Sunday, June 23, 2019

Week-end Wrap - Political Economy - June 22, 2019

Week-end Wrap - Political Economy - June 22, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

I apologize for the absence from last week. My computer crashed last Saturday night, and blew away a chunk of the operating system, so could not be rebooted until placed in the hands of a skilled PC doctor. I have begun searching for a feasible alternative PC at a low budget, and welcome any contributions to PayPal using my email address 2nbbooks@gmail.com. Thank you for your patience and understanding. 

Strategic Political Economy

Facebook's plan to create a global currency are insane and must be resisted. Ten good reasons: (
[Twitter by Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-19]

The way we structure money and payments is a question for democratic institutions, not technology companies.
By Matt Stoller [New York Times, via Twitter 6-20-19]
There are four core problems with Facebook’s new currency. The first, and perhaps the simplest, is that organizing a payments system is a complicated and difficult task, one that requires enormous investment in compliance systems.... 
The second problem is that, since the Civil War, the United States has had a general prohibition on the intersection between banking and commerce. Such a barrier has been reinforced many times, such as in 1956 with the Bank Holding Company Act and in 1970 with an amendment to that law during the conglomerate craze. Both times, Congress blocked banks from going into nonbanking businesses through holding companies, because Americans historically didn’t want banks competing with their own customers. Banking and payments is a special business, where a bank gets access to intimate business secrets of its customers. As one travel agent told Congress in 1970 when opposing the right of banks to enter his business, “Any time I deposited checks from my customers,” he said, “I was providing the banks with the names of my best clients.” 
Imagine Facebook’s subsidiary Calibra knowing your account balance and your spending, and offering to sell a retailer an algorithm that will maximize the price for what you can afford to pay for a product. Imagine this cartel having this kind of financial visibility into not only many consumers, but into businesses across the economy. Such conflicts of interest are why payments and banking are separated from the rest of the economy in the United States.... 
The third problem is that the Libra system — or really any private currency system — introduces systemic risk into our economy... 
We should not be setting up a private international payments network that would need to be backed by taxpayers because it’s too big to fail. 
And the fourth problem is that of national security and sovereignty....
Years ago, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he doesn’t think Facebook is a business. “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company,” said Mr. Zuckerberg. “We’re really setting policies.” ...The way we structure money and payments is a question for democratic institutions. Any company big enough to start its own currency is just too big.

Restoring balance to the economy

“Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live” (PDF)
[Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Poor People’s Campaign, via Naked Capitalism 6-19-19] 
From the “Findings”:

The United States has abundant resources for an economic revival that will move towards establishing a moral economy. This report identifies:
  • $350 billion in annual military spending cuts that would make the nation and the world more secure;
  • $886 billion in estimated annual revenue from fair taxes on the wealthy, corporations, and Wall Street;
  • and Billions more in savings from ending mass incarceration, addressing climate change, and meeting other key campaign demands.
The below comparisons demonstrate that policymakers have always found resources for their true priorities. It is critical that policymakers redirect these resources to establish justice and to prioritize the general welfare instead. The abundant wealth of this nation is produced by millions of people, workers, and families in this country and around the world. The fruits of their labor should be devoted to securing their basic needs and creating the conditions for them to thrive. At the same time, policymakers should not tie their hands with “pay-as-you-go” restrictions that require every dime of new spending to be offset with expenditure cuts or new revenue, especially given the enormous long-term benefits of most of our proposals. The cost of inaction is simply too great.
Lambert Strether notes: "This is, if not MMT, at least MMT-adjacent. It focuses on resources, not money, and it wants to drive a stake into PayGo’s heart-equivalent-if-any. The report is also a useful baseline for Democrat presidential candidates."


Ellen Brown: The American Dream is alive and well — in China
[Public Banking Institute 6-22-19]

In her latest article in Truthdig, PBI Chair Ellen Brown asks why, if Chinese workers are desperately poor and exploited as we are led to think, a whopping 90% of Chinese families can afford to own their homes, in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. One major reason, she argues, is that the Chinese government and its state-owned banks support workers and local businesses, making the cost of living for Chinese families much lower than in the US. 
“[Implementing] a form of monetary expansion that would allow Congress to relieve medical and educational costs, grant cheap credit to states to upgrade their roads and mass transit, and support local businesses could go a long way toward making American workers competitive with Chinese workers. Unlike the U.S. government, the Chinese government supports its workers and its industries. ... Meanwhile, the U.S. model has been regressing into feudalism, with workers driven into slave-like conditions through debt. In the 21st century, it is time to upgrade our economic model from one of feudal exploitation to a cooperative democracy that recognizes the needs, contributions and inalienable rights of all participants.”

The Failure of Establishment Neoliberal Economics

[Salon, via Naked Capitalism 6-20-19]

Worker bonuses slump 22 percent after GOP tax cuts
Lawrence Mishel [Economic Policy Institute 6-22-19]

Concentration: “The Wave of Terror in American Commerce” 
Matt Stoller [Big Issue, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-2019) 
“Anyone who has worked in policy around antitrust will have experience with the little guy expressing terror at something his or her dominant supplier or buyer might do, along with the frustration at not being able to say anything in public for fear of retaliation. This is the core argument against monopolization, which is that it prevents citizens from exercising their right to participate in the public square…. Fear is pervasive across the economy at this point, and most of the people who will speak up are those who have left their companies.”
Lambert Strether adds: "Stoller then goes on to discuss Obama’s betrayal of Iowa chicken farmers, who might as well have been indentured to Big Ag. But surely Stoller does not mean to imply that going into business is the only way to participate in the public square?"

Climate and environmental crises

Where does your plastic go? Global investigation reveals America’s dirty secret
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 6-19-19]

‘The Changes Are Really Accelerating’: Alaska at Record Warm While Greenland Sees Major Ice Melt
[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

Soaring temperatures will raise the risk of armed conflict
[MIT Technology Review, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

“Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict”
[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-19]
From the abstract: “[E]xperts agree that climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential, and the mechanisms of climate–conflict linkages remain a key uncertainty. Intensifying climate change is estimated to increase future risks of conflict.”
“Three Decades of Greenland Ice Sheet Change”
[Polar Portal, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-19]
“We show for example, that since the early 2000s the ice sheet has become thinner almost everywhere. For an ice sheet in balance with the local climate we expect to see a small increase in surface height year on year in the centre and a decrease around the edges as more snow falls than melts at higher elevations and the reverse happens lower down. However, scientists show that the ice sheet is now getting thinner almost everywhere.”
With More Storms and Rising Seas, Which U.S. Cities Should Be Saved First? 
[KUNC, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-19]
Details of what happened when there were two major breaks in water mains during the driest season of the year.

Indian cities are running out of water 
[World Economic Forum, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-19]

Chennai water crisis: City’s reservoirs run dry 
[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 6-20-19]

Economics in the real world

Youngstown’s black working-class voters are full of economic anxiety, and not for Trump. 
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 6-19-19]
The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.” 
And they keep losing ground. In 1980, according to data provided by Jacob Whiton at the Brookings Institution, the median black family in the Youngstown area made 18 percent less than the median black family nationally; today that family underearns by 35 percent. In 2017, the median black household in the city of Youngstown, where most of the region’s black population lives, makes $20,646—little more than half the income of the median black family nationally....
Today, Youngstown is a city of 65,000 that has one hospital and barely one full-service supermarket. The unemployment rate for black workers here is triple what it is for whites. And the poverty rate in the city is 36 percent—twice as high as the county figure. For residents who remember the good years, there’s a feeling of whiplash. A good job now pays $15 an hour. It used to be $30. 
Whatever went wrong for the white working class here went even worse for their black counterparts. Blacks were hurt by job sprawl that saw work opportunities move from the heart of town into distant suburbs, where housing racism kept black workers out. They were hurt by the racist legacy of the unions here, which left them with worse jobs than their white peers and made them more likely to be dismissed first when downsizing occurred. They were hurt by urban renewal and the wave of declining home values, public services, amenities, and school quality. They were stuck in the city as white flight hollowed out the neighborhoods. They were hurt by the whiteness of the county Democratic Party, which they say has shown little interest in the city’s problems.
“Beyond the Great Recession: Labor Market Polarization and Ongoing Fertility Decline in the United States” 
[Demography, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-19]
At some point, they need to dispense with the polite academic jargon and just boldly state that there has not really been any economic recovery; government statistics which purport to show that there is an economic recovery are so massaged and manipulated as to be bogus, and often do not even measure the right things; and working people are sinking deeper and deeper into penury, with lots of negative effects, including having less babies. Lambert Strether puts it simply and starkly: "Falling birth rate, declining life expectancy — everything’s going according to plan!"
From the abstract: “In the years since the Great Recession, social scientists have anticipated that economic recovery in the United States, characterized by gains in employment and median household income, would augur a reversal of declining fertility trends. However, the expected post-recession rebound in fertility rates has yet to materialize. In this study, I propose an economic explanation for why fertility rates have continued to decline regardless of improvements in conventional economic indicators. I argue that ongoing structural changes in U.S. labor markets have prolonged the financial uncertainty that leads women and couples to delay or forgo childbearing. Combining statistical and survey data with restricted-use vital registration records, I examine how cyclical and structural changes in metropolitan-area labor markets were associated with changes in total fertility rates (TFRs) across racial/ethnic groups from the early 1990s to the present day, with a particular focus on the 2006–2014 period. The findings suggest that changes in industry composition—specifically, the loss of manufacturing and other goods-producing businesses—have a larger effect on TFRs than changes in the unemployment rate for all racial/ethnic groups.”

Enemy Actions

The One Percent Have Gotten $21 Trillion Richer Since 1989. The Bottom 50% Have Gotten Poorer.
[New York Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 6-18-19]
...the Federal Reserve just released some data that makes the state of this alignment easier to gauge. In its new Distributive Financial Accounts data series, the central bank offers a granular picture of how American capitalism has been distributing the gains of economic growth over the past three decades. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project took the Fed’s data and calculated how much the respective net worth of America’s top one percent and its bottom 50 percent has changed since 1989.
Life after demonetisation: How India’s poor are paying the price
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

“U.S. death rates from suicides, alcohol and drug overdoses reach all-time high”
[NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-19] 
“Rates of deaths from suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol have reached an all-time high in the United States…. Although the rates of the so-called deaths of despair are up nationally, the report’s investigators were particularly struck by regional differences in the rates…. “When we look at what’s going on in mid-Atlantic states — West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania — those are the states that have the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the country,” David Radley, a senior scientist for the Commonwealth Fund, said.”
It’s A Horrible Idea To Privatize The Tennessee Valley Authority And Other Public Energy Assets [Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 6-18-19]

The Administration has decided to withdrawal a rule that would require two-member crews, and the White House has banned states from requiring such a standard. Currently at least nine states require a two-man crew. In pulling the rule, the FRA said “no regulation of train crew staffing is necessary or appropriate for railroad operations to be conducted safely.” 
The two-person requirement was first proposed by then-FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo in 2013 following one of the worst train accidents in recent memory. Forty-nine people were killed when an unattended 74-car freight train loaded with crude oil crashed into the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic. The explosion leveled the town. Later in 2013 two trains collided in Casselton, N.D., causing 476,000 gallons of crude oil to go up in smoke. 
Officials believe technology, like positive train control, is making trains safer and will eliminate human error when it is fully implemented at the end of 2020. 
Labor unions disagree and believe corporate profit is being chosen over safety.
The Bitcoin Scam: Despite the utopian claims of its proponents, Bitcoin is a right-wing nightmare which facilitates tax evasion, money laundering and environmental degradation. 
[Tribune, via The Big Picture 6-19-19]

 Collapse of Independent News Media

The Decline of American Journalism Is an Antitrust Problem 
[ProMarket, via Naked Capitalism 6-19-19]
To their credit, Facebook and Google started on their paths to dominance with innovation. But their monopoly power is not purely the result of competing on the merits. Facebook has repeatedly acquired rivals, such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Google’s acquisitions—including Applied Semantics, AdMob, and DoubleClick—cemented its market power throughout the ad ecosystem as it bought up the digital ad market spoke by spoke.

Together, Facebook and Google bought 150 companies in just the last six years. Google alone has bought nearly 250 companies. Thus far, antitrust enforcers have not stood in their way, nor have they stopped Facebook and Google from leveraging their monopoly power to exclude competition.

Weak antitrust enforcement set the stage for these platforms to extract the fruits of publishers’ labor, much as monopolies are extracting wealth across most sectors of our economy. Monopolies are putting the American Dream at risk, as people—including journalists—are not rewarded for their efforts.

Information Age Dystopia

Target’s computer systems reportedly went down nationally, prompting long lines and confusion [MarketWatch, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

‘Software engineering’ was a joke until the mission to the Moon made it the future
[Fast Company, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

Hackers behind the world’s deadliest code are probing US power firms
[MIT Technology Review, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid
[NYT, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-19]

US Attacks Russia’s Power Grid; Trump Kept in Dark
[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-19]

What Happens When a US Border Protection Contractor Gets Hacked?
[Motherboard, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-19]

“The Ruthless Reality of Amazon’s One-Day Shipping”
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-19]
“‘As soon as we clock in, we’re pushing our bodies and minds to the limit on these machines, feeling like robots a lot of the time getting the stuff out,’ said William Stolz, a picker who gathers products for orders at an Amazon fulfillment center in Minneapolis, Minnesota who has worked there for about two years. “Amazon’s working conditions have to change if they’re going to actually start treating us like human beings with dignity. A lot of the jobs they have are still temporary. We want Amazon to provide safe and reliable jobs. Right now it’s not the case.'” • Very good overview of all of Amazon’s shipping operations (and how they’re gaming wages with outsourcing).
The unforeseen trouble AI is now causing 
[Next Web, via Naked Capitalism 6-19-19]
...it is becoming apparent that a far more serious problem is posing an increasing risk: adversarial data. 
For the uninitiated, adversarial data describes a situation in which human users intentionally supply an algorithm with corrupted information. The corrupted data throws off the machine learning process, tricking the algorithm into reaching fake conclusions or incorrect predictions. 
As a biomedical engineer, I view adversarial data as a significant cause for concern. UC Berkeley professor Dawn Song notably tricked a self-driving car into thinking that a stop sign says the speed limit is 45 miles per hour.
“Tesla Model 3 Spoofed off the highway – Regulus Navigation System Hack Causes Car to Turn On Its Own” 
[Regulus, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-19] 
“Tesla model 3 was successfully spoofed in several attack scenarios. The navigate on autopilot feature is highly dependent on GNSS reliability and spoofing resulted in multiple high-risk scenarios for the driver and car passengers. Tesla Model 3 spoofing during navigating on autopilot led to extreme deceleration and acceleration, rapid lane changing suggestions, unnecessary signaling, multiple attempts to exit the highway at incorrect locations and extreme driving instability. This test proves beyond doubt the crucial dependence on GNSS for any level 2+ autonomous navigation and the high threat spoofing poses to drivers and passengers utilizing these features.”

Creating new economic potential - science and technology


Video spotlight: How public banks power renewable energy
[Public Banking Institute 6-22-19]
In this video from 2017, Wolfram Morales of the Sparkassen public banking system in Germany, explains how German public banks are funding the transition to renewable energy. His presentation was organized by Friends of the Public Bank of Oakland (now East Bay Public Bank) and Local Clean Energy Alliance and was hosted by Oakland City Councilmembers Dan Kalb and Rebecca Kaplan. “Since 2000, we've followed a policy to strengthen the role of renewable energy. Today ... our renewable energy share in the whole energy production is 41%."
[Railway Age 6-20-19]
Bombardier announced on June 14 that it is opening a rail vehicle assembly facility in Pittsburg, California, for its “Fleet of the Future” metro cars for San Francisco. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (Bart) awarded Bombardier a contract for up to 775 metro cars in 2012 and subsequently exercised all options. 
Bombardier is currently fulfilling the order at its facilities in New York, but says this will be transferred to the new “sister site” in California over the coming months. The company says the move will serve several purposes including retaining and creating local employment in Pittsburg, and freeing up capacity at the New York site for new and upcoming East Coast orders.
How Acela trainsets are made: Inside the Alstom facility
[Railway Age 6-19-19]
RAILWAY AGE AT THE ALSTOM MANUFACTURING FACILITY, HORNELL, N.Y., JUNE 12, 2019: Alstom Transportation is building the next generation of high-speed trainsets for Amtrak‘s Northeast Corridor Acela Express service. The new equipment is scheduled to enter service sometime in 2021 between Washington, D.C. and Boston. 

Atlanta’s More MARTA is big, but is it big enough?
[Railway Age 6-19-19]
MARTA rolled out its project timeline for its More MARTA program, and for some it is less. The Atlanta transit agency is taking advantage of a half-cent sales tax increase approved by voters in 2016 for a $2.7 billion, 16-project package. More MARTA will fund 65 miles of transit lines and 22 miles of arterial rapid transit. It is the agency’s largest investment in decades. Most of the rail projects will be in the construction phase by 2025, and it will take 40 years for the entire More MARTA program to be executed.
Stephen Mraz, June 20, 2019 [Machine Design]
Transparent aluminum, a technology first suggested in a “Star Trek” movie, is now a reality. 
Engineers working for the Air Force have developed transparent ceramic armor (aluminum oxynitride or ALON) that provides better ballistic protection at less than half the weight and thickness of traditional glass laminates.... ALON is a transparent ceramic material composed of aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen. It begins as a powder that is formed into shapes and made transparent by applying high temperatures and pressure. 
The Air Force has been working with this material since 2006. Prior to the current breakthroughs the largest ALON windows were limited to 2.8 square feet. ALON is now made routinely in sizes up to eight square feet by a small business, Surmet Corp. Scaling up is performed incrementally, due to the complex manufacturing steps that must be used. The Air Force is getting closer to providing a commodity material for government purposes.
[Common Dreams, via Avedon's Sideshow 6-19-19]
'We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights. And that is what I mean by democratic socialism.'" In which Senator Sanders re-submits FDR's Economic Bill of Rights and quotes the man himself. (Full transcript and reporting included.)
The Ruling Class Will Not Tolerate the Sanders-Led Assault on Austerity
Glen Ford [Black Agenda Report, via Naked Capitalism 6-20-19]
The whole point of the austerity project is to disempower workers and concentrate wealth at the top. If the Lords of Capital were ever to publicly acknowledged such a vision, even the reddest redneck would rise in revolt. But the corporate servants in the Democratic Party know what time it is. Barack Obama was following orders from the oligarchs when he announced, weeks before taking office in 2009, that all “entitlements,” including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, would be “on the table” for cutting.... 
The corporate Democrats’ duty is to save the oligarch’s dream of global austerity from unraveling. Terrified that Sanders might sweep the 2020 primaries, the Democratic Party bum-rushed the Vermont Senator, flooding the field with 24 candidates, outdoing the Republican establishment’s 16-candidate bid to stop Donald Trump, in 2016. The game plan was to throw every type of candidate into the mix, appealing to every “identity” constituency, to fragment a Democratic primary base that was as much as 90-percent in favor of Sanders’ campaign planks. The bottom line: prevent Sanders from arriving at the Democratic National Convention with enough delegates to win on the first ballot. On the second ballot, the corporate-dependable “super delegates” would kick in to derail the self-styled socialist.
Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism Speech Was a Landmark 
[The Real News Network, via Naked Capitalism 6-20-19]

Biden Tells Elite Donors He Doesn’t Want to `Demonize’ the Rich 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 6-19-19]
Naked Capitalism commenter: “Biden 2020; No Hope, No Change.”
BIDEN: Remember, I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, you know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who’s made money. Truth of the matter is, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change. When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. It allows demagogues to step in [and blame what’s wrong in voters’ lives on] “the other.” You’re not the other. I need you very badly.
 Bernie Sanders vs. Elizabeth Warren
[Ian Welsh 6-17-19]
Warren has said that she’s “capitalist to the bones” and that the problem isn’t capitalism, it is that capitalism needs rules (enforced rules.) Sanders is a democratic socialist. He believes that capitalism has its place, but he believes it is fundamentally flawed. He has harked back to FDR’s second bill of rights, which include rights to health, education, a home, and a good income, among others. 
To Sanders, capitalism isn’t a good system that we’ve managed badly, it’s a flawed system which needs to be heavily controlled. Nor does he believe that the problem with the left is a lack of ideas. It is a lack of power. The left has ideas, the left has not been able to implement those ideas for decades because the left was out of power. 
So, what is required is not to just get good rules back in place. It is to completely subordinate markets to democratic control, and where they are not the best way to do something, remove them.
“Tyranny of the 70-Somethings”
[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-19]
“There is a huge gap between where the energy and creativity of the party lie, with a group of dynamic activists and House members in their 30s and even their 20s (thank you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and the ruling class of 70-somethings layered far above like a crumbling porte cochere…. In the farm system that trains and seasons the leaders of tomorrow—assuming tomorrow ever comes—that gap signifies a lost generation.” • 
Lambert Strether comments: "What is amazing is that the article doesn’t mention Obama’s eight-year role in failing to develop a farm system (indeed, by dismantling OFA, he actively prevented its development)."

McConnell Redefines “Socialism” to Include the Entire Democratic Party 
[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 6-19-19]

Disrupting mainstream economics - Modern Monetary Theory

“Seize the Means of Production of Currency – Part 1”
[Bill Mitchell, via Naked Capitalism 6-18-19] • Another effort to explain MMT to the British Labour Party. Skip the politics and start at “What is MMT?”, where Mitchell is more telegraphic and far less prolix than usual.
There was also a bit of coverage about the book in this recent Bloomberg article (May 31, 2019) – A 600-Page Textbook About Modern Monetary Theory Has Sold Out. 
MMT not only threatens vested neoliberal interests in politics but also challenges the hegemony of mainstream macroeconomists who have been able to dominate the policy debate for decades using a series of linked myths about how the fiat monetary system operates and the capacities of currency-issuing governments within such a system. MMT exposes these myths. 
An MMT understanding allows us to break out of the illusory financial constraints that for too long have hindered our ability to imagine radical alternatives and to envision truly transformational policies, such as the Green New Deal, in the knowledge the issue is not whether we can afford a certain policy in financial terms but only whether we have enough available resources – and political will – to implement it.]

This is massive paradigm shift. It’s no surprise that the establishment’s reaction has been so vicious.

War with Iran

It appears a neoconservative faction led by National Security Adviser Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo have recreated separate channels of intelligence designed to misinform and sway POTUS Trump, exactly the way Dick Cheney created separate channels to herd USA into the Iraq War. It further appears that there are some USA military and intelligence officers who are pushing back against the war mongers. A lot of 3, 4, and 5 stars opposed the Iraq War and had their careers ended, to no avail. Will there be different tactics of opposition this time? 

 In Why Would Iran Attack Tankers?, Ian Welsh quotes an oilpric.com report:
Welsh adds strategic considerations of a hegemon being predictable or not.
On June 5, 2019, huge fire consumed a storage facility for oil products at the Shahid Rajaee port in southern Hormozgan Province. Located west of Bandar Abbas, the Shahid Rajaee port is Iran’s largest container shipping port. Reportedly, a vehicle used for transporting shipping containers exploded and caught fire. Since there were oil products near the site of the explosion, the blaze spread quickly to several tanks and storage sites and caused heavy damage to the port. The spreading fire set off huge explosions which shot fireballs and heavy smoke high into the air. 
On June 7, 2019, six Iranian merchant ships were set ablaze almost simultaneously in two Persian Gulf ports.
[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-19]
The U.S. violated the nuclear agreement and is waging an economic war on Iran. That was the aggression that started the conflict. Anything that follows from that was caused by the Trump administration. 
Colonel Pat Lang thinks that Pompeo was in Tampa to bring the military in line with his aggressive policies:
Ole First in his Class is down in Tampaland today jawboning the leaders of CENTCOM (Mideast), and SOCOM (badass commandos worldwide). Why is he there? The Secretary of State has no constitutional or legal role in dealing with the armed forces. That being the case one can only think that there is push-back from senior commanders over the prospect of war with Iran and that Trump has been persuaded to let him do this unprecedented visit to wheedle or threaten his way into their acquiescence.
 VIPS Memo to the President: Is Pompeo’s Agenda the Same As Yours?
[Consortium News, via , via Naked Capitalism 6-22-19]
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Pompeo’s behavior betrays a strong desire to resort to military action — perhaps even without your approval — to Iranian provocations (real or imagined), with no discernible strategic goal other than to advance the interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He is a neophyte compared to his anti-Iran partner John Bolton, whose dilettante approach to interpreting intelligence, strong advocacy of the misbegotten war on Iraq (and continued pride in his role in promoting it), and fierce pursuit of his own aggressive agenda are a matter of a decades-long record.
What you need to know about CIA’s Iran Mission Center 
[Asia Times, , via Naked Capitalism 6-20-19]
The CIA’s Iran-related activity had been conducted in the Iran Operations Division (Persia House). This was a section with Iran specialists who built up knowledge about political and economic developments inside Iran and in the Iranian diaspora.

It bothered the hawks in Washington, as one official told me, that Persia House was filled with specialists who had no special focus on regime change in Iran. Some of them, because of their long concentration on Iran, had developed sensitivity to the country. Trump’s people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group that would provide the kind of intelligence that tickled the fancy of his national security adviser, John Bolton. 
To head the Iran Mission Center, the CIA appointed Michael D’Andrea. D’Andrea was central to the interrogation program that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, and he ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach. 
It was D’Andrea who expanded the CIA’s drone-strike program, in particular the “signature strike.” The signature strike is a particularly controversial instrument. The CIA was given the allowance to kill anyone who fit a certain profile – a man of a certain age, for instance, with a phone that had been used to call someone on a list. The dark arts of the CIA are precisely those of D’Andrea.
What is most disturbing about this drive to war against Iran is that there is NOBODY, not even on the left, talking about the obvious alternative to this geopolitical Götterdämmerung, in which hundreds of millions would be killed, is to implement the Green New Deal on a worldwide basis, with prominent cooperation on China's new Silk Road (Belt and Road) project, to create a worldwide economic boom and move the world's economies entirely off of fossil fuels. If there were such a worldwide commitment to creating a new world economic base, how could Saudi Arabia and Iran possibly oppose it? They would have to join and cooperate with the other nations of the world or be frozen out of the future. 

Posted by Tony Wikrent at 10:14 AM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)