Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 28, 2020

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 28, 2020
by Tony Wikrent

The Epidemic

What To Look For In A Face Mask, According To Science
[fivethirtyeight.com, via Naked Capitalism 6-25-20]

Different researchers have set up devices that spray tiny droplets at fabric and then measured how much of it comes through the other side, while also measuring air flow to determine breathability. What they’ve found is that it’s less about the type of fabric — cotton, linen, silk — and more about the quality of fabric, according to Segal. Higher quality fabrics have a tighter weave and thicker thread that do a better job of blocking droplets from passing through.

But you also want the fabric to be breathable, according to Taher Saif, a mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois who has been researching face mask material. Saif said if breath can’t get through the mask, it will find another way out, allowing respiratory droplets to spread.

.... Segal offered a rule of thumb: hold the material up to a bright light. “Look at the light coming through the fabric,” Segal said. “If it outlines individual fibers and you can see the light through fabric, it’s probably not as effective. The less of that you can see, the better the filter.”

“Data map reveals the 23% of US counties that are currently seeing an uncontrollable growth in COVID-19 – as new model predicts Phoenix alone could see 28,000 new infections a DAY by July 18” [Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-26-20]

“Twenty three percent of counties across the United States are now seeing an uncontrollable growth in new COVID-19 infections, according to a data map... Phoenix could see 28,000 new cases a day by July 18.... large parts of the South and Southwest are showing an ‘epidemic trend’ or ‘spreading trend’ for new coronavirus infections…. Of the 3,141 counties across the country, 745 are currently experiencing an epidemic outbreak and 1,232 are seeing spreading trends, according to the data map. Nearly 670 counties are currently seeing a controlled trend in new coronavirus cases. According to the map, the entire state of Arizona is seeing either epidemic or spreading trends. ”  

A link to the map

The unintended impact of COVID-19 on cancer
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 6-21-20]

In April 2020, the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science published a report that shined a light on the unintended impact of our response to the treat of COVID-19. According to the report, it is estimated that the delay in 22 million cancer screening tests will result in an increased risk of delayed or missed diagnoses for 80,000 patients.

Prod the Federal Reserve to save state and local governments

Many state and local governments have a fiscal year ending this month AND are required to have balanced budgets. This means that a tsunami of government layoffs is about to hit, and drive the entire economy deep into an economic depression. (The layoffs have already started – 1.5 million state and local government employees have been let go in the past two months).

This economic catastrophe will strike in the next few weeks as state and local governments struggle to balance budgets while experiencing an unprecedented collapse in revenues. Many states are reporting an expected drop in tax receipts of as much as 25 percent. County governments are also reporting the same size negative impact on their revenues. With state and local governments accounting for 14 percent of US GDP, we are about to see three to four percent of the national economy wiped out.

The Federal Reserve has the power and authority to head off this catastrophe in one 8 hour workday, as David Dayen explained in “The Federal Reserve Can End the State Fiscal Crisis Today.”  In the CARES Act, Congress authorized the Fed to establish a $500 billion Municipal Lending Fund (MLF). The Fed has used that MLF authority only once – to provide a $1.2 billion loan to the state of Illinois.

Moreover, the Fed can structure the MLF in any way it wants. It can effectively turn all loans to state and local governments into grants by eliminating the interest rate, indefinitely rolling over principal payments, or make them optional; or extend the maturities to 100 or 200 years, or any period selected.

On June 16, 2020  in “Growing Pressure on the Fed to Save State and Local Governments,”  David Dayen described a campaign now underway to create grassroots pressure on the Fed to provide large-scale emergency funding to state and local governments to avert this looming budget catastrophe. This campaign invokes the Federal Reserve’s legal mandate to maximize employment.

“Letters are being distributed among city and state officials right now urging the Fed to either fix the MLF or move to a 14(2) swap line with indefinite rollovers. This is an active and extremely worthy fight. The Fed is designed to protect employment and prevent recessions. State and local funding is the biggest threat out there. The Fed needs to do its job, not trifle with asset inflation.”

The full text of the letter was written by Cornell University Law School professor Robert Hockett, who has served as an adviser to Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Hockett’s six-page letter is addressed to Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, and goes into minute detail about the Fed’s authority, how it has structured the Municipal Lending Fund (MLF) so far, and what changes the Fed can make to immediately solve the looming catastrophe to state and local government budgets. Hockett’s letter was printed in full in Forbes magazine on June 14, 2020, as “Optimize Community QE – An Open Letter to Fed Chairman Powell.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 21, 2020

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 21, 2020
by Tony Wikrent

Countering the surveillance state 

How to Prepare a Cheap Burner Phone for Protesting
[The Intercept, June 15, 2020]

IF YOU’RE TAKING to the streets to demand justice for the victims of police brutality and homicide, you may want to leave your phone at home. No matter how peaceful your behavior, you are at risk of getting arrested or assaulted by police. Cops might confiscate your phone and search it regardless of whether or not they’re legally allowed to, or they might try to break it, especially if it contains photos or video of their violent or illegal actions.\ 

At the same time, it’s a good idea to bring a phone to a protest so you can record what’s happening and get the message out on social media. Filming police is completely legal and within your rights, and it’s one of the few tools citizens have against police brutality. It’s also important to be able to communicate with others in real time or to find your friends in case you get separated....

If this is too expensive for you, you may have other options: If you have an old phone collecting dust in a drawer, as long as it still works and the battery still holds a charge, you can use this as your burner phone rather than buying a new one. You just need a new SIM card, like one that comes with prepaid cell service. Make sure to factory reset the phone before getting ready to protest....

The Markup published some good steps to take before bringing your primary phone into a protest, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good guide as well.

How Police Infiltrate, Create Violence and Target Journalists 

Lee Camp [via Naked Capitalism 6-20-20]

Where most of the world's people live...

After Violent Clash, China Claims Sovereignty Over Galwan Valley for First Time in Decades 

[The Wire, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-20]

A Skirmish in Galwan Valley: India and China’s Deadliest Clash in More Than 50 Years 

[The Diplomat, via Naked Capitalism 6-17-20]

The writer of the New York Times article on this clash (which I do not link to) made no attempt to explain why this remote area with hardly any inhabitants would be disputed by the India and China. First, the glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau are the source of Asia's major rivers: Indus and Satluj of Indus river water system, Arun, Ghaghra and Gandak of Ganges river water system, Manas and Brahmaputra of Brahmaputra river water system, Yellow River, Yangtze, Mekong and Salween rivers.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 14, 2020

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 14, 2020
by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” -- Frederick Douglass
[via WallStreetonParade, June 1, 2020]

“America’s Moment of Reckoning”: Cornel West Says Nationwide Uprising Is Sign of “Empire Imploding”
[DemocracyNow, June 1, 2020]

The catalyst was certainly Brother George Floyd’s public lynching, but the failures of the predatory capitalist economy to provide the satisfaction of the basic needs of food and healthcare and quality education, jobs with a decent wage, at the same time the collapse of your political class, the collapse of your professional class. Their legitimacy has been radically called into question, and that’s multiracial. It’s the neofascist dimension in Trump. It’s the neoliberal dimension in Biden and Obama and the Clintons and so forth. And it includes much of the media. It includes many of the professors in universities. The young people are saying, “You all have been hypocritical. You haven’t been concerned about our suffering, our misery. And we no longer believe in your legitimacy.” And it spills over into violent explosion.

And it’s here. I won’t go on, but, I mean, it’s here, where I think Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Heschel and Edward Said, and especially Brother Martin and Malcolm, their legacies, I think, become more central, because they provide the kind of truth telling. They provide the connection between justice and compassion in their example, in their organizing. And that’s what is needed right now. Rebellion is not the same thing in any way as revolution. And what we need is a nonviolent revolutionary project of full-scale democratic sharing — power, wealth, resources, respect, organizing — and a fundamental transformation of this American Empire

“A Left Critique of the Current Protests” 

[Benjamin Studebaker, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-9-20] 

 “As long as we have millions of alienated, armed Americans, the police will never be abolished. Calls for their abolishment will instead result in privatisation. The Democratic mayors who run our cities want to avoid responsibility for the killings that are the result of decades of their own negligent policy. Privatising the police divests them of culpability. Privatised police will be even less accountable than publicly run departments. They’ll probably kill even more people. But when it happens, the cities can blame it on the contractors. They can simply fire one outfit and hire another. The anarcho-capitalists have wanted this for ages. They are chomping at the bit to use these protests to make it happen… Sadly, our organizations are inferior to the organizations of the anarchists and the woke neoliberals, and for this reason they will continue to hasten the victory of the right nationalists, much to our chagrin.”

An excerpt of an excerpt form Thomas Frank's new book on elites' opposition to populism
“The Pessimistic Style in American Politics” 

Thomas Frank [Harpers, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-11-20] 

This essay is excerpted from The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, which will be published next month by Metropolitan Books. 

“Populism” is the word that comes to the lips of the respectable and the highly educated when they perceive the global system going haywire. Populism is the name they give to the avalanche crashing down on the Alpine wonderland of Davos. Populism is what they call the mutiny that may well turn the supercarrier America into a foundering wreck. Populism, for them, is a one-word evocation of the logic of the mob: it is the people as a great rampaging beast....

So goes the wail of the American leadership class as they endure another year of panic. They know on some level that what has happened in Washington isn’t due to majority rule at all, but to money and gerrymandering and the Electoral College and decades of TV programming decisions. But the anxiety cannot be dislodged; it is beyond the reach of reason. The people are out of control....

This is the core assumption of what I call the Democracy Scare: if the people have lost faith in the ones in charge, it can only be because something has gone wrong with the people themselves. As Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, put it in the summer of 2016: “Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.”

In basing our civilization on the consent of the plain people, it suddenly seemed, our ancestors had built on a foundation of sand. "Democracies end when they are too democratic," blared the title of a much-discussed essay by Andrew Sullivan in which the author applied his grad school reading of Plato to the 2016 campaign. Around the same time, an article in Foreign Policy expressed it more archly: it’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses....

In the 1880s.... something profound took place. The farmers—men and women of society’s commonest rank—figured out that being exploited was not the natural order of things. So they began taking matters into their own hands. In Kansas and a few other Western states, members of the group went into politics directly, and the People’s Party was born.

The Populists were the ones who blasted those smug assumptions to pieces, forcing the country to acknowledge that ordinary Americans were being ruined by an economic system that in fact answered to no moral laws.

From the very beginning, then, “populism” had two meanings. There was Populism as its proponents understood it: a movement in which ordinary working people demanded democratic economic reforms. And there was Populism as its enemies characterized it: a dangerous movement of groundless resentment in which demagogues led the disreputable.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 7, 2020

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 7, 2020
by Tony Wikrent

Countering the surveillance state 

How to Cop-Proof Your Phone Before Heading to a Protest 

[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 6-2-20]

How to protect yourself from rubber bullets—and why these ‘nonlethal’ weapons are so dangerous [Popular Science via Naked Capitalism 6-4-20]

Protest Safety: How to Protest During the Coronavirus Pandemic

[Teen Vogue via Naked Capitalism 6-4-20]

Strategic Political Economy

“What Trait Affects Income the Most?” 

[Economics from the Top Down, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-5-20] 

Why is it so difficult to abandon old myths? One reason is that these myths are used to rationalize social order. Take, as an example, the Earth’s orbit. It took the Catholic church nearly 400 years to admit that the Earth revolves around the sun.... After convicting the heliocentric proponent Galileo of heresy in 1633, the church banned heliocentric teachings for another two centuries (until 1822). It took another 170 years for the church to formally admit (in 1992) that Galileo was right. Think about that. Almost four centuries of denial for an idea that had no effect on daily life. All because it threatened the authority of those with power. The lesson here is simple. When ideas challenge authority, evidence will be ignored, denied and suppressed.

That brings me to economics.

The discipline of economics is the modern equivalent of the church. To legitimize authority, neoclassical economists preach dogmas that are manifestly false. But unlike the ethereal debate about the Earth’s place in the cosmos, economic dogmas have a huge impact on day-to-day life. They make the difference between tolerating inequality versus being enraged by it.

Neoclassical economics preaches that all is fair with the distribution of income. Income differences, the theory claims, stem from differences in productivity. As long as markets are competitive, people earn their ‘marginal product’. And so there’s no reason to redistribute income.

The reality is quite different. Income, I believe, is determined not by productivity, but instead largely by rank within a hierarchy. In other words, power begets income. The role of economics is to deny this uncomfortable reality. Economists reinforce hierarchies by denying their existence. Long and worth a read. Handy chart: