Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 7, 2021
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
If There’s No Fear of Inflation, Why is GOP Against More Stimulus? – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth — Transcript here
Mark Blyth. ….arguing about deficits is just a footnote on the wider agenda of power for the sake of power. Why do they do this? Because they know that existentially Republicanism has run its course. As Rana just said, there’s only so much you can give to business before they’ve got everything, which is pretty much where we are now. There’s nothing more to give. We need huge amounts of infrastructure repair. We need huge amounts of social investment in the economy and elsewhere. And this is anathema to everything the Republicans have stood for and delivered on for the past 30 years, which is simply more money for me and to hell with the rest of you. So they’re not going to turn this around….
Rana Foroohar. I completely agree with that. And I think it actually brings up something I’m quite worried about, which is the fine line that the Biden administration has to walk right now in executing even part of their Build Back Better, Reward Work Not Wealth strategy, without creating such a bumpy ride from here to there that the Republicans can say, well, look, look what Joe Biden did. Now the markets have crashed... because if you think about what we’re trying to do, if we pull way back, this administration is trying to shift the American economy structurally from being an economy that is based on debt and asset price bubbles to one that is based on income and wage growth. And that’s a laudable goal. But it’s also like turning the Titanic.
….you might actually know when the markets crash that things are getting better in the U.S. economy because certain things have to be done. Raising taxes on companies, the labor share rising, some of the push for union labor that’s coming with the Defense Production Act. All of that is going to dampen profits. It’s going to frighten investors and the hot money is going to run.
Mark Blyth. ….the weird thing is there’s $18 trillion in negative yield and long-term government debt in the world today. Right. The existence of this is a bit like the existence of dark matter. It’s what binds the universe together. And if it exists, it means that all those other stories about hyperinflation, they simply can’t be true…. Because what it means is investors are willing to buy government debt at a loss. And if they’re willing to buy government debt at a loss simply because they want to purchase security, because they’re uncertain about the future, then by definition they cannot be expecting an inflation. Because if they were, they would insist on a higher interest rate, not a negative one….
….So let’s think about some of the models, that constrain us here. And I don’t mean sort of the fancy formal ones. I mean the informal ones in our heads. Most people do not understand that governments are not like households. Most people do not spend their time thinking about the difference between money and high-powered money, bank reserves, and all the rest of the stuff that makes government’s ability to finance itself qualitatively different from households, we’ve definitely love the household analogy… you’ve got to deal with the folk models in people’s heads. And the vast majority of Americans do not think that running up extra 15 trillion dollars in debt just because there’s a virus that’s taking out one in a hundred people is a good idea. And if you do that when it comes to the midterms, you’re going to pay an awful electoral price even if it is the right thing to do.
Severe Dysfunction in Washington and Wall Street Puts the U.S. at Risk of Capital Flight
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2021 [Wall Street on Parade]
There is recent evidence that the U.S. is already seeing capital flight. According to a January 24 report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China beat out the U.S. in foreign direct investment inflows last year, receiving $163 billion versus $134 billion for the U.S. That was a radical change from 2019 when the U.S. received $251 billion in foreign direct investment versus $140 billion for China.
Capital flight could accelerate this year if the craziness in Congress and Wall Street continues. Just ask yourself this, would you want to invest in a country that had scenes of a bloody attempted coup of the government featured on the front pages of newspapers around the world? Would you want to risk your savings in a stock market that has ceased to perform its two key functions: a pricing mechanism for the value of companies and efficient allocation of capital to worthy businesses and industries.
Elon Musk Interview: 1-on-1 with Sandy Munro
Elon Musk Discusses Build Quality Problems With Engineer Who Compared Model 3 To ‘A Kia In The ’90s’
[Jalopnik, via The Big Picture 2-4-21]
Progressives and leftists using a Marxian type of class analysis have failed to notice that Musk has accomplished something no one else has done in just over a century: achieve mass production of a new automobile in USA. While Musk’s relations with his employees leaves much to be desired, and his political views are anything but progressive, the fact is that Muck is providing a rare example of new technologies being implemented to create an economic phase shift. Those critics who point out that Musk’s companies depend on government support miss the point that government support is exactly what is needed to push the economy in new directions — in this case, ending our dependence on burning fossil fuels. In their conversation, Musk and Munro discussed a number of topics that illustrate the analytical power of Veblen’s business versus industry paradigm: design of seats for passenger vehicles; wire harnesses; modern road design; and why getting an MBA prevents you from managing an industrial corporation competently.
What happens when you take a manufacturing expert with decades of automotive engineering experience and put him in a room with a science nerd like Elon Musk? ….He recently sat down with one of Tesla’s biggest build-quality critics, manufacturing expert Sandy Munro, founder of the benchmarking consultancy Munro & Associates. Here’s what Musk had to say about large panel gaps and poorly designed body structures in what has to be one of the most epic technical interviews I’ve seen in a while….
Tesla’s CEO then fesses up to his company’s build-related mistakes and dives into why they’ve been happening…. “The organizational structure errors, they manifest themselves in the product,” he begins. “We’ve got probably the best material science team in the world at Tesla. Engineers would ask what’s the best material for this purpose...and they got like 50 different answers. And they’re all true individually, but they were not true collectively,” he admits.
“When you try to join all these dissimilar alloys...you’ve got gaps that you’ve got to seal, and you’ve got to join these things, and some of them need to be joined with rivets, some of them need to be joined with spot welds, some of them need to be joined with resin or resin and spot welds,” he continues. “Frankly, it looks like a bit of a Frankenstein situation when you look at it all together.”
….The rest of the interview remains thoroughly nerdy. There’s discussion about cars’ natural frequencies, about how reducing polar moment of inertia by bringing mass toward the car’s center of mass yields better handling. There’s discussion about tolerance stack-up and how that leads Tesla to almost always err toward fewer pieces and Lego-like parts precision.
Munro mentions his company’s BMW i3 findings, lauding the German automaker’s excellent build quality for the carbon-fiber body. Musk replies that one of his major concerns about use of carbon fiber is that it has a vastly different coefficient of thermal expansion than aluminum or steel, and this can cause fitment issues when the vehicle is subjected to certain thermal environments.
When the Electric Car Is King, Less Energy Is More
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 2-3-21]
Here’s a surprise: Electrifying U.S. vehicles wipes out the equivalent of our entire current power demand.
“General Motors to eliminate gasoline and diesel light-duty cars and SUVs by 2035”
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-1-21]
“General Motors has pledged to stop making gasoline-powered passenger cars, vans and sport utility vehicles by 2035, marking a historic turning point for the iconic American carmaker and promising a future of new electric vehicles for American motorists…. GM has said it would invest $27 billion in electric vehicles and associated products between 2020 and 2025, outstripping its spending on conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles. That figure includes refurbishing factories and investing in battery production in conjunction with LG Chem, a South Korean battery maker.”
Biden Wants the Government to Run on EVs. It Won’t Be Easy
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 2-2-21]
South Korea Leads World in Innovation; U.S. Drops Out of Top 10
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 2-3-21]
The U.S., which topped the first Bloomberg Innovation Index in 2013, dropped two places to 11th. In a report last year, the National Science Board found that “where once the U.S. was the uncontested leader in science and engineering, we are now playing a less dominant role.”
The country scores badly in higher education, even though U.S. universities are world-famous. That underperformance was likely made worse by obstacles to foreign students, who are usually prominent in science and technology classes -- first due to the Trump administration’s visa policies, and later to the pandemic.
Manufacturing: “U.S. Is Losing the Battery Race Despite Having the Right Stuff” [Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-4-21]
“[T]he U.S. has most of the ingredients it needs for a battery-building industry. It has the raw materials, with three companies developing facilities to extract lithium from subsurface brine in the Southern California desert, while similar projects are under way in Arkansas and Nevada. It also has the demand. Utilities are plugging big batteries into the electric grid to store renewable power and protect against blackouts. And U.S. automakers are ramping up production of EVs… For U.S. automakers, there’s good reason to want batteries built here. In an era of trade turmoil, relying on imported batteries could be problematic, even if President Biden abandons his predecessor’s use of tariffs. And with car companies worldwide shifting to electrics, Detroit will need an ample supply to keep car prices low. Plus, EV battery packs are big and heavy, making them expensive to ship. The pack for a compact Chevrolet Bolt, for example, weighs about 950 pounds. U.S. battery factories feeding U.S. auto plants could reduce those costs. ‘Think about shipping a couple million battery packs from Asia—it’s a nightmare,’ says Brett Smith, director of technology for the Center for Automotive Research. ‘It just becomes more logistically reasonable to build it here.'”
You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype
[Lee Vinsel, via Naked Capitalism 2-2-21]
It is outrageous that I can point to gobs of people in my field working on synthetic biology, “AI,” self-driving cars, and blockchain but not a single person researching septic tanks, mobile homes, trailer parks, or even housing more generally, even though these latter topics are full of technological issues and true human suffering that IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.
The Epidemic
[CovidStraight Talk, via Naked Capitalism 1-31-21]
Very useful chart showing airborne mitigation techniques
Here’s how American stimulus checks stack up to other countries’ Covid relief
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 2-4-21]
Housing Precarity and The Covid-19 Pandemic (PDF)
[NBER, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-21]
From the Abstract: “We find that policies that limit evictions are found to reduce COVID-19 infections by 3.8% and reduce deaths by 11%. Moratoria on utility disconnections reduce COVID-19 infections by 4.4% and mortality rates by 7.4%. Had such policies been in place across all counties (i.e., adopted as federal policy) from early March 2020 through the end of November 2020, our estimated counterfactuals show that policies that limit evictions could have reduced COVID-19 infections by 14.2% and deaths by 40.7%. For moratoria on utility disconnections, COVID-19 infections rates could have been reduced by 8.7% and deaths by 14.8%.”
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-21]
Collapse of Independent News Media
A West Virginia newspaper company is suing Google and Facebook over online ads.
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-21]
“There is no longer a competitive market in which newspapers can fairly compete for online advertising revenue.”
What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters
Dan Froomkin [Press Watch, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-21]
Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And, because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.
Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today’s Democrats and today’s Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I’m against that….
While we shouldn’t pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don’t know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent, and write up what you’ve learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?
Health Care Crisis
The diabetic who ignores his debt
[Sick Note, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-21]
Naked Capitalism commenter: “This is no movie. This is real. It makes Kafka look like The Little House on the Prairie.”
[Nick’s Newsletter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-1-21]
“Big Pharma’s investment in Black leaders bought their opposition to Medicare for All. Jim Clyburn has been a vocal advocate against it. Barack Obama worked behind the scenes to stop it and continues to undermine it at every turn. The leader of the Democratic Party, President Joe Biden, said he would veto it if it somehow magically passed through the House and the Senate. 46% of Republicans support Medicare for All. Our Black Leaders and Democrats are to the RIGHT of almost half of Republicans voters on healthcare. What has been the result of our leaders cozying up to health insurance companies? Black Americans suffer some of the worst health outcomes in the country. Despite being only 13% of the population, we hold 31% of the recurring medical debt. Black men have the lowest life expectancy and it’s not even close. Black women face intense racial bias in the healthcare field. Black women suffer from the highest rate of infant mortality in America, a rate 3-4 times higher than white women. How can liberals so easily ignore the grim reality that our healthcare system has brought upon black Americans?
Disrupting mainstream politics
“The Bernie movement: An assessment”
[Noah Smith, Noahpinion, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-1-21]
“Bernie’s Theory of Change might have been right (see previous section). But his Theory of Power was wrong. This was proven in dramatic fashion on March 3rd, 2020, when Biden crushed Bernie in the Super Tuesday primaries and went on to cruise to a victory infinitely more decisive than Hillary Clinton’s. Bernie believed that only his brand of politics could drive a turnout surge; instead, the turnout surge was all for Biden. Bernie believed that he would be able to unite the White working class and the Black working class; instead, the two united in their support for Biden. Bernie bet on a big surge in youth turnout; it just didn’t happen. America’s young people were willing to pour into the streets to fight racist cops, but they couldn’t be persuaded to pour into the voting booths for single-payer health insurance. And online activism turned out to be less potent of a weapon than some had allowed themselves to believe.”
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-3-21]
Lambert Strether added: “Exactly as with Iraq, everybody who was wrong is still in power (and rich), and everybody who was right is marginalized, unserious, and scratching.”
Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-4-21]
The Dark Side
The Lousy Tippers of the Trump Administration: They were exhausting, impossible, stingy, and cruel, just like at their day jobs.
Moe Tkacik, February 03, 2021 [Slate, via The Big Picture 2-5-21]
Trump couldn’t pull off a coup, but he had inspired thousands of regular-ass Americans to roam the streets of their own country like Blackwater mercenaries screaming obscenities to $12-an-hour retail workers and restaurant hostesses for having the audacity to ask them to don masks during a pandemic that was killing more than 100 fellow citizens every hour…. But now that they’re gone, good God it must be said: They really were the scum of the earth
“A Punishing American Zeitgeist” An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
[The Drift, via Naked Capitalism 2-4-21]
We can think of that trajectory as beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the rise of Margaret Thatcher in England. These two figures consolidated a profound reorientation of government towards market-friendly, upwardly redistributionist, and highly punitive domestic policy, which in the U.S. includes mass incarceration. Trump bursts on the public scene in this period, emerging in New York City as a swaggering real estate developer and socialite in the 1980s, when he’s still nominally a Democrat, although he’s already a disruptive political figure.
He made what we might now see as a signature intervention after a terrible incident when a white woman was raped and brutally beaten in Central Park. Five black teenage boys, interrogated by the NYPD under extreme duress, confessed to the crime, and ended up going to jail for a long time. Trump put out a big ad in the New York newspapers calling for the execution of the five boys, who, as we found out recently, were innocent. It is telling that he began to consolidate his image as a public figure by latching onto a wave of racialized authoritarian politics and inviting a spectacle of public vengeance….
Another figure who rises in that moment, and who remains central within Trump’s orbit, is Rudy Giuliani, who became mayor of New York in the 1990s after, interestingly enough, leading a riot of mostly off-duty New York policemen on the steps of City Hall to protest the Dinkins administration’s plans for an all-civilian police review board. Talk about an echo. The police riot at City Hall launched Giuliani into the NYC Mayor’s office. There he was again before the riot at the Capitol on stage with Trump calling for a “trial by combat.” ….The riot on the city hall steps in the 1990s helped Giuliani ride the wave of “law and order” into a highly successful and remunerative public career… A lot has changed since the 1980s and 1990s, but Trump and Giuliani have been remarkably consistent in the way they plotted their path through a punishing American zeitgeist.…
The government has been oriented, for the last fifty years, towards a tremendously unbalanced and unequal political economy and criminal punishment regime…. A context for all of this is that we have been largely inured or habituated to what I would call the macro-aggressions we are now subjected to: extreme wealth polarization, declining living standards, declining life expectancy, heavy surveillance, substantial erosions of our capacities to ensure collective flourishing. And we have no clear way forward. So in these large-scale ways, we’ve become almost dulled and fatalistic, in the sense that we expect decline. We expect a future that is worse than our present.
Meanwhile, we’ve become more and more sensitized to the microscopic and frankly minor forms of abuse that are given watchful attention. The upsurge of trainings around sexual harassment or around white privilege are examples of these controlling tendencies and administrative approaches, and I don’t think they can attain the goals that they set (i.e., social justice), because they suffer from an elite skew…. We’re sort of caught between a type of progressive conformism on the one hand, one that speaks a language of inclusion and diversity, and on the other hand, a reckless right-wing vision of freedom, understood as the impunity to do whatever you want under terms of protected wealth and status, damn the consequences. And between those two poles we’ve grown massively unbalanced, with a tremendous sensitivity to microaggression and a dullness to macro-aggression…. what I am calling the elite skew that frames a logic of cancellation actually means that macro-aggressions mostly go unpunished. The well-heeled perpetrators — those most responsible for big risk and big ruin, like war and financial crisis — fail upwards. Meanwhile, smaller players face personal ruin and disproportionate punishment for small risks, badly taken. Cancellation thrives in a culture and economy in which wealth, legacy powers, and institutions are protected and the threshold of disposability for everyone else is exceedingly low.
[Personality and Individual Differences, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-2-21]
“We report the results of three studies that show: (1) those higher in narcissism are more likely than those who are lower to see organizations in political terms (opportunity), (2) they are more willing to engage in organizational politics (motive), and (3) they are more skilled political actors (means).”
“How Billionaire Robert Smith Avoided Indictment in a Multimillion-Dollar Tax Case”
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-4-21]
“But rather than expose a man worth about $7 billion to a possible prison term and potentially force him to give up control of his private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, Barr signed off on a non-prosecution agreement. It required Smith to admit he had committed crimes, pay $139 million and cooperate against a close business associate indicted in the largest tax-evasion case in U.S. history—Texas software mogul Robert T. Brockman. Smith, the richest Black person in the U.S. according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, agreed to cooperate after spending years raising his public profile as a philanthropist and advocate for racial justice. He praised the Trump administration’s efforts to provide economic assistance to minority business owners amid the Covid-19 pandemic. As his wealth tripled over the past five years, he also gave away more than he had hidden abroad. All that complicated the possible prosecution of a defendant whom jurors may have viewed sympathetically.”
“FTC says Amazon took away $62 million in tips from drivers”
[ABC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-2-21]
“The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that for more than two years, Amazon didn’t pass on tips to drivers, even though it promised shoppers and drivers it would do so. The FTC said Amazon didn’t stop taking the money until 2019, when the company found out about the FTC’s investigation…. The drivers were part of Amazon’s Flex business, which started in 2015 and allows people to pick up and deliver Amazon packages with their own cars. The drivers are independent workers, and are not Amazon employees. The FTC said Amazon at first promised workers that they would be paid $18 to $25 per hour, and also said they would receive 100% of tips left to them by customers on the app. But in 2016, the FTC said Amazon started paying drivers a lower hourly rate and used the tips to make up the difference. Amazon didn’t disclose the change to drivers, the FTC said, and the tips it took from drivers amounted to $61.7 billion.” • And a “team” at Amazon reprogrammed the app to steal tips. Managers, programmers, testers, documentation specialists, accountants, database wizards, etc. Nobody said a word. All corrupt to the bone. “Learn to code!”
“Independent business groups push Biden against FTC, DOJ appointees with ties to Big Tech”
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-4-21]
“A coalition of independent business associations is urging President Biden against appointing individuals with ties to the four biggest tech companies to top antitrust enforcement roles at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The associations, representing more than 60,000 independent businesses, sent a letter to the president on Wednesday calling for him to appoint individuals that will ‘prioritize reinvigorating anti-monopoly policy.’ … ‘We believe that it is imperative that you avoid appointing individuals who have served as lawyers, lobbyists, or consultants for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to key antitrust enforcement positions. Instead, we encourage you to appoint experienced litigators or public servants who recognized the dangers of, rather than helped to exacerbate, these corporations’ market power,’ the letter continued.”
There is no bipartisanship because Republicans don’t want it”
Ryan Cooper [The Week, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-3-21]
“It is somewhat mysterious why bipartisanship became a sort of fetish object for some D.C. lifers. It probably has something to do with how it obscures responsibility — if you are some kind of lobbyist or part of the imperialist foreign policy “blob,” bipartisanship can facilitate financial deregulation, or yet another pointless increase in the military budget, without it being clear who is to blame. A proper democratic system has clear lines of accountability, so it is obvious what the people’s representatives are doing with their power. Bipartisan compromise is the exact opposite. At any rate, for whatever reason Biden felt the need to pander to this sentiment during the campaign by promising a return to bipartisan comity that was absolutely never going to happen. He duly gave Republicans their opening, and now that they rejected the offer it’s on them. But perhaps now Democrats can try the novel strategy of trying to do a good job all by themselves, and allowing voters to judge them on their performance.”
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-3-2021]
“Trump pollster’s campaign autopsy paints damning picture of defeat”
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-4-21]
“The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic…. The findings are based on an analysis of exit polling in 10 states. Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — are states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are states that Trump won in both elections. The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the ‘greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,’ and that he ‘lost ground with almost every age group.’ In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older. Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that the former president suffered a ‘double-digit erosion’ with ‘White College educated voters across the board.'”
Lambert Strether sums it up: “Shorter: No pandemic, Trump wins.”
Rise of the Barstool conservatives
[The Week, via The Big Picture 2-2-21]
What Trump recognized was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and "SJWs," opposition to the popularization of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military, the rights of male undergraduates to engage in fornication while intoxicated without fear of the Title IX mafia. Whatever their opinions might have been 20 years ago, in 2021 these are people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever GamerGate was about. On economic questions their views are a curious and at times incoherent mixture of standard libertarian talking points and pseudo-populism, embracing lower taxes on the one hand and stimulus checks and stricter regulation of social media platforms on the other.
I have come to think of the people who answer to the above description as "Barstool conservatives," in reference to the popular sports website….
I fully expect the future of the Republican Party to belong to Barstool conservatives, which is to say, to a growing but so far almost invisible coalition that could very well carry the White House. The Barstool conservative movement will not have institutions in any recognizable sense, certainly not think tanks or highbrow magazines, but it will be larger, more geographically disparate, younger, and probably more male. It will also, I suspect, be more racially diverse, much like the portion of the electorate that gave Trump 74 million votes in 2020….
“Poll: 64 percent of GOP voters say they would join a Trump-led new party”
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-5-21]
“A majority of Republican voters said if former President Trump were to start a new political party they would likely join, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds. Sixty-four percent of registered Republican voters in the Jan. 28-29 survey said they’d join a new political party led by the former president, including 32 percent who said they would very likely join.”
The Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
Molly Ball, February 4, 2021 [Time, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-5-21]
Trump’s election in 2016–credited in part to his unusual strength among the sort of blue collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIO–prompted [Mike] Podhorzer to question his assumptions about voter behavior. He began circulating weekly number-crunching memos to a small circle of allies and hosting strategy sessions in D.C. But when he began to worry about the election itself, he didn’t want to seem paranoid. It was only after months of research that he introduced his concerns in his newsletter in October 2019. The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, he wrote. “Most of our planning takes us through Election Day,” he noted. “But, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes”–Trump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. “We desperately need to systematically ‘red-team’ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.”
It turned out Podhorzer wasn’t the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of “resistance” organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition. Voting-rights and civil rights organizations were raising alarms. A group of former elected officials was researching emergency powers they feared Trump might exploit. Protect Democracy was assembling a bipartisan election-crisis task force. “It turned out that once you said it out loud, people agreed,” Podhorzer says, “and it started building momentum.”
….On March 3, Podhorzer drafted a three-page confidential memo titled “Threats to the 2020 Election.” “Trump has made it clear that this will not be a fair election, and that he will reject anything but his own re-election as ‘fake’ and rigged,” he wrote. “On Nov. 3, should the media report otherwise, he will use the right-wing information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.” The memo laid out four categories of challenges: attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on Trump’s political opponents and “efforts to reverse the results of the election.”
….In Podhorzer’s presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump’s pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.
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AOC hiding in her office during the insurrection. YouTube (UserFriendly). The full version is apparently annoying due to the excessive commentary.
“New Sheriff in Town | Law Enforcement and the Urban-Rural Divide” [The Drift]. “The South in 1865 was not a blank slate, but an open field for a new battle. This fresh struggle would pit those who embraced Black citizenship and wished to consolidate the gains of emancipation against those who aimed to use the law and the power of the state to continue profiting from Black labor. In the mid-1870s, the federal government retreated from its support of the freedpeople, and white planters violently retook control of the region. The political wing of this counterrevolution was the Democratic Party, but its paramilitary wing was divided in two: in rural areas, it wore Klan hoods; in cities, it donned police uniforms. This bifurcation of state power across urban police forces and rural sheriffs is one that persists today. Urban police, especially those in our biggest cities, receive the bulk of media attention, but for millions of rural Americans the primary agent of law enforcement is the county sheriff, just as it was for Big Harris Rood in 1866 — a distinction that tends to get lost in contemporary discourse that treats all “cops” as identical. It understandably matters little to a protestor getting beaten whether the person doing the beating is a sheriff’s deputy or a city police officer. But as we begin the process of rethinking American law enforcement as a whole, these structural differences can help us determine what kind of change is possible.” • This is a very interesting article, and if, as I believe, the Reconstruction South was the world’s first example of fascism, the parallel development of policing is super-interesting. Well worth a read.
‘We’ve learned to love the guy’: How Biden charmed the left Politico L 2-6
“Is the governing coalition of the country going to be the Democratic party writ large: progressives, centrists and aligned independents, is that the governing coalition?” said Jeff Weaver, former senior adviser to Sanders’ presidential campaign. “Or is the governing coalition, Democratic Party centrists and Republicans? That's the fundamental question.”
Keeping that coalition together, however, is likely dependent on where Biden comes down on the issue of eliminating the legislative filibuster. Though some leading Democrats have signaled a change to the filibuster may be on the horizon, progressives are watching Biden and other party leaders closely on the issue.
He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?
[NYT 2-2-2021]
“The Case for a Third Reconstruction” [New York Review of Books] WC 2-4. “Like the secessionist slaveholders who would break the republic rather than accept the election of an antislavery president, Trump and his enablers tried to disrupt the electoral process rather than accept his decisive defeat in the election.”
How the New Orleans Streetcar Revival Left Bus Riders Behind The city’s expansion of its tourist-friendly streetcar network did little to help long-suffering NOLA commuters, transit advocates say. But change may be en route. (CityLab) BP 2-5-21
How the Brain Responds to Beauty There is no shortage of theories about what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. Ideas about proportion, harmony, symmetry, order, complexity and balance have all been studied by psychologists in great depth. The theories go as far back as 1876—in the early days of experimental psychology—when German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion to the golden ratio (if you’re curious, that ratio is about 1.6:1). Scientists are searching for the neural basis of an enigmatic experience (Scientific American) BP 2-4-21
Institute for New Economic Thinking, via Naked Capitalism 2-2-21]
Biden administration embraces antisemitism definition that includes some criticisms of Israel Mondoweiss, via Naked Capitalism 2-4-21] The same IHRA definition used to take down Corbyn.
You actually make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and extremely broad for me. I’m looking forward to your next post, I will try to get the hang of it!
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