Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 30, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 30, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Yuan overtakes yen in global transaction volume 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-26-2022]

China in the Middle East 

Chas W. Freeman, Jr. [Naked Capitalism 1-27-2022]

How Supply-Side Reaganomics is linked to the slave holding Confederacy

Heather Cox Richardson, January 27, 2022 [Letters from an American]

On January 21, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained to the World Economic Forum that the Biden administration rejected Republican supply-side economics, ushered in during the Reagan administration. That system relied on tax cuts and aggressive deregulation to spark private capital—the supply side—to drive the economy. Supply-side economics has not increased growth, Yellen said, while it has failed to address climate change and has shifted money upward as it moved the burden of taxes from capital and put it on workers.

Biden’s economic policy, Yellen explained, rejected this philosophy in favor of what she calls “modern supply-side economics.” This term appears to be intended to suggest a middle ground between the supply-side economics of the 1980s, which focused on putting money in the hands of the wealthy, and the post–World War II idea that the government should manage the economy by investing in infrastructure and a social safety net.

Biden’s plan, Yellen explained, has focused on “labor supply, human capital, public infrastructure, R&D, and investments in a sustainable environment.” Rather than focusing on putting money into the hands of the “demand side” of the economy—consumers—it focuses on developing a strong labor force in a strong democracy to create growth through hard work and innovation.

In its emphasis on education and access to resources, the Biden administration’s economic policy echoes the ideology Abraham Lincoln articulated in 1859. Wealthy southern enslavers insisted the government should simply defend the property rights of the wealthy, who would amass wealth that they would then put to its best use to develop the country. But Lincoln argued that the government should nurture the country’s laborers, who were the nation’s true innovators and hardest workers and who, if properly supported, would move the country forward much faster than a few wealthy men would.

The pandemic

The American sickness

[Indignity, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-27-2022]

“Across this large and otherwise fractious country, in its famous “blue states” and “red states” alike, the United States is converging on an ever-more-clearly articulated answer to the coronavirus pandemic: the pursuit, in defiance of most of the rest of the world, of a nationwide Unlimited Covid policy….. But the movement for Unlimited Covid has a uniquely American character. It represents an informal yet powerful collaboration between the country’s two mutually hostile political parties, across two different presidential administrations. The country’s pandemic response was initially defined by Trump, who chose to deny the risks of the virus, to suppress testing to keep official case counts low, and to delay any mobilization to produce tests or protective equipment. Facing a reelection campaign, and encouraged by a party line that the disease would be no worse than seasonal influenza, Trump and the Republican Party counted on allowing the virus to spread freely, generating natural herd immunity, after which they hoped it would subside on its own. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party took power at the beginning of 2021, claiming a mandate to change the way the country handled the pandemic. In line with the party’s technocratic spirit, and with the benefit of the newly available vaccines, Biden quickly launched a mass immunization program. That same technocratic outlook, however, led the administration to pursue what it hoped could be the most narrowly efficient strategy against the coronavirus—a domestic vaccination program only, rather than promoting international immunization, and without trying to catch up with the sort of testing, tracing, and targeted suppression that other countries had deployed. When the virus kept mutating and proved itself able to spread even among vaccinated people, the Biden administration had not stockpiled tests or masks with which to respond to new waves. Caught up in its promise of a return to normalcy, and unable to narrowly tailor closures to meet specific problems, the administration failed to bring the country to a pandemic-fighting footing and allowed economic relief measures to expire. In the end, the country settled on a contest between the original Republican program of counting on the unchecked virus to produce national herd immunity and a Democratic program of counting on a combination of vaccines and infections to produce national herd immunity. Although the details of it played out as partisan conflict—right-wing commenters went so far as to obfuscate their own vaccinations, to undermine Biden’s efforts—the result either way was Unlimited Covid. By redefining its failure to control the coronavirus as a success, the United States has rewritten its social contract and reshaped the expectations of its people.”

Lambert Strether adds: “The ruling class will have slaughtered a million Americans and gotten away clean. It’s a remarkable achievement. These impressive numbers are, well, let’s be polite and say “world historical.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 23, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 23, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

How to Prepare for Climate Change’s Most Immediate Impacts 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 1-18-2022]

Strategic Political Economy

1/25 Live Chat: The Author Of “Davos Man”

David Sirota [The Daily Poster, January 7, 2022]

New York Times reporter Peter Goodman will talk to Daily Poster subscribers about his new book on billionaires conquering the world….

In his new book Davos Man — How the Billionaires Devoured the World, Goodman delivers a searing exposé of how the global billionaire class has engineered a bottom-up transfer of wealth that has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. The book lays bare the roots of Trump, Brexit, and anti-democratic movements sweeping the globe, exposing how wealthy executives perpetuated the agony of the pandemic by monopolizing the benefits of COVID vaccines and laying the groundwork for the rise of Omicron.

RICH AMERICANS’ OUTSIZED ROLE IN ELECTING REPRESENTATIVES

[Public Citizen, January 18, 2022, via The Daily Poster, January 19, 2022]

A new report finds two-thirds of all “maxed-out” campaign donations to members of Congress came from the richest 10 percent of zip codes across the U.S., and 25 percent of all maxed-out contributions were from the wealthiest one percent of zip codes. The study, authored by consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, also shows that zip codes with mostly white residents gave five times the amount of maxed-out contributions per capita as zip codes with mostly Black residents. “This study confirms that the very wealthiest Americans play an immensely greater role than regular voters in choosing our elected officials, and that members of Congress have a strong incentive to align their positions with wealthy donors’ interests,” said Taylor Lincoln, Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division research director and author of the study. The Freedom to Vote Act — one of two federal bills under debate that creates stronger protections for voters — would offer a six-to-one match on political contributions of $200 or less and allow congressional candidates to raise campaign cash without relying on the wealthiest donors, as long as they agree to forgo donations over $1,000.

'Time for Citizens United to Go': US Oligarchs Poured $1.2 Billion Into 2020 Elections

Jake Johnson, January 21, 2022 [Common Dreams]

The figure represents a 39-fold increase compared to spending in 2010, the first election held after the widely decried ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 16, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 16, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-2022]

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Heather Cox Richardson, January 14, 2022 [Letters from an American]

Yesterday, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s requirement that businesses with more than 100 employees address the coronavirus pandemic by making employees either get vaccines or, if they choose not to be vaccinated, to test weekly and wear a mask at work….

In his opinion, Gorsuch explicitly raised the concept of the “nondelegation doctrine” and the related concept of the “major questions doctrine.” The nondelegation doctrine relies on our government’s separation of powers. It says that, as its own branch of government, Congress cannot delegate regulatory authority to the executive branch, where agencies like OSHA live.

But, since Congress has, in fact, been delegating authority to the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington, those who want to reduce federal authority sometimes rely instead on the more limited major questions doctrine, which says that although Congress can delegate minor authority to administrative agencies, it cannot delegate major questions (although just how to define a major question is unclear).

A recent study by University of Southern California professor of public policy Dr. Pamela Clouser McCann and University of Michigan professor of social science Dr. Charles R. Shipan, both experts on intergovernmental delegation, found that 99% of today’s federal laws involve delegation. Unwinding them and requiring Congress to make all its own regulatory decisions would paralyze the modern government.

Those who support the idea of nondelegation argue that it guarantees government by the people rather than by an unelected bureaucracy, and this is a worthy thought. But unfortunately, it depends on the goodwill of those elected to state legislatures, and because those lawmakers also get to decide who votes in their states, that goodwill can be thin on the ground.

At heart, this is the same states’ rights argument that the U.S. has grappled with since the 1830s. Since that time, while some state legislatures have used their power to reflect the will of the people, others have limited the vote, putting a small group of people into power. Once in power, they have used the state government to promote their own interests. States’ rights advocates have consistently said that any federal interference with a state’s unfair laws is tyranny…

Since the 1930s, though, lawmakers have used the federal government to combat unfair state laws. They have regulated businesses when state lawmakers wouldn’t, protected civil rights from discriminatory state laws, and, ultimately, guaranteed the right to vote in states that kept their citizens from the polls, with the expectation that if everyone could vote, they would, indeed, create state governments that reflected the will of the majority..

TW: “lawmakers have used the federal government to combat unfair state laws.” In other words, guarantee to each state a [civic] republican form of government. 

The Republicans’ Death Panel Finally Emerges! The Supreme Court’s Republican Six rule that the government lacks the power to fight a pandemic.

Harold Meyerson, January 13, 2022 [The American Prospect]

For a bunch of jurists who claim to adhere to textualism, the six Court right-wingers gave no indication that they’d actually read the act that established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which was signed into law by left-winger Richard Nixon. That law gives OSHA the authority to protect workers “exposed to grave danger” from “substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 9, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 9, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Yes, Maggie, There Is Such a Thing as “Society”

Lambert Strether, January 3, 2022 [Naked Capitalism]

The Iron Lady, the late Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, famously remarked: “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

In this short and simple post, I will show that we can prove Thatcher wrong, using what we have learned about airborne transmission in the current pandemic. First, I will present an experiment, and then I will show why it is disproves Thatcher (and, if one should wish to undertake the task, a lot of libertarian and libertarian-adjacent foofra about “methodological individualism” as well, although that is a task for another day).

First, the experiment. (I am using The Asahi Shimbun‘s coverage; here is the original study.) Here is a photo of the setup….

Now, let’s reframe the experiment as a model, the sort of simple model that pseudo-Nobel prize-winning economists construct. Let’s model “interactive coexistence” of humans or “persistent social interaction” as two mannequins locked in a box together, sharing air. This is, in fact, not as far-fetched a model of humanity as it seems at first. We are an indoor species:

“We spend more time in our homes, than whales spend submerged beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Dr. Richard Corsi of Portland State University, who has studied indoor air quality for 30 years. “The average American lives to 79 and spends 70 of those 79 years inside buildings.”

And unless we are Ted Kaczynski, in solitary confinement, leaving on the street, or Simeon Stylites — all surely edge cases — we spend our time indoors with others, sharing air. In other words, breathing is a social relation[2]. We have the most material social relationship possible — sharing air — between two individuals, and they do not have to be family. Ergo, Maggie Thatcher is wrong….

It’s interesting to rethink the arguments for “freedom” — a word, though not a concept, I am coming to loathe — in terms of seat belts or cigarette smoking. Ultimately, seat belts became mandatory, and cigarette smoking in shared air was forbidden. Auto accidents and cancer weren’t multiplying exponentially in the space of days, however….

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-7-2022]

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“The liberty of local bullies”

Noah Smith [Noahpinion, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-4-2021]

“I have often remarked in the past how libertarianism – at least, its modern American manifestation – is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call ‘local bullies.’ The modern American libertarian ideology does not deal with the issue of local bullies. In the world envisioned by Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and other foundational thinkers of the movement, there are only two levels to society – the government (the ‘big bully’) and the individual. If your freedom is not being taken away by the biggest bully that exists, your freedom is not being taken away at all.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 2, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 2, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

[Youtube, 

Happy new year! 

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Strategic Political Economy

“The collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it”

Heather Cox Richardson, December 26, 2021 [Letters from an American]

...the collapse of the USSR gave the branch of the Republican Party that wanted to destroy the New Deal confidence that their ideology was right. Believing that their ideology of radical individualism had destroyed the USSR, these so-called Movement Conservatives very deliberately set out to destroy what they saw as Soviet-like socialist ideology at home. As anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home. Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn't have nuclear weapons.”

In the 1990s, they turned their firepower on those they considered insufficiently committed to free enterprise, including traditional Republicans who agreed with Democrats that the government should regulate the economy, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. Movement Conservatives called these traditional Republicans “Republicans in Name Only” or RINOs and said that, along with Democrats, such RINOs were bringing “socialism” to America.

With the “evil empire,” as President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union, no longer a viable enemy, Movement Conservatives, aided by new talk radio hosts, increasingly demonized their domestic political opponents. As they strengthened their hold on the Republican Party, Movement Conservatives cut taxes, slashed the social safety net, and deregulated the economy.

In the 1990s, as well-connected businessmen began to gather wealth and power in the former Soviet republics, that deregulation made the US and the UK attractive places for these oligarchs to place their illicit money. According to a fascinating new study from Chatham House about the UK, that investment ultimately weakened the rule of law. The study concerns the UK alone, but since the UK and US are by far the world’s top exporters of financial services, many of the report’s findings are suggestive for the US as well….

The financial deregulation that made the US a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, after the September 11 attacks on the US, Congress in 2001 passed the PATRIOT Act to address the threat of terrorism. The law took on money laundering and the illicit funding of terrorism, requiring financial institutions to inspect large sums of money passing through them. But the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) exempted many real estate deals from the new regulations.

In the years since, the United States has become one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Experts say that hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the US every year. As Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted last year, “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns, but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”

….

In some ways, the collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it. In the past thirty years, we have torn ourselves apart as  politicians adhering to an extreme ideology demonized their opponents. That demonization is escalating now as Republican radicals who were born after the collapse of the USSR and who therefore see their primary enemies as Democrats, are moving the Republican Party even further to the right. North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn, for example, was born in 1995.

That demonization has also helped to justify the deregulation of our economy and then the illicit money from the rising oligarchs it attracted, money that has corrupted our democratic system.