Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 24, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 24, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Godless Empire: Evil Cannot Create Anything New, Only Corrupt What Good Created 

[The Reading Junkie, via Mike Norman Economics 4-18-2022]

Analysts in Washington study a culture and find its most primal, barbaric roots, and create a cartoonish caricature of it. With that caricature as a false god, that whole society is turned into a death cult, the perfect, self-destructing weapon against Washington’s rivals. The suicidal nature of Washington’s pawns is deliberate. After Russia is destroyed, there would be no use for a Ukraine anymore, so it is actually better for Ukraine to be destroyed in the process too…. The West loves “blood harvests” and projects that idea onto other cultures like Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine, but it originated on our own shores. Look at modern movies and shows like 300 and Vikings. Why do our filmmakers dream so much of mass killings, rapes, and blood gods? Why do they love depicting barbarians raping and massacring weak and pathetic Christians? It’s weird.

TW: This is why it is a tragedy that contemporary scholars of civic republicanism such as Pettit sand Rawls are misleading people by defining civic republicanism as “freedom from domination.” What makes civic republicanism a superior philosophy of political economy and governance is its insistence on promoting the human capacity to “do good,” by striving toward perfection.

Samuel Scolnicov, “An Image of Perfection: The Good and the Rational in Plato's Material Universe” (Revue de Philosophie Ancienne, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1992)

Matt J. Rossano, Seeking Perfection: A Dialogue About the Mind, the Soul, and What it Means to be Human (Routledge, 2015)

This idea is, of course, reflected in the Preamble of the USA Constitution (“a more perfect union”) , but the philosophical importance of its inclusion is today all but forgotten. 

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-20-2022]

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The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers 

[Palladium, via Naked Capitalism 4-22-2022]

Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan: A History is the first history to adequately capture this story. Malkasian deployed as a civilian officer in Kunar and Helmand provinces in the aughts, and then returned to Afghanistan as an advisor to General Joseph Dunford in 2013, and stayed at Dunford’s side through his tenure on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Malkasian speaks Pashto fluently, traveled widely across Afghanistan conducting interviews, and participated in the Trump era negotiations with the Taliban.

Malkasian’s account of American error builds on these personal experiences. His catalog of American mistakes and miscalculations is long….

Most accounts of the conflict are one-sided portrayals of the American experience in Afghanistan. Malkasian’s fluency in Pashto allows The American War in Afghanistan to escape the limitations of the genre. Entire chapters are built on Afghan sources that other histories of the war ignore. From their perspective, the U.S. war in Afghanistan was not really American at all. Over the last two decades, it was Afghans, not Americans, who have done the majority of the killing, bleeding, and dying. The war in Afghanistan was first and foremost a civil war. Any account of the Taliban’s victory must start with what each side of this civil war was fighting for.

Mexico nationalises lithium in populist president’s push to extend state control 

[FT, via Naked Capitalism 4-212-2022]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 17, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 17, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“The policy of the USA has always been to prevent Germany and Russia from cooperating more closely” 

[Swiss Standpoint, via Naked Capitalism 4-12-2022]

We forget that Crimea was independent, even before Ukraine became independent. In January 1991, while the Soviet Union still existed, Crimea held a referendum to be managed from Moscow and not from Kiev. It thus became an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Ukraine did not get its own independence referendum until six months later in August 1991. At that point, Crimea did not consider itself a part of Ukraine. But Ukraine did not accept this. Between 1991 and 2014, it was a constant struggle between the two entities. Crimea had its own constitution with its own authorities. In 1995, encouraged by the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine overthrew the Crimean government with special forces and abrogated its constitution. But this is never mentioned, as it would shed a completely different light on the current development.

Liberalism, conservatism and the lack of discussion of civic republicanism

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid It’s not just a phase.

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 4-16-2022]

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past….

Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society....

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 10, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 10, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Jerks

Michael Brenner [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 4-9-2022].

...it is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.  At a more personal level, this impression is reinforced by messages from persons whom I’ve known and respected telling me that I’m in the pay of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “mad,” “too clever by half,” 

...Third, it is self-evident that our national leaders, elected or appointed, are equally incapable of sober deliberation, of intellectual honesty (with themselves as well as us), of elementary logic, even of acknowledging factual realities. Consequently, the resulting behavior defies rational analysis.

NATO to target China – Stoltenberg 

[RT, via Naked Capitalism 4-6-2022]

The West is losing its mind:

NATO plans to deepen its cooperation with partners in Asia as a response to a rising “security challenge” coming from China, which refuses to condemn Russia’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine, the US-led bloc’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg revealed during a press conference on Tuesday.

Bill Clinton: “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path”

Bill Clinton [[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-8-2022]

“I did everything I could to help Russia make the right choice and become a great 21st-century democracy.”

Comments were savagely on target:

Darthbobber April 8, 2022 at 4:11 pm

Clinton makes it all the way through that Russia screed without so much as mentioning the October ’93 Russian constitutional crisis, the shelling of parliament, suppression of the opposition press, end of the independence of the high court. Or of our considerable efforts at reelecting Yeltsin under-err–less than democratic conditions.

Sacrificing the fledgeling democracy of the Gorbachev constitution on the altar of shock therapy was pretty decisive in terms of Russia’s evolution since, also in terms of creating the oligarchs in the first place. Odd how none of this is worth even a passing mention. Priorities, I guess.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 3, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 3, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Nearly 1 in 3 food companies forced to reduce or shutdown production 

[Brussels Times, via Naked Capitalism 4-2-2022]

Yves Smith added: “From IM Doc, independent of above story, by e-mail:”

2 interesting patient conversations this week…The other was the retired CEO of one of our big Ag corps. He told me in no uncertain terms to begin to do everything I could to prepare. All kinds of problems are brewing with the nation’s food supplies and supply chains and the real pain will not start until later this summer or fall – but it is going to be really ugly. He rates the likelihood to be somewhere between “epic and biblical”

Child poverty spiked by 41 percent in January after Biden benefit program expired, study finds 

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 3-29-2022]

‘Their Inflation Strategy Is Working’: Corporate Profits Soared to Record High in 2021

Jake Johnson [Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 3-31-2022]

The US Empire’s Ultimate Target Is Not Russia But China 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Mike Norman Economics 3-31-2022]

Ukraine / Russia

Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War 

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 3-28-2022]

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.  

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark.

Just where is Joe Biden going to find gas for the EU? 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 3-28-2022]

A senior U.S. official clarified that the promise of 15 bcm this year is actually a commitment to try and help convince companies in Asia or elsewhere that were expecting cargoes this coming winter to agree to send them to Europe instead. That would be a repeat of what happened this past winter, the official said.”