Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 31, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 31, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Will elites be allowed to “cull the herd”?

Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-27-2022]

We’re engaged in a massive social experiment to see whether an elite (ruling + governing classes) can “cull the herd” in six-figure quantities, and still retain hegemony (TINA); the Covid pandemic is only the latest and most obvious example. So far, the answer seems to be yes, or even “Hell, yeah!” Viewed in that light, is “the system” “at risk” at all?

Global power shift as USA and west commit “suicide by neoliberalism”

Is this or is this not a recession? It doesn't matter, there are much bigger changes afoot — Philip Pilkington

Philip Pilkington [Macrocosm, via Mike Norman Economics 7-29-2022]

What is going on? Simply put, the West is getting poorer. We are seeing two things at once. First of all, policymakers have lost the plot and started intervening heavily into the economy with lockdowns and various other policies that destroy the supply-side of the economy. Secondly, we are seeing an enormous geopolitical shift centered around the war in Ukraine. The old model where the rich West runs large trade deficits with the poorer developing countries in exchange for worthless paper is coming to an end. We are exacerbating this transition by engaging in self-destructive sanctions policies that interfere with markets in everything from energy to fertiliser.

In a few words: the West is in decline and our leaders are greatly accelerating and exacerbating this decline. They can cover this up with redundant arguments about what is and isn’t a recession for so long. But at some point either the inflation will get worse — perhaps by gas shortages in Europe this winter — and/or the unmeployment rate will spike. At that point, the underlying dynamics will become too obvious to ignore. For politicians and the general public anyway. Economists will likely find some other redundant nuance to debate and distract.

Russia’s Vostok 2022 has big messages 

M. K. Bhadrakumar [India Punchline, via Mike Norman Economics 7-27-2022]

[Bhadrakumar is a diplomat and former ambassador, retired from the Foreign Service of India.]

Vostok 2018, held exactly four years ago, was the first time such a massive military exercise was held after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (At the height of the Cold War in 1981 under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union held its last Vostok exercise). In the event, Vostok 2018 turned into a Russia-China gun show. 

The Russian Federation put more than 300,000 troops in the field—alongside tens of thousands of tanks, helicopters, and weapons of every sort—for a huge war game in Russia’s far-eastern reaches, and invited the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to play along, which it did.

And a whole new groove in international affairs began appearing, signifying that the interests of Russia and China have once again begun to align — this time around, in response to US military power under a pugnacious president, Donald Trump.  

On the sidelines of the exercise, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping had a breakfast of blinis together in Vladivostok. It was a powerful signal that Russia no longer saw China as an adversary but as a potential military ally. It was widely noted internationally as heralding a major shift in the co-relation of forces in world politics. 

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Michael Hudson — Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Nature

Global power shift as USA self-destructs

Alfons Mais: “Russia has resources that are almost inexhaustible” 

[Handelsblatt, via Naked Capitalism 7-20-2022] Original here.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 7-21-2022]

x

.

Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 7-23-2022]

x

.

Record-breaking Chinese bridge clears hurdle to faster transport in border province 

South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 7-19-2022]

PHOTO Luzhijiang Bridge in the southwestern province of Yunnan

China has built the world's longest single-tower suspension bridge

[Interesting Engineering, July 17, 2022]

The 800-meter-long (2,625 feet) bridge is being built to improve the connection between China and Southeast Asia. It will drastically cut the travel time between the cities of Yuxi and Chuxiong from an hour and a half to only two minutes….

The Luzhijiang Bridge is also impressive because of the incredibly steep valley cliffs it rises out of. Drivers sticking to a 100 mph speed limit will come straight out of tunnels onto the 300-meter-tall bridge from either side. The steel cables used for the suspension bridge had to be secured by drilling a 100-meter tunnel for an anchor.

The bridge will also form part of a new 200 km (124 miles) expressway through Yunnan that will improve the passage to countries including Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos. The expressway is part of the country's Belt and Road Initiative, which is designed to improve connections with 140 other countries.

China Maritime Report No. 22: Logistics Support for a Cross-Strait Invasion: The View from Beijing (PDF)

[China Maritime Studies Institute, U.S. Naval War College, via Naked Capitalism 7-17-2022]

Charles Sumner speech on civic republicanism, February 1866

The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, For the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government.  

Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts

Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution fixing the Basis of Representation, February 5 and 6, 1866. 

II.

And this brings me to the next form of this necessity and duty, as they appear in the guaranty clause of the Constitution. It is expressly declared that “the United States shall guaranty to every State in this Union a republican form of government.” These words, when properly understood, leave no alternative. They speak to us with no uncertain voice. But they must be understood. The Rebel States, while providing constitutional safeguards for property in man, and, according[Pg 137] to the vaunt of their Vice-President, making Slavery the corner-stone of the new Government, yet follow our Constitution in the
formal guaranty of a republican form of government.[46] Defiantly they assume that Slavery is not inconsistent with such a government. To this degrading assumption we must reply, not only for the national cause, but that republican governments may not suffer.

The caning of Sumner on the Senate floor,
by South Carolina representative
Preston Brooks, May 22, 1856

 

[Pg 138]

Believe me, Sir, this is no question of theory or abstraction. It is a practical question, which you are summoned to decide. Here is the positive text of the Constitution, and you must affix its meaning. You cannot evade it, you cannot forget it, without abandonment of duty. Others in vision or aspiration have dwelt on the idea of a Republic, and they have been lifted in soul. You must consider it not merely in vision or aspiration, but practically, as legislators, seeking a precise definition, to the end that the constitutional “guaranty” may be performed. Your powers and duties are involved in this definition. The character of the Government founded by our fathers is also involved in it.

There is another consideration not to be forgotten. In affixing the proper meaning to the text, and determining what is a “republican form of government,” you act as a court in the last resort, from which there is no appeal. 

Thee magnitude of the question before us is seen in the postulate with which I begin. Assuming that there has been a lapse of government in any State, so as to impose upon the United States the duty of executing this guaranty, then do I insist that it is a bounden duty to see that such State has a “republican form of government,” and, in the discharge of this bounden duty, we must declare that a State, which, in the foundation of its government, sets aside “the consent of the governed,” which imposes taxation without representation, which discards the principle of Equal Rights, and lodges power exclusively with an Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Caste, or Monopoly, cannot be recognized as a “republican form of government,” according to the requirement of American institutions. Even if it may satisfy some definition handed down from antiquity or invented in monarchical Europe, it cannot satisfy the solemn injunction of our Constitution. For this question I now ask a hearing. Nothing in the present debate can equal it in importance. Its correct determination will be an epoch for our country and for mankind.

You are sole and exclusive judges. You may decide as you please. Rarely in history has such an opportunity been offered to the statesman. You may raise the name of Republic to majestic heights of justice and truth, or you may let it drag low down in the depths of wrong and falsehood. You may make it fulfil the idea of John Milton, when he said that “a commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body”;[47] or you may let it shrink into the ignoble form of a pretender, with the name of Republic, but without its soul.

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Stunning new Webb images: baby stars, colliding galaxies and hot exoplanets 

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 7-13-2022]

Strategic Political Economy

The Power Game 

W. J. Astore (Lieutenant Colonel USAF ret.), [Bracing Views, via Mike Norman Economics 7-10-2022]

A book that shook my world was journalist Hedrick Smith’s “The Power Game,” published 35 years ago in 1987. It was about “How Washington really works,” and what I remember about it is how it made me feel, as in discouraged and outraged. I learned about the power of lobbyists, the power of money, and what money gains you, which is access. More-or-less legal forms of corruption in 1987 are now most definitely legal, with the Supreme Court decreeing that corporations are citizens and that money is speech….

One thing I really liked about Hedrick Smith is his honesty. He gave a talk on his book, link here:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?3754-1/power-game-washington-works

Where he explained that, if you’re a politician and you accept certain campaign donations, it’s understood between both parties that when the donor needs you to vote a certain way, you will vote that way, no questions asked. Everyone in Congress understands this. It’s why every effort by real citizens to get big money out of politics fails. It fails because the big donors won’t have it. They like to be able to buy politicians, thank you very much. That’s how democracy works, so says the Supreme Court. If you don’t like it, start your own corporation, make a few billion, then you too can buy your own politician.

A revival of democracy in America starts with campaign finance reform, which most politicians say they’re for even as they vote against it. Sounds like a conundrum to me. Can we solve it by explaining to our esteemed justices (John Roberts, can you hear me?) that money is not the same as speech and that corporations really aren’t the same as citizens?

Finally, a rather obvious point, but it bears repeating. Justices like Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett weren’t just selected because they were reliable votes against abortion. They were really vetted and selected because they will always rule with the powerful against the powerless. They are, in a word, pro-corporate.

“Pushed To The Brink”

Jesse & Tyrel Ventura [Die First Then Quit, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-15-2022]

“From the Police, to the Supreme Court, to Congress, across the board U.S. citizens are losing faith in our vital institutions in record numbers. Notably, the biggest drops in citizen confidence from last year to this year were found in the institutions of the Presidency and the U.S. Supreme Court. They both fell 15 and 11 percent, respectively. This doesn’t come as a surprise given how feckless the Biden Administration has been when faced with the major political, economical, and social challenges we’ve seen over the last year. Rising inflation, Roe v. Wade, Climate Change… just vote harder…. This nose dive cuts across all party lines as well…. How much farther can we fall or maybe the better question is what happens to a populace that loses all faith in its institutions? The answer to that maybe found in a recent polling data collected by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which discovered that a majority of American’s believe their government is corrupt and rigged against them. Pigging backing on that, the data also revealed that ‘more than one in four Americans are so alienated from their government that they believe it may ‘soon be necessary to take up arms’ against it.’ One in four Americans. That’s a truly frightening statistic. That should make anyone’s blood run cold after reading it. Violent revolution is not the answer. Any student of history will tell you that a political revolution based on violence hardly ever brings actual freedom to a country.”

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Our Entire Civilization Is Structured Around Keeping Us From Realizing We Can Do This

Caitlin Johnstone [via Mike Norman Economics 7-9-2022]

Thousands of protesters outraged by the deteriorating material conditions of the nation’s economic meltdown have stormed the presidential palace of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and I guarantee you the aerial footage as they poured into the building en masse has made every government leader and plutocrat a little uncomfortable today….

If you’ve ever wondered why so much energy goes into keeping everyone propagandized in our society, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why our rulers work so hard to keep us divided against each other, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why we’re always being instructed to take our grievances to the voting booth even though we learn in election after election that it never changes the things that most desperately need to change, this is why.

Our entire civilization is structured around preventing scenes like the one we’re seeing in Sri Lanka today. Our education systems, our political systems, our media, our online information. Religions that have been around for thousands of years because the powerful endorsed and promulgated them are full of passages extolling the virtues of obedience, poverty, meekness, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. From the moment we are born our heads are filled with stories about why it’s good and right to consent to the status quo and why it would be wrong to take back what has been stolen from us by a predatory ruling class.

This is why we’re always inundated with messaging about the importance of civility and politeness any time people realize that they can simply confront corrupt officials in restaurants or at their homes to push for what they want. The managers of the oligarchic empire which rules over us are terrified that we will one day notice that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that there’s really nothing they could do to stop us if we decided to replace them with a system which benefits ordinary people instead of an elite few.

Introduction. THE POPULIST MOMENT: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America 

by Lawrence Goodwyn, Oxford University Press, 1978.  

This consisted of a new way of looking at society, a way of thinking that represented a shaking off of inherited forms of deference. The achievement was not an easy one. The farmers of the Alliance had spent much of their lives in humiliating circumstances; repeated dealings with Southern merchants had inculcated insecurity in generations of farming people. They were ridiculed for their poverty, and they knew it….

In 1884-85, the Alliance began developing its own rhythm of internal "education" and its own broadening political consciousness among leaders and followers. The movement culture would develop its own mechanism of recruitment (the large-scale credit cooperative), its own theoretical analysis (the greenback interpretation of the American version of finance capitalism), its own solution (the sub-treasury land and loan system), its own symbols of politics (the Alliance "Demands" and the Omaha Platform), and its own political institution (the People's Party). (pp  33-34)

Michael Hudson: From Junk Economics to a False View of History – Where Western Civilization Took a Wrong Turn

[Naked Capitalism 7-8-2022]

Today’s neoliberal economic mainstream has created a fairy tale about civilization existing without any regulatory oversight or productive role for government, and without any need to levy taxes to provide basic social services such as public construction or even service in the military. There is no need to prevent fraud, or violent seizure of property – or the forfeiture of land tenure rights to creditors as a result of debts. But as Balzac noted, most great family fortunes have been the result of some great theft, lost in the mists of time and legitimized over the centuries, as if it were all natural.

These blind spots are necessary to defend the idea of “free markets” controlled by the wealthy, above all by creditors. This is claimed to be for the best, and how society should be run. That is why today’s New Cold War is being fought by neoliberals against socialism – fought with violence, and by excluding the study of history from the academic economics curriculum and hence from the consciousness of the public at large. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the fight is between socialism and barbarism.

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

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

by Tony Wikrent 

Strategic Political Economy

“America Is Sliding Into the Long Pandemic Defeat”

Ed Yong [The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-28-2022]

“In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or ‘Figure it out yourself.’ It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic.” We call it “personal risk assessment.” ….

“Across the country, almost all government efforts to curtail the coronavirus have evaporated….. I have interviewed dozens of other local officials, community organizers, and grassroots groups who are also swimming furiously against the tide of governmental apathy to push some pandemic response forward, even if incrementally. This is an endeavor that all of American society would benefit from; it is currently concentrated among a network of exhausted individuals who are trying to figure out this pandemic, while living up to public health’s central tenet: Protect the health of all people, and the most vulnerable especially…. Building a stronger public-health system demands an unfettering of the moral imagination: Americans need to believe that their government should invest in systems that keep everyone safer from disease—and to trust that such systems are even possible.

But throughout his decades-long career, [AIDS activist and Yale epidemiologist Greg] Gonsalves has witnessed social safety nets being repeatedly shredded, leading to ‘a collapse of any faith in the state to do good,’ he told me. That faith eroded further when public institutions buckled during the pandemic, and when two successive administrations failed to control the coronavirus. The resulting ‘pandemic fatigue’ is not just a craving for the status quo, but a deep cynicism over the possibility of something better. In one study, most Americans preferred a better, fairer post-pandemic future, but mistakenly thought a ‘back-to-normal’ one was more popular [a Keynesian beauty contest, but one where the minimizers were given the megaphone by the 1%] —and so more likely>. ‘People can imagine a world with crypto-banking and the metaverse, so why is it so hard to imagine a world with less disease and death?’ Céline Gounder of Kaiser Health News said.”

How Japan Achieved One of The World’s Lowest Covid Death Rates 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-2022] 

“If the US had Japan’s death rate, only 82,000 people would have died. Not 1 million+.”