Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 28, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 28, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

The pandemic

”Individual freedoms versus collective responsibility: immunization decision-making in the face of occasionally competing values”

[Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]

From 2006, still germane: “There are situations where there can be a real or perceived divergence between individual and community benefits of vaccination. This divergence may occasionally be based upon current scientific evidence and may exemplify the need for overriding individual autonomy. Use of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the US in the early 1990s is such an example. The sustained use of OPV led to the elimination of polio in the US, with the last cases of wild polio reported in 1979. While OPV is extremely safe and effective, the vaccine very rarely caused vaccine associated paralytic polio (VAPP) resulting in 5–7 cases of VAPP annually with near universal use of OPV in the US. Once polio had been effectively controlled in the US, preventing the indigenous transmission of polio, the risks of the vaccine (VAPP) may have been greater than the risk of disease. Assuming the individual does not travel to a region where polio is still endemic, a roughly one in a million risk of VAPP is highly unlikely, but still greater than the risk of wild polio. Yet, if a substantial number of individuals were not vaccinated because of this individual risk/benefit analysis, polio would likely have been reintroduced into the US, as the disease is only a plane ride away, leading to a tragedy of the commons [7]. While this divergence in individual versus community benefits was short-lived (the US switched to the inactivated polio vaccine that can not cause VAPP), such a situation can cause a dilemma for parents, health care providers and policy makers.”

"Barriers to Air Purifiers in Schools Rebuttal Matrix"

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-22-2022]

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”How a $100 box is changing the way people protect themselves against coronavirus”

[Dallas Morning News, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]

“Enter the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, a do-it-yourself air filtration system with North Texas ties that has taken the internet by storm. Each box typically costs under $100 to make and is more effective than other, pricier options like High Efficiency Particulate Air filters. The simple contraption consists of a box fan, four MERV13 furnace filters that can be purchased online or in store, some cardboard and strips of tape. It’s the brainchild of air quality researcher Richard Corsi, dean of engineering at the University of California, Davis, and Jim Rosenthal, CEO of Texas-based company Tex-Air Filters. …. The White House recognized the need for better ventilation and launched the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge in March to call on building operators, like schools and companies, to up their inside air quality. But interest in such investments has been weak, even with billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 funding for schools that can be used to upgrade ventilation systems. Portable air filters can make up for outdated ventilation systems, although they tend to come with hefty price tags. Standalone devices that use HEPA filters can cost upwards of $300 to $400, and that doesn’t include the price of filter replacements. So when the DIY air filter prototype – designed by Corsi and first constructed by Rosenthal in the summer of 2020 – worked, the two were elated. With MERV13 filters making up each side of the cube, the box fan on top pulls air through the filters and blows clean air out of the top. In a 700-square-foot classroom with nine-foot ceilings, a Corsi-Rosenthal Box on the highest fan setting can add the equivalent of about seven-and-a-half to eight air changes per hour, Corsi said. ‘If we started at two air changes per hour and we added eight air changes per hour, we’re roughly getting about an 80% reduction in inhalation dose with that single Corsi-Rosenthal Box,’ he said. ‘That’s a huge reduction. That’s like everybody wearing pretty decent masks in the classroom.'”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 21, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 21, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Kenneth Mack | The 14th amendment: its radical past (Yo

uTube)

[Harvard Law School, Nov. 16, 2016, via YouTube]

[TW: Law Professor Kenneth Mack chronologically summarizes the terrorizing events that prompted the writing and passage of the 14th Amendment, and the reactions against it, including:

• the Memphis riot of May 1-3, 1866, in which black Union troops being demobilized were confronted by a white mob that killed 46 local
  
• the New Orleans riot of July 30, 1866, in which 34 African Americans were killed and another 119 wounded, by a white mob composed largely of former Confederate soldiers
  
• the horrifying ax murder of a black family in rural Kentucky in the summer of 1868, by two white men, John Blyew and George Kennard. When officials in Kentucky refused to prosecute the two white murderers, federal officials tried and convicted them in the U.S. Court for the District of Kentucky. The state of Kentucky then appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, arguing Kentucky’s laws prohibiting African Americans from testifying against whites invalidated the convictions. The Supreme Court rejected the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and ruled that victims were not entitled to protection from violations of their rights perpetrated under the laws of the “sovereign” states. 
  
• The massacre of over 100 black militia men by a group of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan in Colfax, Louisiana, April 13, 1873. ]
  

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Eric Foner: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (YouTube)

[National Constitution Center, November 19, 2019, via YouTube]

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31:11
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” What are the privileges or immunities of citizens?  Nobody knows… Bingham [US Representative from Ohio John A. Bingham, who drafted the 14th Amendment] had a clear idea — he said those are the liberties protected in the Bill of Rights. Bingham said what this clause will do is require the states to respect the Bill of Rights. Before the Civil War the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights only apply to the federal government. What are the first words of the First Amendment? “Congress shall make no law…” Look at freedom of speech: try to give a speech against slavery in South Carolina — you can't, there's a law against it. Doesn't that violate the First Amendment? No, because the First Amendment is about the federal government. But now Bingham says the now the states are going to have to abide by it.

33:18
There was a tradition of sharp distinctions among different kinds of rights: political rights, the right to vote, but you can be a citizen and not have that  — women were citizens but they couldn't vote. That's up to the states to determine who votes, at least before the Civil War. Civil rights, you mentioned a lot of them a minute ago those are the rights that really make it possible to compete in the labor market: the rights of signed contracts, to sue and be sued, to testify in court, have basic equality before the law…. Republicans by this time thought blacks orught to have all of those civil rights that  — that's what the Civil Rights Act of 1866 says….

33:57 — The language is interesting… citizens have to enjoy these civil rights the same as enjoyed by white persons. That's a very interesting way of putting it. Before the Civil War, the word “white” in law was a boundary, a barrier: only white people can vote... Now they use whiteness as a baseline: if white people enjoy this right, than everybody else has to enjoy it. So it's amazing... what's going on here is a complete rewriting of the legal structure of the United States in terms of race. One of the things I used a tell my students, “you know what they are trying to here,  if you wonder what their original intent is, it’s what we would call today “regime change.” They are trying to change a regime based on slavery into a regime based on freedom.” That's what they are trying to do in reconstruction, with these laws and these amendments.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 14, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 14, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

The Inflation Reduction Act is Not Designed to Reduce Inflation 

Benjamin Studebaker [via Naked Capitalism 8-8-2022, also Water Cooler 8-8-2022]

“If you actually look at this thing, this legislation only raises $739 billion over the next decade. This means that on average, each year, it only raises around $73.9 billion. This is not as much money as you might think. The US spends around $782 billion on defense each year. Last year alone, the federal government spent $6.8 trillion. We’re looking at less than 10% of the defense budget, 1% of the federal budget, and about 0.3% of GDP. How is the federal government meant to combat inflation with a new tax that is smaller than a third of a percentage point of the economy? The purpose of the bill is to be seen to be doing something. The Biden administration needs something to run on in the midterms…. [T]he United States suffers from a chronic lack of state capacity. It struggles to pass all but the most paltry legislation. It cannot get out in front of its problems and it cannot even solve crises as they arise. So, it papers over its dysfunction by measuring spending in decades rather than in years, by sticking that extra zero on the end of every number. Seven hundred billion sounds much better than seventy billion. It almost sounds like somebody’s doing something. But it’s the sound of silence.”

“A Complete Breakdown of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Inflation Reduction Act” 

[Slate, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-11-2022]

“The Inflation Reduction Act is the Walt Whitman of federal legislation: like the great American poet, the bill contradicts itself; it is large and contains multitudes. It represents the most significant climate investment in U.S. history, but it also paves the way for a massive expansion of oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters. It includes a new minimum tax designed to ensure that large corporations pay at least 15 percent of their profits to the federal government, but it also showers corporations in tax subsidies that will push many more firms’ tax rates below 15 percent (and in some cases below zero). It is disappointingly modest in its aspirations, but it will arguably be—along with the Affordable Care Act—the most ambitious piece of legislation signed by a Democratic president in more than a half century.” 

Digging Into the Inflation Reduction Act (podcast)

[The American Prospect, August 12, 2022]

In this episode, the hosts interview David Dayen about just what is in the monster Inflation Reduction Act: gobs of tax credits, new regulations, tax hikes, and so on. Then they discuss what its passage reveals about the state of the Democratic coalition and what it might bode for the future.

Climate and environmental crises

Bad News for Earth: Rainwater Is No Longer Safe to Drink, Study Says

[Popular Mechanics, via Ian Welsh 8-12-2022]

Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 7, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 7, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Restoring balance to the economy

Becoming the Workers’ Party Again

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), August 5, 2022 [The American Prospect]

...A toxic combination of shareholder capitalism and pliant politicians gutted our middle class, hollowed out our towns, and dried up opportunity for people outside big coastal cities and people without college degrees or inherited wealth.

And it upended our politics…. The “blue wall” was crumbling. Between 2012 and 2020, Democrats lost nearly 2.6 million votes in small and midsized towns in Ohio and the Midwest. A recent report sheds light on how it happened—and what progressives can do to fix it….

The people I grew up with knew that Republicans would sell them out to corporations—Bush negotiating NAFTA, Gingrich fighting to bring China into the WTO, Trump granting corporate tax breaks. That surprised no one.

But many Democrats’ active encouragement of the corporate outsourcing agenda came as a shocking betrayal. Those decisions stung much worse coming from the party of Roosevelt—the party that for generations these workers had trusted to be on their side.

Stealing America Back From the Right

The American Prospect, August 1, 2022]

In this excerpt of the latest bonus episode, the hosts interview New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie about reclaiming American traditions and institutions from conservative Republicans who want to destroy them. 

BY PROSPECT STAFF AUGUST 1, 2022

The new pandemic

Monkeypox vaccinations in Africa would have spared the whole world from this emergency
[Quartz, August 3, 2022]

[TW: Back in the mid-1980s, a number of times I joined a small and forlorn groups of activists  protesting in front of the World Bank building in DC. One of our points was that if the IMF and the World Bank were not stopped from imposing “conditionalities” (austerity) on developing countries, the resulting economic carnage would literally turn those countries into petri dishes for the evolution and emergence of new and ever more deadly pandemic diseases. 

We also warned that the consequences of Henry Kissinger's December 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200 “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth. For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” (pdf) would be deadly for USA and Europe, not just the developing countries targeted by Kissinger for destablization and depopulation. ]