Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 25, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 25, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-23-2022]

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Strategic Political Economy

Come to America and Live a Shorter Life!

Harold Meyerson, December 22, 2022 [The American Prospect]

While life expectancy continued its upward climb among our peers—the nations with advanced economies—it fell in 2021 to its lowest level since 1996 in these United States according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. COVID and fentanyl each took a terrible toll, adding to the well-documented deaths of despair from suicide, alcoholism, and the other plagues statistically associated with the lives of working-class Americans.

An American child born last year had a life expectancy of 76.4 years—down from 77 years in 2020. The earlier year, of course, was the year of COVID with no vaccines, while 2021 was the year of COVID with vaccines, which only highlights the role that vaccine resistance played in dooming some hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who might otherwise still be among us. Lest anyone doubt that the MAGA mishegas about the satanic vaccines was key to the continuation of COVID deaths well beyond the date when the vaccines became widely available, it’s notable that the death rate from COVID among whites surpassed that among Blacks and other racial groups in mid-2021.

Indeed, as a late-October study in The Lancet Regional Health–Americas documented, there was a direct correlation between the conservatism of a congressmember’s voting record and the death rate from COVID of their constituents, across all age groups and taking into account such factors as race, education, and income. Those death rates were 11 percent higher in states with Republican governors. This wasn’t just a function of state policy (like, e.g., Ron DeSantis’s war on vaccines), of course, but also of the beliefs of our MAGA-istic compatriots.

Another late-October study, this one published in the academic journal PLOS One, demonstrated that the perils of living in red-state America aren’t limited to greater COVID mortality rates. 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 18, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 18, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

We need the return of the state 

[Tax Research UK, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2022]

Neoliberalism is built on lies. For decades the deceit at its core has been ignored because it appeared to deliver prosperity. It does not any more. That is why everything is unravelling.

The biggest lie that neoliberalism promotes is that all value is created by private sector business, which claim is contrasted with a claim that government destroys value. So, apparently, a teacher working for a private school adds value. The same teacher in front of the same children in a state school would, apparently, not do so. The idea is obviously absurd, and yet is key to understanding neoliberal’s approach to public services, which is built on this lie.

This neoliberal lie has corrupted public services. Based on this claim it has come to be believed that there is no answer to any question that the state can supply. Instead, it is the private sector that must provide the solution to problems because that sector supposedly knows best.

Creating new economic potential - science and technology

Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl’s incurable cancer 

[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2022]

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year.

T-cells are supposed to be the body's guardians - seeking out and destroying threats - but for Alyssa they had become the danger and were growing out of control. Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body….

The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago.

Bases are the language of life. The four types of base - adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) - are the building blocks of our genetic code. Just as letters in the alphabet spell out words that carry meaning, the billions of bases in our DNA spell out the instruction manual for our body.

Base editing allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions.

[TW: The development of base editing was funded by a government entity, the US National Institutes of Health, and put into practice by another, Britain’s national health service. It is government that creates economic progress; that’s why We need the return of the state .]

With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough

Daniel Clery, December 14, 2022 [Science]

Despite the fanfare, fusion power stations are still a distant dream. NIF was never designed to produce power commercially. Its primary function is to create miniature thermonuclear explosions and provide data to ensure the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable. Many researchers believe furnacelike tokamaks are a better design for commercial power because they can sustain longer fusion “burns.” In a tokamak, microwaves and particle beams heat the fuel and magnetic fields trap it. “The challenge is to make it robust and simple,” White says….

If the compression of the fuel is symmetrical enough, fusion reactions begin in a central hot spot and propagate smoothly outward, with the heat from fusion sparking more burning. That self-sustaining burn is what defines ignition, and after more than a decade of effort NIF scientists declared they had achieved that milestone after a shot in August 2021 produced 70% of the input laser energy. But NIF’s funder, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, set NIF’s goal as an energy gain greater than one—the threshold it passed last week.

Going that extra mile wasn’t easy. After the August 2021 shot, the NIF team found it couldn’t repeat it. Using a smooth diamond capsule turned out to be key: The one from August 2021 had been the most perfectly smooth and spherical they’d made. “We had to learn how to make the capsules better,” Herrmann says. They also made the capsule slightly thicker, which provided more momentum for the implosion but required a longer, more powerful laser pulse. So they tweaked the laser to squeeze out more juice, upping the energy from 1.9 MJ to 2.05 MJ.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 11, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 11, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

“The People Cheering For Humanity’s End”

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-8-2022]

“From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways…. The first is Anthropocene anti-humanism, inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment…. Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that anti-humanism decries—scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens.” • I don’t use the phrase “death cult” that often, but perhaps I should start. The exact perspective we should expect from The Atlantic: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” –Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Global power shift

Robbing The Global South, Then Scorning Its Poverty: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 12-7-2022]

China’s Xi on ‘epoch-making’ visit to Saudi as Riyadh chafes at U.S. censure 

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 12-8-2022]

The semiconductor industry and the China challenge 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2022]

“Part 2 at https://asiatimes.com/2022/12/the-chip-industry-and-national-security/”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 4, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 4, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Professional Management Class war on workers

Railroading workers

 [Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-29-2022]

“The dispute boils down to one issue: paid sick leave. … Railroad companies have adamantly refused to include any short-term paid leave. That means rail workers must report to work, even when they are sick, or forfeit their pay. “It’s an insane and cruel system, and these guys are fed up with it,” Peter Kennedy, chief negotiator for the maintenance workers union, which rejected the deal, said. Rail workers say that some colleagues come to work with COVID because they can’t afford to take time off. The maintenance workers are seeking a deal with at least four paid sick days. The railroad companies, according to the union, are unwilling to negotiate.”

Biden Breaks His Promise, Betrays Rail Workers 

Matthew Cunningham-Cook, Andrew Perez, Rebecca Burns & Julia Rock, November 29, 2022 [The Lever] 

In 2020, Biden called the lack of decent paid sick leave “a national disgrace” — now he’s siding with railroad barons to crush rail workers seeking those benefits….

With Democrats in full control of Congress for just a few more weeks, Biden could be using this moment to push lawmakers to pass the party’s landmark union rights legislation or implement a national paid leave policy. Instead, he is calling on Democrats and Republicans alike to side with highly profitable railroad companies and crush their workers.

Senators Help Donors Derail Paid Sick Days

Matthew Cunningham-Cook & Rebecca Burns & Julia Rock, December 1, 2022 [The Lever]

“In August, a federal report prepared by the Biden administration stated that the railroads contend that their enormous profits do not reflect “any contributions by labor.” The railroads, meanwhile, have waged a full-court press to have Congress implement an agreement negotiated by the Biden administration that only includes one day of paid sick leave, after refusing to agree to any paid sick days in three years of talks with unions. Buffett’s BNSF, a wholly-owned subsidiary of his nearly $700 billion conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, raked in $1.4 billion in the last quarter… Another major rail operation, the Atlanta-based Norfolk Southern, reported $958 million in profits in the quarter ending September 30…. Union Pacific, based in Omaha, Nebraska, brought in $1.9 billion in profits in the quarter, up $200 million from the same period a year ago…. Jacksonville, Florida-headquartered CSX generated $1.1 billion in profits in the quarter ending on September 30, up $143 million from the same period the year before…. Canadian Pacific brought in $664 million in profits in the quarter — double the haul from the same period last year…. Finally, Montreal-based Canadian National brought in more than $1 billion in profits in the quarter, a 44 percent increase over the same period last year…. Railroad workers will return to the bargaining table again in 2025. Railway union sources told The Intercept Thursday that their next step would be to push for sick leave in an anticipated Biden executive order mandating a week of paid sick days for federal contract workers.