real economics: Week-end Wrap – Political Economy

Timothy Mellon, the reclusive heir to a Gilded Age fortune, has poured over $165 million into the 2024 election so far, with tens of millions backing both Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Koch Invests in Massive Land Grab From West African Herders

[Exposed by CMD, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2024]

Predatory finance

Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, August 23, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

Last year, the staff of a federally-insured bank in Kansas, Heartland Tri-State Bank, wired out more than one-third of the amount the bank held in deposits to a crypto scam. Why did they do that? Because the CEO of the bank, Shan Hanes, told them to do it. Hanes had become one more crypto sucker seduced by the allure of a get-rich-quick scheme. On Monday, Hanes was sentenced in a case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice to 24 years in prison for embezzling $47.1 million (via the wire transfers shown in the graph above) from the bank he was in charge of protecting. The bank failed last July with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) stepping in to make depositors whole while the investors in the bank (shareholders) were wiped out….

All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, August 20, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

The Huge Profits Investors Have Made on Catastrophe Bonds Are Raising Eyebrows

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2024]

New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, August 15, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

...Dr. Webster previously worked as an international economist with the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Department of Defense – which suggested to us that he might have insights into the workings of the U.S. government that we were missing in our analysis of the Fed.
Based on our analysis over three decades of research, the Fed has been captured by the Wall Street megabanks. But is it possible that both our premise and that of Dr. Webster could be simultaneously correct? If Wall Street has also captured key components of the Executive Branch and the U.S. Congress, then there is actually no conflict between these premises….

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

What Happens When a CEO Destroys Evidence in an Antitrust Trial?

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2024]

'People Need to Go to Jail for This Sh*t': Video Shows How US Meat Industry Colludes to Boost Prices

Jake Johnson, August 21, 2024 [CommonDreams]

A former grocery executive told a progressive media outlet in a video released Tuesday that "people fucking need to go to jail" over a long-running scheme in which dominant U.S. meat industry players have used information provided by a little-known data analytics company to increase prices and pad their bottom lines.
"This is probably one of the top five food scandals of the 21st Century, and we can't underplay it," said Errol Schweizer, the former vice president of Whole Foods' grocery division. "People need to go to jail for this shit."
Schweizer's comments come at the start of a nine-minute video produced by More Perfect Union, which tells the story of how Indiana-based Agri Stats, the seemingly bland data firm, "built a network used by the nation's largest meat companies," including Tyson Foods, Hormel, and Cargill.

Restoring balance to the economy

Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists

Zephyr Teachout, August 22, 2024 [The Atlantic]

...The other big problem with the textbook economics take on price gouging is the assumption that temporarily higher-priced products will find their way to the people who value them the most. That might be true in a world where everyone had the same amount of money to spend. In the world we actually inhabit, that is not the case. During a power outage, a working-class cancer patient who desperately needs to buy the last generator in stock to keep his medications refrigerated might not be able to outbid a healthy millionaire who just wants to run their air conditioner.
This is another way of saying that price-gouging bans are a form of moral policy. The laws recognize that consumers, not being the coldly rational Homo economicus of academic models, are going to be less price-sensitive during disaster; their desperation can be exploited. And people who lack the savings to get through a crisis or the resources to comparison shop are even more likely to suffer from price increases on essential items. In a pandemic, war, or major weather event, it seems morally repugnant to give an unearned bonanza to a big firm while denying essential services to vulnerable members of society. All parents, not just the wealthiest, should have an equal chance to obtain diapers even if supply chains are disrupted. Price-gouging laws represent a different set of market rules, grounded in fairness….
The problem with price-gouging laws is that they exist only at the state level. Few states have the resources to take on the multinational corporations that dominate markets for many essential goods. Even if they did, they would still face jurisdictional challenges. If a company makes baby formula in Wisconsin and then sells to a distributor in Minnesota, which then sells to a supermarket in Oregon, that company might radically hike the price it charges in Minnesota when the next pandemic hits—but then be unreachable by the Oregon attorney general even if Oregonians end up paying the cost.
Most price gouging today happens far beyond the reach of most state attorneys general. A strong federal law would help not only the public but also the small-business owners who lack the ability to do anything but pass on big increases—and who become, unfairly, the face of ugly profiteering for many consumers….

Killing Noncompete Clauses Is All About Freedom

Timothy Noah, August 23, 2024 [The New Republic]

On Tuesday, Judge Ada Brown of the Northern District of Texas struck down a Federal Trade Commission regulation barring noncompete clauses from employment contracts. Businesses routinely impose noncompete clauses on their workers in what amounts to a latter-day version of indentured servitude. Granted, employees subjected to noncompete clauses—about 18 percent of the United States workforce—differ from the indentured servants that colonial settlers brought to the New World in that they’re free to quit their jobs. But they’re barred from working for a competitor, which can leave them just as stuck at their existing place of employment.
As Kamala Harris and Tim Walz frame their fall campaign around the theme of freedom—“Mind your own damn business,” Walz said Wednesday night—they should talk up the FTC’s fight against a Republican-appointed judiciary to let Americans work wherever they damned well choose.
The statute that created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914 empowered it “to prevent persons, partnerships, or corporations … from using unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce” through various means, including through the imposition of “rules and regulations.” As the name rather bluntly indicates, noncompete clauses are a tool used deliberately to suppress competition. Studies show they’re pretty good at doing so: Noncompetes reduce wages, especially for low-wage workers. They also—by discouraging the creation of new businesses—reduce economic dynamism, making them at least as bad for capitalism as they are for workers….
The FTC has answered the [National Association of Manufacturers]’s trade-secrets objection by pointing out that laws against the theft of trade secrets remain on the books, and that contractual nondisclosure agreements would remain legal under its rule….
The amicus brief was submitted by Erica T. Klenicki and Michael Tilghman II of the NAM and Richard D. Salgado, Paul W. Hughes, and Andrew A. Lyons-Berg of the law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP. I mention this because even as these five attorneys argued to the court that noncompete clauses were a vital tool of American commerce, they were none of them at risk of being sued by the NAM should they take employment at some rival organization—say, the Association for Manufacturing Technology, or (God forbid) the AFL-CIO. That’s because the American Bar Association does not permit “non-competition clauses in partnership, member, shareholder, or employer agreements.”
Noncompetition clauses are similarly banned in four states. In one of these, California, noncompete clauses have been legally unenforceable since 1872, an obstacle that somehow failed to prevent the state from dominating the agriculture, entertainment, and tech industries....

Justice Department Sues RealPage, Alleging It Enabled Price-Fixing On Rents

[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 08-24-2024]

Disrupting mainstream politics

Kamalapalooza

Joseph O’Neill, August 3, 2024 [The New York Review]

Fundamentally, the Kamala craze reflects the elation and hope and unleashed power of a party base unexpectedly freed from its gloom and despair. The ActBlue movement is back.

Recall that in 2020 people supported Joe Biden not because he had uniquely appealing qualities but because he was the anti-Trump candidate with the D after his name. As the D guy, he was deposited in the White House by a Blue Wave set in motion, well before his presidential run, by an informal network of grassroots groups such as the Women’s March and Indivisible and Swing Left and Run for Something, almost all of them powered by the small-dollar donation platform ActBlue….

From early 2018 onward, newly politicized and organized Americans have ensured that Democrats have overperformed at the ballot box—especially in the special elections, midterms, and ballot measures that for years had been dominated by GOP voters.

Biden and his team failed to understand or acknowledge this. The ActBlue movement—its energy, its boldness, its up-to-date political knowhow—had no part in the Biden entourage. Instead the president surrounded himself with old Washington hands whose political playbooks, like his own, relied on the received wisdom of the 1990s, when it was viewed as politically savvy for a Democratic president to distance himself from his base to win over “moderate” voters. This school of thought holds that America needs a strong Republican Party, young people don’t vote, Israel must be supported at any cost, good policy takes care of politics, and the party grassroots are not to be trusted.

That political strategy didn’t work. The more Biden’s administration delivered on the issues that Trumpist white working-class voters professed to value (a strong job market, a strong border, strong infrastructure, strong manufacturing), the less popular the president became. The more he embraced the Republican Party as a bipartisan partner in government (on the American Rescue Plan, on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, on his general PR), the more extreme and emboldened it grew. Now the insurrectionist Mike Johnson is the speaker of the House, the corrupt Supreme Court acts like a far-right legislator, and Donald Trump again stands at the threshold of power….

The Washington chapter of Harris’s political career began in 2017. She has little personal experience of Republican politicians being upright guys with good-faith conservative opinions. She gives no sign of believing that working-class heartland families figure out their political allegiance by gathering at the kitchen table and studying the candidates’ positions on the issues. She seems naturally aware that Americans inhabit a hypermediated reality, which is to say, their political consciousness is formed not by exposure to vertical data messaging—the politician or the union leader or the news anchor handing down policy information—but by a complex flux of social narratives and emotional currents and vibes.

The ActBlue movement has proven that it knows how to navigate that flux. Now Harris finds herself its superstar leader. It is a political privilege that is almost impossible to fathom: the loyalty of an enormous, battle-hardened, electorally formidable, deep-pocketed army of anti-Republican warriors who have quickly filled her campaign’s coffers and erased Trump’s polling advantage in the battleground states….

Sixty percent of July donors were women. The number of Gen Z donors, compared with June, increased more than tenfold.

[TW: There are positive reviews of the Democratic National Convention that are nauseatingly giddy with the writer’s euphoria and joy. I can accept that most people are happy — irrespective of any consideration of actual policy — to finally have an alternative to the demoralizing oppressiveness of over a decade of national political news dominated by Trump. More interesting, I think, are the positive reviews of the Convention by writers who sensed that the convention has formalized the passing of the political era of the Clintons, Biden, and perhaps even Obama. Heather Cox Richardson best captured this sense at 30:52 in her YouTube “Politics Chat” of August 20, 2024. Richardson attended the convention as a guest:

“What I was completely unprepared for, it is very hard... not to feel like something is ending, and something else is beginning. And we don’t know what that something else is going to be...
31:25 So I think we all know that something new is starting. What that is, we don't know. And I think in part that means we're very on edge, but we're also incredibly excited about the idea of something new….
32:01 ...I'm 61, right? So, you know, I don't expect to live to 121 or whatever it would be if you doubled that. I'm at the other side of newness, if you will. And I was not prepared for how strongly it hit me that I was essentially watching Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden walk off stage, that was really a surprise to me. So, and I was with people who were very emotional as well about it…. [I bet she would like to rephrase this as “walk off the stage of history.”]

[The cynical among us — and it’s clear from the comments every week that there may be no one left among us who is not cynical — can easily dismiss this as mere sentimentality and emotion. But fast forward to 37:20, where Richardson begins discussing “a number of things that have surprised me about this cultural moment,” beginning with wearing friendship bracelets. These bracelets became a fad during music artist Taylor Swift's ongoing The Eras tour, which began in March 2023 and will end in December 2024. Swift’s Eras tour has repeatedly broken records for some of the most attended and highest-grossing music concerts in history. Richardson explains how this particular fad of friendship bracelets has become cross-generational, and carries at least partially a political message. I don’t know about you, but that stopped me in my tracks. Cultural phenomena that are cross-generational are easy enough to find in sports. But in politics? This is, I think, something very, very unusual and portentous. I suspect Donald Trump is better than most of us at reading the popular zeitgeist, and if what Richardson concludes is true, it makes complete sense that Trump is so negatively obsessed with Taylor Swift.

[The plain fact, clear to everyone at this point — except libertarians and a disturbingly large segment of the economics profession — is that the economic policies of the past half century have been a disaster, and have horribly corrupted and badly weakened the social foundations of democracy itself. Even conservatives now recognize how much damage their “neoliberal” (a most unfortunate and misleading name) economic policies have done, see, e.g., Trump's economic populism and fulminations against free trade, outsourcing, and corrupt business elites. The largest threat now remaining from movement conservatism is its triumph in imposing its philosophy of governing on the legal system and judiciary, most especially the Supreme Court. The response to that corrupting of the judiciary will no doubt involve the forced retirement, perhaps even impeachment, of some judges and SCOTUS justices, but that would leave untouched -- and probably energize — the networks of influence and local and state structures carefully erected and nurtured by the reactionary rich by their project of building movement conservatism. A new political economy needs to be developed, articulated, and “sold” to the public. Marxism ain’t it.

[I believe the foundational flaw in Marxism and communism are the beliefs that the selfishness of human nature is the result of how the means of production are allocated, and eliminating private property will fundamentally transform human nature. Theorists of civic republicanism, on the other hand, begin with accepting that human nature is deeply flawed, and stress the importance of therefore designing and creating political and legal structures that impose the rule of law and standards of justice. Some theorists, such as Plato and Machiavelli, are dismissed and even despised by some on “the left” because they advocate — in addition to political and legal structures — chicanery, subterfuge, and even lies and treachery as acceptable means for safeguarding and preserving a republic, especially when the very existence of the republic is threatened.

[To keep chicanery, subterfuge, lies and treachery — “realpolitik," if you like — in check, all we have, in the final analysis, are social and cultural norms, beliefs, and customs. Was it justice to convict and imprison Al Capone for tax fraud? Partly, of course, but it certainly was something of a legal subterfuge. More importantly, it was an acceptable means of restoring some justice to communities afflicted by Capone’s law breaking.

[If Marxism and communism aren’t answers, what is? Well, those familiar with my scribbling know that my answer is civic republicanism. On the specific issue of property relations, I do believe that the preferable human path forward includes economic democracy — democratizing ownership of the means of production. All corporations should be majority owned by their employees. Period; end of discussion. Private equity, hedge funds, and corporate raiders, investment trusts, and similar forms of economic organizations, and should simply be banned. All mergers and acquisitions should be carefully and tediously examined for what their effects might be. The financiers, banksters, corporate lawyers, and mergers and acquisitions “specialists” will howl in fury and rage. Good. Let them. Their howling and fulminating signals we are getting closer to an optimum level of economic equality. But so long as the Democratic Party remains largely dependent on and responsive to large campaign contributors and their demands, this will also signify the intensity of infighting within the party.

[A major goal of restoring civic republicanism is to strengthen and reinvigorate the general, popular hostility to economic malfeasance, such as price gouging, no matter whether or not that malfeasance violates the letter of some law or other As certain social scientists have shown, not just humans, but even animals, have an innate sense of fairness. But, less than a decade ago, there were many “liberals” and Democrats' who objected when Senator Bernie Sanders stated what should had obvious since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis: “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” The exit of the Clintons and the Bidens —if that is what it is, as Richardson believes — is also the long needed departure of these Democrats who unquestioningly accepted the legitimacy of massive concentrations of wealth and economic power. Especially now, when we have the certainty over the next couple decades of conservative jurists tilting in favor of neoliberal economics, we need to ensure that public outrage over economic malfeasance, whether regulated or unregulated, is so great and so consequential, corporate executives and elites are too terrified of “crossing the line."

[But if we can restore civic republicanism as our philosophy of politics and government, and develop the ideas of political economy proper to a republic, there will be much strengthened public consciousness and proclivity to oppose oligarchical forms of political economy, such as our present form of financial capitalism. (Ian Welsh did a terrific job and very valuable service on August 22, 2024, summarizing most of the goals of a republican political economy, in How Europe Could Reinvigorate Their Economy.)

[We should be encouraged by the history of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Very little of the actual policies were developed and articulated before the election in November 1932. In fact, very few progressives were happy with the Democratic Party convention of 1932— also held in Chicago. Many were offended by the opulent revelry of the event at a time of the most severe economic hardships any American had ever known or witnessed. Henry A. Wallace, the radical Iowa farmer whom FDR selected as his Secretary of Agriculture, and later as vice-President in 1941, fumed on the train home. “It's incredible,” Wallace confided to Rex Tugwell. “The country is in ruins and we seem to be on a kind of Sunday picnic.”

[Tugwell wrote in December 1948 issue of The Western Political Quarterly, “The campaign of 1932 came after almost four years of grinding deflation, succeeding almost a decade of agricultural depression. There were idle factories, unemployment, hunger—all the phenomena of industrial paralysis.” Yet, according to Tugwell, the campaign was nothing more than “a cautious statement of progressive hopes and beliefs, the items of which had been familiar since the times of Bryan, T. R. Roosevelt, and Wilson."

[Note the popular reaction to FDR’s inchoate message of a “new deal” and how similar it is to today’s “Kamapalooza:”

To a nation thus paralyzed and sunk in despair, a golden voice proclaimed in the First Inaugural that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself. It seemed as though a great sleeper awoke at that call and found that, after all, he had a useful strength. He stretched and looked for ways to use it. No less than 460,000 citizens wrote personally to their President as a result of this one speech. It swamped the White House facilities, but it showed what a welcome change Roosevelt was after Hoover. The people had a man.

[It did not matter that all the details and the full institutional structure of the New Deal had not yet been designed or even conceived. As Roosevelt’s chief speechwriter, Columbia University law professor Raymond Moley wrote in his 1966 book, The First New Deal, Roosevelt’s policies announced during the campaign were only “vaguely progressive.” What gave so many Americans hope was that Roosevelt had an “abundant hospitality to new ideas.” And as Tugwell wrote, into the opening created by that “hospitality” charged the ideas of the radicals and and progressives of the Populist Movement of the 1880s and 1890s:

It is nevertheless true that President Roosevelt owed his election largely—not, of course, wholly—to the movement, long gathering force, long frustrated, which was headed by Donnelley and others of the Farmers’ Alliance, the Grangers, and the Populists in the Midwest and the South of the last century.

[Similarly, today, if we persevere in pushing our ideas, there is every likelihood that they will be adopted and implanted by the administration of Kamala Harris.

[The strength of a republic, is that its genius arises from the inclusion of all citizens, from the clash and refinement of their ideas in political discussion — all people “are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Why so endowed with such rights? Because all people are endowed with intellect and reason, and the ability to contribute to the national discussion. Anything that impedes, cripples or obstructs this discussion — such as voter suppression, gerrymandering, limiting free speech to “free speech zones,” or attempts to discourage or even silence whistle blowers, is axiomatically an attack on the strength and genius of the republic. It is exactly because the ideas that “corporations are people” and "money is speech” result in the voices of the richest drowning out all others, that they should be immediately and summarily rejected. Indeed, we now have well over a century of evidence that the larger and more hierarchical an economic enterprise becomes, the less responsive, and less innovative — the less capitalistic — and more authoritarian it — and its society — becomes. ]

Kamala Harris Turns the Page on the Trump Era

Dan Pfeiffer, August 23, 2024 [via downwithtyranny.com]

“[P]eople are sick and tired of our politics, and Donald Trump has been the dominant figure in our politics for nearly a decade. He is omnipresent in our lives. As Obama so aptly put it on Tuesday night: ‘It just goes on and on and on. The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day. Now, from a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a President, it’s just dangerous.’ The pure exhaustion with the never-ending battles and sniping of the Trump era is why so many people tuned out of politics. Many are weary over the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch. Been there, done that. Biden beat Trump once, and while things in the country improved greatly, many were still unsatisfied. Harris represents an opportunity to turn the page on this entire era of politics, a prospect for a brighter, less rancorous future. Trump is now functioning as the de facto incumbent in the race. People are thirsting for a new direction….

The Democrats’ Old Guard Passes The Torch At The DNC

[Huffington Post, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 08-23-2024]

Of the 25 elected officials who were scheduled to speak, 13 were under 50 years old. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 34, brought the house down and seemingly leveled her career up with her speech. Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, 37, slammed ― literally ― the conservative blueprint called Project 2025 after bringing it out as a large printed book. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, 48, and a trio of young women delivered the party’s most important message, promising to protect abortion rights. Other young leaders, including Whitmer, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, were seemingly held in reserve, with the speaking schedule for the next three nights not yet fully revealed. The youth push also helps the party sell the idea of Harris as a fresh start, a way to move past the chaotic politics of eras defined by former President Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic.

Working-Class Journalist's Speech Hailed as 'Most Radical' in DNC History

Jessica Corbett, August 23, 2024 [CommonDreams]

John Russell urged Democrats to serve working Americans "looking for a political home, after years of both parties putting profit above people."

Two Thoughts From the DNC: Real hints at a better Democratic Party, and how they're fucking it up.

Hamilton Nolan, Aug 23, 2024 [How Things Work]

1. There is a really promising coherent bloc within the Democratic Party right now that seems poised to, if not control the party, then to wield a level of policy influence that “the left” has not had in many decades. This bloc is roughly: The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Bernie wing of the party, the left wing state legislators of the blue states, and organized labor, in particular some of the most determined progressive unions with national scale, like UAW and SEIU. I saw this coalition surface again and again in various permutations at events throughout the DNC—not as outsiders, but as budding power brokers within the party. AOC and Bernie and Shawn Fain all gave prime time speeches. There was a very, very significant union presence on the main stage. I have covered presidential conventions since 2012 and this one was by far the most oriented towards this faction of the party.
This is very encouraging. Not just because it indicates a generic movement to the left, but because it indicates a step towards the labor left. It indicates an increasing consciousness that neoliberalism has failed and that the inequality that it produced paved the way for Trump and that the road back demands putting working class interests at the center of the party….
2. At the risk of using a trite metaphor, the Democrats have an Omelas problem. You know the Ursula K. Le Guin story where a seemingly perfect city owes its utopianism to the absolute misery of a single child kept locked away. Well, for the Democrats, the child is Gaza. The slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza with American weapons hangs over everything this party does right now….
The party is not dealing with this like adults. The moral path is to stop sending weapons to Israel. But even setting that aside, the party is politically behaving in a stupid and cowardly way. A well organized peaceful movement—of Democrats, who support the Harris ticket—asked the DNC only for a single Palestinian legislator to be allowed to speak from the stage. They were refused. The party is trying to cover its eyes and pretend Gaza doesn’t exist. That will fail. To do this at a time when the stakes of the election are so high is particularly galling. The intolerable specter of Trump on the other side is not a reason to say to people who have had family members killed in Gaza, “Shut up and vote for the vice president of the man who sent the bombs, who will herself continue sending bombs.” No. Wrong. That is too much to ask of anyone. The high stakes of the election make it incumbent on the Democrats to take tangible steps to change their stupid and inhumane policy and allow the people who want to vote for them to vote for them. It is astounding that neither the prospect of losing Michigan nor basic human decency has moved the Harris campaign to a minimally decent place on this issue. It is morally sick and politically stupid.

Will Harris Finally Kill Wall Street’s Infamous Tax Break?

Helen Santoro, August 22, 2024 [The Lever]

Democrats have pledged to close a tax loophole benefiting private equity billionaires — but amid millions in Wall Street donations, the party has failed to do so for years.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Ford’s Shocking New Idea Lets Cars Spy on Others and Send Data to Cops and Insurance Companies

[Reclaim the Net, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2024]

No one’s ready for this

[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 08-23-2024]

“In explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely fucking fake. Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone ‘just works,’ it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place…. [I]t would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule. If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them. Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes. This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do.”

Climate and environmental crises

The Era of Runaway Heat Records Is Here

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2024]

Climate Change Is Making the Middle East Uninhabitable

[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2024]

What has worked to fight climate change? Policies where someone pays for polluting, study finds

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 08-23-2024]

Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades (paywalled)

[Science, via Naked Capitalism 08-23-2024]

From the Abstract: “Our insights on effective but rarely studied policy combinations highlight the important role of price-based instruments in well-designed policy mixes and the policy efforts necessary for closing the emissions gap.”

Democrats' political malpractice

Democrats Dismiss the Pain of Gaza at Their Moral—and Possibly Political—Peril

James Carden, Aug 25, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The Democrats Are Running Scared From the Most Important Fights

Kate Aronoff, August 24, 2024 [The New Republic]

At its convention this week, the party largely avoided two crises that are the cause of mass suffering: climate change and Israel’s war in Gaza….
There’s more connecting the mentions of climate and Palestine at the DNC than the fact that there wasn’t much substance to it. Discussing either the climate crisis or Israel’s war on Gaza in any convincing fashion requires specifics: Who, exactly, is spewing all of those heat-trapping emissions? And who is taking all those innocent Palestinian lives? More importantly, ending all of that suffering—from global warming and war alike—requires a willingness to challenge the forces responsible for it with more than words. The convention showcased a party that isn’t willing to do any of this.

Uncommitted Delegates Denied a DNC Speaker

Emma Janssen, August 23, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Over the past few weeks, Uncommitted delegates had been calling on the Harris campaign and convention organizers to allow a Palestinian American speaker or a doctor who has volunteered in Gaza to take the stage at the DNC. The ask was a humble one. Five minutes. A pre-vetted speech. Delivered by a preapproved speaker from a list written up by Uncommitted members. The speaker would be subject to the same rules as everyone else on stage….

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

The Democrats Have A Very Serious Florida Problem— And That's 30 Electoral Votes

TABLE: Florida voter registration by party affiliation

[The effects of (anti)Republican voter roll purges: Since 2020, Democratic Party registrations have fallen by one million, while Republican Party registrations have increased by just a bit over 100,000.]

I asked a top Florida elected official how that’s possible. His response was chilling. “The Republicans control the entire machinery of government, including law enforcement and the court system.”

Bombshell Report Exposes How Trump Is Lining His Pockets With Campaign

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, August 23, 2024 [The New Republic]

According to a CNN analysis of federal campaign finance data, Trump and associated political groups have funneled more than $28 million in campaign donations into his businesses since he first ran for office in 2015. Other Republicans are reportedly also using their campaign budgets on Trump’s businesses in order to earn favor with the conservative populist….
“He’s clearly now in complete control of the Republican Party,” Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, told CNN. “Patronizing his businesses has become one of the accepted ways that candidates and public officials express their loyalty to the party’s leader.”

The Con at the Core of the Republican Party

Nina Burleigh, August 20, 2024 [The New Republic]

…in his bracing history of American conservative hustlers, The Longest Con, veteran political writer Joe Conason proposes that the American right has for more than a half century been increasingly OK with “politicized larceny.” After decades of professional fearmongers, scammers, and grifters chipped away at the line between right and wrong, the right was ready to support the idea, as Gordon Gekko put it, that greed is, actually, good. The ends always justify the means, if you can make bank on the way.
A crucial representative of this attitude, according to Conason, was Roy Cohn, the red-baiting Joe McCarthy aide, New York power broker, and Mafia lawyer whose “philosophy of impunity” was so successful that it shaped right-wing politics for decades to come. His most apt pupil was Donald Trump, whom he represented in his later years. Cohn taught the younger Donald that “it was not only possible but admirable to lie, cheat, swindle, fabricate, then deny, deny, deny—and get away with everything,” Conason writes. As a lawyer, Cohn’s motto was: Better to know the judge than to know the law. As a businessman, it was: Better to stiff creditors than pay bills; and always worthwhile to lie, bribe, steal, and swindle while never apologizing….
The 1960s saw the rise of a new crop of operatives wielding modern technology. Richard Viguerie amassed a fortune and bought himself an estate in Virginia horse country by cornering the market on direct mail in the early computer age. His company reached its zenith after Watergate, when it was sending one hundred million pieces of mail annually, soliciting donations from gulls inflamed by keywords like “union bosses” and “federal bureaucrats” and “radical feminists” and “homosexual activists….
The compendium of con is infuriating, but by the end of the book, bafflement replaces outrage. Almost every Republican leader today supports convicted felon Trump. Decent conservatives have been extinct for a while. Over the decades, many of the most prominent figures on the right, from aristocrat William F. Buckley in his day, to the now-regretful Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt (the strategist who had the clever idea of welding Sarah Palin to John McCain), failed to object to the rot within—or at least not until it was too late. How is it that all these people were unbothered?
Conason’s book offers the suggestion of an answer. Writing about how then–RNC chair Ronna McDaniel knew Trump was lying the Big Lie, but didn’t interfere with the scam, Conason explains: “Intimidated by Trump and profiting heavily from his grift,” the RNC “continued to spread disinformation.” Its response to Trump’s lies “was merely to tinker around the edges of the fundraising copy, never to fundamentally challenge the message.” Intimidation and profit. The paired goads—the stick of fascist abuse, the carrot of free grifted money—may be only logical explanation for the conservative movement’s total abandonment of even the appearance of principles.
Whether or not Trump survives this election, the transmogrification of the right, Conason writes, is likely permanent. “The industrial production of falsehood and fraud will grind on shamelessly, with or without him, overseen by entrepreneurs who understand that substance and commitment carry no sales value in a political culture dominated by noisemaking, grandstanding, and malice.” This machine was built over decades by people who have chipped away at the ethical norms of public life, lining their own pockets. It will most certainly grind on unimpeded by shame or law as long as the right maintains a grip on the levers of power.

Always Happy To See Conservatives Turn Against Trump— But Doesn't Make Them Democratic Party Leaders

Howie Klein, August 2, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

...From its inception, conservatism has often been at odds with the ideals that drive progressivism. The tension between these two ideologies is rooted in their fundamentally different approaches to society, economy and governance. At its heart, conservatism is all about preserving the existing social order, which inevitable over time will have grown corrupt and putrid. This inclination towards maintaining the status quo manifests as resistance to change. Historically, conservatism has aligned itself with the defense of established hierarchies and traditional institutions, such as monarchy, aristocracy and religious authority— an obstacle to social progress, an obstacle to challenging and dismantling oppressive structures, an obstacle to equality, social justice and the expansion of democratic rights. The conservative defense of the status quo has been a defense of inequality, whether in the form of slavery, feudalism or unfettered capitalism.
Conservatives have championed economic policies that prioritize the interests of the wealthy and powerful, often at the expense of working people. From the Industrial Revolution to the present day, conservatism has been associated with the protection of property rights, the deregulation of industries and opposition to labor movements, perpetuating economic inequality and social injustice. Conservative policy inherently leads to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, while leaving the majority to struggle with poverty and exploitation. On top of that and throughout history, conservatism has aligned itself with opposition to civil rights and social liberation movements. Whether it was the fight against the abolition of slavery, the struggle for women’s suffrage, or the civil rights movement, conservatives are always on the side of maintaining existing power dynamics and resisting calls for change.

Historically, conservatism has been associated with nationalism, imperialism, authoritarianism and has been a precursor to fascism, ideologies that are premised on domination and exploitation. Let’s not ever forget that conservatives invariably align with authoritarianism when existing social structures are threatened, from monarchies, military dictatorships to fascist regimes.

I’m always suspicious, and on my guard, when Republicans— conservatives— leave their party and decide to make a new career inside the Democratic Party...

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

US judge strikes down Biden administration ban on worker ‘noncompete’ agreements

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2024]

Federal Judge Gives Louisiana Polluters a 'Free Pass' to Harm Communities of Color

Edward Carver, August 23, 2024 [CommonDreams]

'Infuriating': Arkansas Supreme Court Disqualifies Abortion Amendment From Ballot

Julia Conley, August 22, 2024 [CommonDreams]

Abortion rights defenders in Arkansas said Thursday it was "a dark day" after the state's Supreme Court ruled a ballot measure that would enshrine stronger reproductive rights protections for people in the state was ineligible for November election ballots.
The court ruled 4-3 in favor of arguments presented by Republican officials including Secretary of State John Thurston and Attorney General Tim Griffin, who said organizers with Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG)—which submitted more than 101,000 signatures to secure the amendment for the ballot—had failed to correctly submit paperwork verifying that paid canvassers had been properly trained.
AFLG strategy director Rebecca Bobrow expressed agreement with Justice Karen Baker's dissent, which accused Thurston of making up statutory requirements "out of whole cloth" and of being "determined to keep this particular vote from the people" at all costs.

Civic republicanism

[TW: As I mention above in the discussion of the Democratic National Convention, the strength of a republic results from a free public discussion of the ideas generated by all citizens. Obviously, the “manufacturing of consent" is a major problem. Some means will have to be devised to compel advertisers to be much more mindful of the public good.]

The Unsavory Confessions of a P.R. Guru

Aaron Gell, August 19, 2024 [The New Republic]

A flack’s new memoir touts his work for dictators and tycoons. But that’s only part of today’s misinformation industry.

MASTER PLAN, Ep 2: Watergate’s Magic Window Of Corporate Cash

David Sirota and staff, August 20, 2024 [The Lever]

As brand-name companies fund the break-in, a White House memo envisions dark money and Nixon leaves a ticking time bomb in D.C.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 25 2024

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