“Most Americans have to work to earn a living. But the rich are different: They get most of their income not from labor but from what they own — companies, stocks, real estate and the like. These income-generating assets are what economists call capital. And because capital is heavily concentrated among the rich, the U.S. government taxed earnings derived from capital at a higher rate than earnings made through labor for the entirety of the 20th century. But that’s no longer the case, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley. In their new book, “The Triumph of Injustice,” they present data showing that in 2018, labor income was taxed at a higher rate than capital income for the first time in modern U.S. history.”
This could be the formal marker for when USA ceased being a republic and became a plutocracy, but I would argue for the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court instead.
In their most recent 10-year budget and economic forecast, the CBO made a big change, reducing their long-run forecast of the interest rate on government bonds by almost a full percentage point, from 3.7 to 2.9. (See Table 2.6 here.)
Most directly, the new, lower interest rate reduces expected debt payments over the next decade by $2.2 trillion.
I have no doubt that Trump and the Republicans will use this to push the line that the Trump tax cuts worked to grow the economy and pay for themselves.
....Mazzucato, an Italian-American economist who had spent decades researching the economics of innovation and the high tech industry, decided to look deeper into the early history of some of the world’s most innovative companies. The development of Google’s search algorithm, for instance, had been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, a US public grant-awarding body. Electric car company Tesla initially struggled to secure investment until it received a $465 million (£380 million) loan from the US Department of Energy. In fact, three companies founded by Elon Musk — Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX — had jointly benefited from nearly $4.9 billion (£3.9bn) in public support of various kinds. Many other well-known US startups had been funded by the Small Business Innovation Research programme, a public venture capital fund. “It wasn’t just early research, it was also applied research, early stage finance, strategic procurement,” she says. “The more I looked, the more I realised: state investment is everywhere.”
Mazzucato included her findings in a 150-page pamphlet she submitted to UK policy think tank Demos. It was distributed to thousands of policymakers, and received coverage in daily newspapers. “It was obvious that it had touched a nerve,” she says. “The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go straight to the core of the myths about innovation.” She decided to dissect the product that symbolised Silicon Valley’s engineering prowess: the iPhone.
Mazzucato traced the provenance of every technology that made the iPhone. The HTTP protocol, of course, had been developed by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and implemented on the computers at CERN, in Geneva. The internet began as a network of computers called Arpanet, funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD) in the 60s to solve the problem of satellite communication. The DoD was also behind the development of GPS during the 70s, initially to determine the location of military equipment. The hard disk drive, microprocessors, memory chips and LCD display had also been funded by the DoD. Siri was the outcome of a Stanford Research Institute project to develop a virtual assistant for military staff, commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The touchscreen was the result of graduate research at the University of Delaware, funded by the National Science Foundation and the CIA.
Victory in California! Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature has made AB 857 — the grassroots-generated, people-powered Public Banking Act — the law in California. The California Public Banking Alliance has been tireless in educating legislators, drafting language, and generating massive statewide public support. The strong leadership of the bill's co-authors, Assemblymembers Miguel Santiago and David Chiu, generated 19 co-sponsors and support from several committee chairs, clearly demonstrating that the will of the people is behind banks that serve the public interest....
California gets it rolling [podcast]
As global climate strikes continue around the world this week, California has passed breakthrough legislation that sanctions municipal public banks to serve as public administration entities, a development with wide repercussions across the country. We talk with a couple of the citizen leaders, Marc Armstrong and Susan Harman, who were pivotal drivers of the effort, and what they think it means for the movement. Then Ellen speaks with an author and former US Treasury economist, Richard C. Cook, about why the extractive domination of private banks over the totality of civic life must be taken down if we wish to have an economy that works for all. Finally, we have another talk with Bank of North Dakota historian Mike Jacobs about why that bank has managed to avoid corruption and remain a robust example of why banks should be owned by the people.
A must-read for all the details of the policy follies of the past four decades, and for the quotes from speeches at the time by such elites as Larry Summers.
Chinese power today is a result of a large number of incidents similar to this one, the wholesale transfer of knowhow, technology, and physical stuff from American communities to Chinese ones. And the confused politics of China is a result of the failure of the many policymaking elites who participated in such rancid episodes, and are embarrassed about it. As we peer at an ascendant and dangerous China, it makes sense to look back at how Clinton thought about the world, and why he would engage in such a foolish strategy.
Broadly speaking, there were two catastrophic decisions Clinton made in 1993 that ended up eroding the long-term American defense posture. The first was to radically break from the post-World War II trading system. This system was organized around free trade of goods and services among democratic nations, along with somewhat restricted financial capital flows. He did this by passing NAFTA, by bailing out Mexico and thus American banks, by creating the World Trade Organization, and by opening up the United States to China as deep commercial partners.
The Clinton framework gutted the ability of U.S. policymakers to protect industrial power, and empowered Wall Street and foreign officials to force the U.S. to export its industrial base abroad, in particular to China. The radicalism of the choice was in the intertwining of the U.S. industrial base with an autocratic strategic competitor. During the Cold War, we had never relied on the USSR for key inputs, and basically didn’t trade with them. Now, we would deeply integrate our technology and manufacturing with an enemy (and yes, the Chinese leaders saw and currently still see us as enemies).
The second choice was to reorganize the American defense industrial base, ripping out contracting rules and consolidating power into the hands of a small group of defense giants. In the early 1990s, as part of the ‘reinventing government’ initiative, the Clinton team sought to radically empower private contractors in the government procurement process....
The empowering of finance friendly giant contractors bent the bureaucracies towards only seeing global capital flows, not the flow of stuff or the ability to produce. This was already how most Clinton administration officials saw the world. They just assumed, wrongly, that stuff moves around the world without friction, and that American corporations operate in a magic fairy tale where practical problems are solved by finance and this thing called ‘the free market.’ In their Goldman, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group-ified haze of elitist disdain for actually making and doing real things, they didn’t notice or care that the Chinese Communist Party was centralizing production in China. They just assumed that Chinese production was ‘the free market’ at work, instead of a carefully state-sponsored effort by Chinese bureaucrats to build strategic military and economic power.
Book review of American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Albert
....After Barack Obama was elected president, the Koch brothers and the Donors Trust of dark money funders (to which the Kochs were leading contributors) would mobilize and subsidize the Republican base in the so-called populist revolt they named the Tea Party.... when Trump seized control of the GOP in 2016, he reaped the populist whirlwind that Richard Nixon began sowing nearly half a century earlier and that the Bush administration—their administration—had whipped to hurricane force....
By the time Alberta’s account gets underway, most of the political dynamics behind the events he describes were long established and extremely powerful. Some of the book’s major figures, like former House Speaker John Boehner (who was also one of its principal sources), were remnants from earlier phases of the party’s strife, and developments like the growth of the Tea Party or the uprisings of the House Freedom Caucus make sense only as outgrowths of previous internecine battles. Most importantly, by 2008, the Republican Party had already become what the political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein would call “an insurgent outlier” in American politics: “ideologically extreme… scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Alberta has written, in short, a book that is more denouement than drama, detailing the fall of a hollow GOP establishment that, having abandoned normal party politics in favor of relentless polarization, was already teetering. While American Carnage describes the outcome of the party’s radicalization, it completely misses—indeed, fundamentally misunderstands—a major impetus behind Trump’s ascendancy: the destructive presidency of George W. Bush....
[Alberta’s account] cannot explain how Trump could so swiftly capture virtually an entire political party. A plausible answer to that puzzle is hiding in plain sight in Alberta’s book. Although Trump came into office with majorities in both houses of Congress, and although, as Alberta notes, the White House ceded control over domestic legislation to Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan, the Republicans had terrible difficulty scoring legislative wins. Most galling to Trump as well as the party’s congressional leadership was the failure to repeal Obamacare, one of the GOP’s core campaign pledges since the program began. On two fronts, though, Republicans moved with absolute assurance: the approval by the Senate of right-wing nominees to the federal bench, including Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and, after a brutal, unexpected fight, Brett Kavanaugh; and the rapid approval of a fiercely regressive tax bill in 2017. Control of the courts for the Christian right and the Federalist Society, tax windfalls and deregulation for the donor class: these were the causes that truly stirred the GOP majorities in Congress. It’s not simply that the recumbent Republicans are intimidated by the party base that Trump has captured; they are motivated chiefly by right-wing dogma and their own baseness, which Trump understands and manipulates.
Chris Hedges [Truthdig, via Naked Capitalism 9-28-19]
Impeaching Donald Trump would do nothing to halt the deep decay that has beset the American republic. It would not magically restore democratic institutions. It would not return us to the rule of law. It would not curb the predatory appetites of the big banks, the war industry and corporations. It would not get corporate money out of politics or end our system of legalized bribery. It would not halt the wholesale surveillance and monitoring of the public by the security services. It would not end the reigns of terror practiced by paramilitary police in impoverished neighborhoods or the mass incarceration of 2.3 million citizens. It would not impede ICE from hunting down the undocumented and ripping children from their arms to pen them in cages. It would not halt the extraction of fossil fuels and the looming ecocide. It would not give us a press freed from the corporate mandate to turn news into burlesque for profit. It would not end our endless and futile wars. It would not ameliorate the hatred between the nation’s warring tribes—indeed would only exacerbate these hatreds.
Impeachment is about cosmetics. It is about replacing the public face of empire with a political mandarin such as Joe Biden, himself steeped in corruption and obsequious service to the rich and corporate power, who will carry out the same suicidal policies with appropriate regal decorum.
GND - A problem too big to solve, or an opportunity too big to miss?
The Green New Deal: A Fight for Our Lives
Naomi Klein [New York Review of Books, 9-21-2019] Adapted from the introduction and epilogue to On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, by Naomi Klein, published by Simon and Schuster.
In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting trees and establishing soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.
Matt Stoller [Pro-Market, via Naked Capitalism 9-18-19]
Director is the key founder of what is now known as the Chicago School of law and economics, which reshaped the American approach to corporate power and political economy.... Director’s life was dedicated to setting free the power of concentrated capital, eliminating the power of labor, and undoing the New Deal. His success is so profound it is hard to describe, so embedded are we today in the world and rhetoric Director shaped.
...changing political cleavages in FR-US-UK 1948-2017 documenting the shift from class-based political conflict to multiple-elite (intellectual vs business elite) and identity-based political conflict.
Main empirical finding: the rise of multiple-elite politics
• In the 1950s-60s, the vote for left-wing (labour-socialist-democratic) parties in France-UK-US used to be associated with lower education & lower income voters: class-based political conflict (→ redistributive policies)
• It has gradually become associated since 1970s-80s with higher education voters, giving rise since 1990s-2000s to a multiple-elite party system: high- education elites vote left, while high-ncome/high-wealth elites vote right. I.e. intellectual elite (Brahmin left) vs business elite (Merchant right).
Peter Drucker, a conservative admirer of Keynes, viewed him as not merely conservative, but ultraconservative. “He had two basic motivations,” Drucker explained in a 1991 interview with Forbes. “One was to destroy the labor unions and the other was to maintain the free market. Keynes despised the American Keynesians. His whole idea was to have an impotent government that would do nothing but, through tax and spending policies, maintain the equilibrium of the free market. Keynes was the real father of neoconservatism, far more than [economist F.A.] Hayek!”
The bigger picture... was the way in which the Cambridge Analytica story opened a window onto a new constellation of international billionaires, corrupt politicians, and war profiteers who were apparently amassing enormous power. That story isn’t only about technology, data, and psychographic profiling; it’s also, at root, a story about the consequences of entrenched economic inequality, the privatization of essential public assets and government functions, including even national security, and the challenge to conventional foreign policy posed by the bargains being struck between international kleptocrats….
In both Britain and America, there exists a class of billionaires who seek to become oligarchs and a corresponding class of government officials who want to become billionaires. Since 2008, when the financial markets’ development of complex and ill-regulated derivatives led to a credit crisis and crash that erased huge sums from the fortunes of the global ultra-rich—with Western tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelson, and Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska among the biggest losers—the world’s billionaires have been moving away from a commitment to free markets. Learning from the banking bailouts and the socialization of moral hazard, they have instead embraced an ambition to build lasting monopolies that enjoy both official and unofficial forms of state support.
….
The United States has its own versions of the oligarchs, albeit ones who made their money legally rather than through the criminal enterprises for which many Russians have been indicted by American prosecutors or sanctioned by the federal government. As I’ve previously written, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley managed to establish their extraordinary monopolies—viewed by the state as a form of soft power as well as an essential national security asset in a world of cyber-conflict—only because that entire sector received huge injections of venture-capital funding from the military and intelligence agencies. In this case, too, the astronomical profits are largely untaxed and held off-shore....
This international billionaire class is also establishing and using private intelligence and influence agencies like Cambridge Analytica to help them manipulate national and international politics. It’s well known that the Koch brothers have their own such agency (called i360), but other billionaires have firms whose names we don’t even know. That’s not to say there’s a grand conspiracy of global elites or coordinated centralization of power for mutual advantage. But what these messy conflicting interests do have in common is that they are all working against liberal-democratic institutions. The free-market dream of being liberated from government authority, once an article of faith for the billionaire class, has turned into the oligarchs’ dream of coopting, or even usurping, government authority in pursuit of profit.
....one of the most ambitious of America’s would-be oligarchs, Erik Prince. He is a private military contractor, formerly of Blackwater; his present company, the Frontier Services Group, has backing from the Chinese government and a Hong Kong billionaire named Johnson Ko, the company’s executive director. Prince’s meetings on behalf of the Trump team were arranged by a former Blackwater colleague who is now an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, George Nader. Nader, who is currently in federal custody in Virginia as an accused child sex trafficker, claims that Prince was sent as an emissary for Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to the notorious Seychelles meeting with Dmitriev and Bin Zayed.
.... Mueller’s main finding, a “sweeping and systematic” campaign of interference by Russia in the 2016 election, has simply reinforced the idea that the United States and Russia are combatants in a fairly traditional form of political warfare. Mueller’s report and testimony had no impact in exposing the multilateral business deals—here involving American, Russian, Saudi, Israeli, Qatari, and Emirati actors—that bypass national interests, official foreign policy, international regulations, electoral laws, and even ordinary market pressures.
The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillanceoperated by both agencies.
According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.
The plight of Boeing continues to fascinate me. Dad's cousin was a machinist / toolmaker for them from the 1940s to the early 1970s—from the B-29 to the 727. One Sunday afternoon I listened to him explain the problems of producing the tooling for the 727's tail section. Not only did the tail carry important control surfaces, the designers had run a third jet engine through the middle. Not surprisingly, making all this work required fabricating some complex shapes out of high-strength aluminum alloys. This was before computerized milling machines so these tools were built with slide rules, micrometers, Bridgeport mills, and a whole lot of skills. The resulting aircraft exceeded every important performance projection by at least 5%, thousands were made, and there are still people who argue it was the fastest subsonic airliner to ever fly.
My brother-in law was the guy who specified for Boeing which welding method would be used for every part that would be joined using heat. For every potential operation, he would test several welding methods, X-ray the results, and then break the weld to see how much load it would take. His results became part of Boeing's institutional memory. Any time folks needed to weld up a landing gear, or whatever, they could check to see what methods had been certified. My brother-in-law had not gone to engineering school but he was so good at what he did, he was given a "field promotion" to engineer by the company (along with the increased pay grade.) Such was the "old" Boeing.
According to his account, old Boeing began to die with the merger of Boeing
and McDonnell Douglas on Aug. 1, 1997. The value of the transaction was $16.3
billion. McDonnell Douglas had been on the ropes for awhile and their senior management had turned to the Wall Street sharpies for "help"—the kind of help that stressed share prices and political connections to the Defense Department over the real work of building quality airplanes. These folks came to Boeing in the merger and began an assault on the company's engineering culture. On February 9, 2000, Boeing's engineers actually went out on strike—egged on, no doubt by the designated management fool / Wall Street darling named Debbie Hopkins who wondered aloud, "Just why does Boeing need engineers anyway?" I don't know Debbie, maybe it's because punching a hole through the air at nearly 600 mph is really hard to do. Maybe it's because without engineers, Boeing does not exist.
Anyway, shortly after the SPEEA strike was settled, my brother-in-law quit in disgust and found a peaceful job teaching non-ferrous welding at a Tacoma community college where he worked into his late 70s. Debbie was soon fired but her work was done. The rot at Boeing soon showed up in airplanes that had serious quality issues. I did a post in 2013 about the troubled Dreamliner and now the 737max fleet is grounded.
If anyone ever needs a lesson in what happens when Predators take over a
Producer company, Boeing will do perfectly. In it's glory days, Boeing
pretty much defined a Producer company. Engineers ran the show. The
company would occasionally bet the farm on a breakthrough product.
There was a sense of pride you could feel the moment you passed through
the plant gates. And people who knew aircraft were often fanatically
loyal to their output (It's Boeing or I'm not going.) Yes, there were
other companies that made large aircraft but sensible people would often
ask "Why?" Boeing was so sure about its products that for decades, it
only had one salesman. One was plenty because everyone knew what buying
from Boeing meant.
And then it started to unravel. In 1997, Boeing merged with McDonnell
Douglas, a company that had lost its airplane-making chops and had
become just another cost-plus supplier hanging off the big Defense
Department teat. Boeing also had significant ties to the defense
industry but were babes in the woods compared to the sharpies from
McDonnell Douglas. Soon the sharpies were ensconced in senior
management at Boeing and the rot began to set in. The open assault on
Boeing's engineering culture came out into the open during the
SPEEA (Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace) strike of 2000.
The cordial atmosphere between the engineers that designed Boeing's
products and the engineers that managed the company was broken.
Management even moved the headquarters to Chicago from Seattle to show
the divorce was final.
Once the Boeing Producer / engineering culture had been trashed, the
chance for breakthrough, industry-defining projects was trashed as well.
The Dreamliner, which was not even that revolutionary to start with,
became an expensive, ongoing fiasco that demonstrated the truth of the
most famous sign carried during the SPEEA strike "No nerds, No Birds."
And so now, after several years of delays and $Billions of cost
over-runs, the few Dreamliners that have been delivered are grounded.
The problem isn't even an aerospace problem but rather faulty lithium
batteries. If the Predators of the "new" Boeing management were
actually capable of feeling shame, they would be resigning en mass. Yeah, that's going to happen (NOT)!
DW looks at the institutional impediments to change in the all-powerful automobile industry. And OMG are the car folks all powerful—for some very good reasons. Germans invented the internal combustion engine—both gasoline and diesel. The nation's driver associations have even managed to keep parts of the autobahn speed-limit free. And should a driver do something seriously stupid and crash, the authorities have access to rescue crews on hair-trigger alert. This is not to say the rest of the country always approves of these James-Dean wannabees setting transportation policies. Environmental activists recently managed to ban automobile traffic in central Stuttgart—the home of Porsche and Mercedes Benz.
But the serious power is still held by the manufacturers and their conventional wisdom which says—the automakers are the most important element of the German economy and you tamper with them at great risk. In that nearly rules-free environment, they twiddled their thumbs and made fat profits from ICE cars. Now their biggest market, China, is demanding that they get serious about selling electric cars. This is proving much harder than it looks—and WAY more expensive. Here DW has captured a fascinating look at smug auto executives spouting the conventional wisdom / Institutional Inertia.
This week the number of articles along these lines merited a new topic subtitle, which I also used to link to an article I posted in March 2019 about the economic ideas of Adam Smith. As the title of a March 2019 article co-authored by Suresh Naidu -- author of the post below about Robert Bork --states plainly: Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice.
While I welcome this emerging new clarity about the bloody costs of conservative a.k.a. neoliberal economic ideology, I am troubled that the ideology of republicanism continues to be overlooked as the obvious answer. As I wrote in March 2019 (Liberals and the Left Fail to Notice – and Celebrate – the Intellectual Death of Conservatism), "The actual conception of civic virtue in a republic is by its very nature fundamentally contrary to the basic tenets of capitalism...republicanism will never be in harmony with market capitalism." Almost all the proposals for reforming the USA economy --including by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders -- amount to the imposition of state regulation without fundamentally addressing the economic beliefs and ideology of elites. This is why I place such importance on the work of Ian Welsh, and why the Business Roundtable's recent critique of the theory of shareholder value is an important indicator of elites' thinking. Will elites actually change their thinking? Or are they merely beginning to formulate a response to the growing resistance to the economic ideology they have promoted for the past three quarters of a century to roll back the New Deal? Is it even possible for a leopard to change its spots?
....money is a social construction, and price signals are not given by God and nature: they are choices. Political choices. That isn’t to deny some physical reality behind them, but that reality has obviously been elided, when in America, the life spans of some demographic groups are dropping while super-yachts and luxury condos are hot to trot.
All systems have to do only one thing: whatever is required to keep the system in power.
That’s all they have to do. Whether or not human welfare is advanced or not; whether or not we care about animals or nature is irrelevant to the raw calculus of power and staying in power, until it effect staying in power.
If the hoi polloi can be kept from revolting or demanding (remember demands are based on “or else,” they are not requests) well then, the powerful will not do anything that does not increase their power or money. They will only care about human welfare outside of their own group if they feel they must, or if, as happens occasionally, they see their group as being something other than the elite group.
Right now elites don’t care about other humans enough to reshape the money and political systems (the same thing, ultimately) to prioritize human welfare, avoid a great-die-off, or stop climate change. This is clear. It is not arguable, it is a fact, based simply on their actions.
The Koch version of free-market capitalism, which is the one pushed at the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Economic Education, FreedomWorks, the Hoover Institution, and the Heartland Institute, is a simple creed, one that goes as follows:
I believe that freedom is good and that people should be left to pursue their own ends as they see fit. The market knows best, and government regulation is a misguided attempt to second-guess people’s decisions about their own interest. People and corporations should pursue their self-interest under conditions of freedom, because in a marketplace of voluntary transactions, everyone’s interests will end up being served.
....It’s only when you think for a bit, and work out the implications, that you realize something that sounds perfectly innocuous actually has horrifying implications. What about child labor laws? Oh, well, that’s just the state stepping in to prevent a beneficial transaction between the child and the employer. We’re “taking away opportunity from children,” as libertarian economist Jeffrey Tucker put it in a Foundation for Economics Education article called “Let The Kids Work.” Oh, what about price gouging? Well, you’ll read in the Wall Street Journal that price gouging is Actually Good, because it’s a Mutually Beneficial Transaction between someone in desperate need of a thing and someone willing to part with it.
One of my favorite books for understanding the real nature of free-market capitalism is Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable. Block, a right-wing libertarian, goes through various different categories of unpopular people, and shows how they are actually heroes performing a public service. Slumlords? They provide houses! Blackmailers? They’re merely offering the service of not disclosing information—would you rather they just released the damaging information? Drug dealers? It’s a product—you don’t have to buy it! Ebenezer Scrooge? He was investing his money and building the economy! Block concludes that these people “do not violate anyone’s rights, so they do not violate basic morality.”
For Block, “respecting property rights” and “basic morality” are identical, meaning that I can be as nasty to you as I want so long as I don’t steal your furniture, and still be an upstanding person. Employers can mistreat employees—by sexually harassing them, belittling them, working them to exhaustion, and they haven’t done anything wrong, because it’s a Free Market Transaction that the employee could theoretically walk away from....
Elizabeth Warren: I believe the central question in America today is who government works for. Yeah, it’s got a lot of different directions, but that’s the fundamental one. Is it just going to work for the rich and the powerful, or is it going to work for everyone else? Antitrust cuts right to the heart of that. We’ve had a government that has kissed up to every giant corporation for decades. It has weakened antitrust enforcement, looked the other way on mergers, passed on deals that everyone knew were anti-competitive and would be bad for the economy and bad for competition but good for the bottom line of the companies that wanted it. And no one so much as fluttered an eyelash over it. And that’s started to change. And I think—So here’s my thinking: it’s because we’re focusing more on what’s wrong in this country. It’s not like somebody woke up and just said “antitrust”—we’re not that nerdy—but it’s about what’s wrong in this country. And as people increasingly see that the problem is not an overreaching government, the problem is a government that won’t get in the fight on the side of the people. Antitrust becomes one of the clearest places to see that.
The Fridays for Futures movement inspired by the frankly incredible Greta Thunberg has been fun to follow since it started only a year ago. She was a disgusted child who decided to skip school to camp out in front of the Swedish Parliament. The goal was to remind the politicians that they were not doing enough to arrest the climate crises. Her logic was absolutely impeccable:
The scientific consensus is that unless there are significant changes in how societies operate, we only have twelve years before the CO2 tipping points have been breached and all hell is going to break loose.
The most commonly reported tipping point was 1.5°C (2.7°F) We are almost there.
2018 broke records for high temperatures and widespread forest fires in Sweden. Anyone who wasn't frightened to death by these developments was probably clinically unconscious. It was an amazing demonstration of what environmental collapse could look like.
Greta did the math. She was 15. 12 years and she would be only 27. This is a very grim future.
"Why educate yourself to be a useful and productive citizen when the future is so hopeless?" reasoned Greta. Besides, she was extremely studious so missing a little school to make a political point seemed a logical path. Her grades weren't going to suffer.
A typical angry teenager, she distilled her beef with the world in the perfect summation, "You adults are shitting on my future." It is almost impossible to imagine a more powerful battle cry if the goal is to unite the world's young into a vast protest movement. But I am almost certain that not even Greta had any idea of the firestorm she was igniting.
She has spoken to the European, British, and French Parliaments. She went to Davos to scold the filthy rich for their role in the crimes against the climate. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And her latest was her decision to address the UN General Assembly which meant a transatlantic trip. Since she doesn't fly, this left her with few options. The one she chose was to sail on an environmentally-friendly racing yacht.
Lambert Strether notes "This is brutal, a must-read."
"It is impossible to tell the story of the 737 Max -- indeed, the story of Boeing's entire recent history -- without taking a closer look at Airbus. The self-confident Americans underestimated their European competitor's strength, not wanting to believe that Airbus's ascent to become the world's second-largest aircraft manufacturer was the kind of economic miracle that changed the entire game. Founded in 1970, massively subsidized by European governments and heavily promoted by an industry that was deeply invested in its success, Airbus was able to revolutionize the global passenger jet market in the course of just three decades. And then came the wonder of 1999, when Airbus received significantly more orders for its aircraft than did its American rival, despite the fact that Boeing had just merged with erstwhile competitor McDonnel Douglas a few years before....
“And this all comes at a time when the Airbus-Boeing duopoly has been developing cracks. The two may still be the world’s undisputed aerospace leaders, but companies in China, Russia and Japan are in the process of grabbing a bigger piece of the pie. Furthermore, it has become easier to build airplanes because a highly specialized global market of suppliers has developed that can deliver almost any part in the desired quality at the desired moment in time. The times when airplane construction was a calling card of unattainable technological excellence are coming to an end. Things are becoming more difficult, especially for Boeing.”
Outsourcing comes back to bite you in the ass. Every time. USA has "free traded" away the family jewels.
“The Cherokee Nation announced last week that it has, for the first time in its history, nominated a delegate to the United States Congress in accordance with provisions in treaties the tribe has with the federal government. In a Thursday press release, Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. nominated the Cherokee Nation’s vice president of government relations, Kim Teehee, for the job.”
For 47 years, the Business Roundtable has lobbied on behalf of corporate America. Much of that time, it maintained the fiction that the sole purpose of a corporation was to maximize profits on behalf of shareholders. This philosophy has been under assault for several years now, and this week the Business Roundtable announced it wants to put it to rest.In a widely circulated memo, the 200-member organization reversed itself, writing that “shareholder primacy” is no longer the sole purpose of a corporation. Instead, corporations must include a commitment to “all stakeholders,” which includes customers, employees, suppliers and local communities....But turning this aircraft carrier around won’t be easy, in large part because of the group’s own history. Indeed, the Roundtable has spent most of the past four decades advocating against the interests of those exact stakeholders. To cite some of the more notable examples:
— It fought the rise of labor unions and pro-union legislation;
— Helped to defeat antitrust bills;
— Prevented the formation of the Consumer Protection Agency;
— Opposed corporate governance changes to make boards of directors and CEOs more accountable to stockholders;
— Fought proper accounting of stock options given as compensation to executives and insiders;
— Opposed increases in the national minimum wage (it now favors increases);
— Lobbied to prevent restrictions on executive compensation;
— Fought legislation that would create cleaner energy and address climate change;
— Pushed for corporate income-tax cuts;
— Supported anti-consumer Supreme Court decisions, including the fiction that corporations are legal people, and that campaign donations equal speech.
The People's Republic of China is wealthier than any rival America has faced. Its leaders are convinced of the malignance of the United States. Their ambitions are global, their ideology hostile, and their military forces optimized to "fight and win wars" with America and the democratic nations that surround it. The challenge is daunting—and it exists because of us. The Sino-American relationship of 2019 is the acrid fruit of "engagement."
Engagement is dead. Yet like dead growth lumped to living branch, the men and women who crafted the disaster linger with us. In twitter whispers and podcast chatterings their murmurs grow. Engagement did not fail, we hear. It never was about remaking China in the first place. We never thought the Chinese would come to share our systems, values, or priorities. Engagement was about something else entirely....
Here is Bill Clinton, explaining to the American voters why the People's Republic deserves a seat at the W.T.O.: By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy's most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people -- their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say....
The broader problem with the Haas formula ("shape what China does") is that China's political behavior cannot be divorced from the economic and political structures that produce it. As China's newest white paper eagerly reminds us, demanding the PRC reform its SOEs is demanding that it transform the fundamentals of its government, of which those SOEs are a critical part. Asking them to dismantle mercantilist policies and halt IP theft is asking them to abandon the economic model (what Xi would call "the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics") that their social system (in the Marxist tinged theory of the CPC, China's social "superstructure") is built upon. Dialing down the ambitions and capabilities of the PLA would have meant dismantling a keystone of Party ideology, identity, and organization.
Just as much of the world has come to see rapid population growth as normal and expected, the trends are shifting again, this time into reverse. Most parts of the world are witnessing sharp and sudden contractions in either birthrates or absolute population. The only thing preventing the population in many countries from shrinking more quickly is that death rates are also falling, because people everywhere are living longer.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy [via Mike Norman Economics 8-8-19]
Summary of "Deregulating Corruption," (pdf) Harvard Law & Policy Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2019
From its very first term, the Roberts Supreme Court has been rebranding the meaning of the word “corruption” both in campaign finance cases as well as in white-collar crime cases. And in Kelly v. United States (better known as the Bridgegate case), the Supreme Court may do even greater damage to the concept of corruption.
What has the Roberts Supreme Court done to corruption? I discuss this in my recent Harvard Law & Policy Review article, “Deregulating Corruption,” and in my soon to be released book, Political Brands. First, they have narrowed the meaning of the word in a series of election law cases that address the constitutionality of various campaign finance laws. In cases like Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations the First Amendment right to spend an unlimited amount of money on political ads, and McCutcheon v. FEC, which allows the rich to support as many congressional candidates as they want with contributions, the Roberts Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that “corruption” only means quid pro quo exchanges.
This approach to corruption sets the Roberts Supreme Court apart from other Supreme Courts. For over a century, previous Supreme Courts upheld campaign finance laws and other regulations which try to keep graft and political intimidation at bay precisely because as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Yarbrough in 1884, “[i]n a republican government like ours, where political power is reposed in representatives of the entire body of the people, chosen at short intervals by popular elections, the temptations to control these elections by violence and by corruption is a constant source of danger…. no lover of his country can shut his eyes to the fear of future danger from both sources…”
Even the Rehnquist Supreme Court—no bastion of liberals— was more thoughtful about political corruption than the Roberts Court is. For example, in 2003, the Rehnquist Supreme Court ruled in FEC v. Beaumont that there is a “public interest in ‘restrict[ing] the influence of political war chests funneled through the corporate form.’ …; ‘[S]ubstantial aggregations of wealth amassed by the special advantages which go with the corporate form of organization should not be converted into political ‘war chests’ which could be used to incur political debts from legislators.’”
In a twin 2003 decision, McConnell v. FEC, the Rehnquist Court asserted that the “crabbed view of corruption”—which would limit the term to actual quid pro quo corruption—“ignores precedent, common sense, and the realities of political fundraising.” The Roberts Court has rapidly put that capacious concept of political corruption in exile and knocked down nearly every campaign finance law it has been asked to review. (The Supreme Court left in place a ban on foreigners spending in US election and a ban on judges personally asking donors for money, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule.)
But wait, there’s more. The Roberts Supreme Court has also rebranded corruption by changing what counts as white-collar crimes. In Skilling v. US (a case brought by disgraced ex-CEO of Enron Jeff Skilling challenging his 24-year prison sentence for defrauding the company’s shareholders), the Supreme Court agreed with Skilling that he should not have been charged with honest services fraud because his crimes did not involve a bribe or a kickback. This Supreme Court decision led to Skilling getting 10 years shaved off of his original sentence. He was released from jail in 2018 and left his halfway house in 2019. He is now a free man.
Also in the criminal context, the Roberts Supreme Court invalidated the conviction of ex-Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell. McDonnell, who had money troubles while he was Governor of Virginia, accepted money and gifts from a businessman named Jonnie Williams who wanted to sell his tobacco pills (I’m not making any of this up) to Virginia employees. The Governor set up a few meetings for Williams and once touted a bottle of the tobacco pills in a meeting.
In McDonnell v. US, the Supreme Court decided that none of what Governor McDonnell did was “an official act,” and thus he could not be guilty of a quid pro quo exchange with Williams. No one disputed that Williams had given the governor lots of money. What the Supreme Court didn’t buy was that the Governor did enough in return for the largess to constitute a crime.
Tom Hickey, who posted this at Mike Norman Economics, asks further:
Corruption isn’t a partisan matter. Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been accused of abusing their offices for private gain. And using the Roberts Supreme Court cases to their advantage is equally bipartisan....Is the intent to install plutonomy, the oligarchy of wealth, under the veneer of representative democracy?
Interestingly, in Western liberal "democracies", the oligarchy of wealth called plutonomy is institutionally formalized through the "sanctity of private property," which includes hereditary transfer of ownership through inheritance, establishing a wealthy elite in power across generations. Looks more like neo-feudalism.
Lambert Strether adds: "It’s actually even worse than that since the commonly-cited measure of CEO pay lowballs it. See How the SEC Enabled the Gross Under-Reporing of CEO Pay. It looks as if the EPI used the conventional method for stock option valuation, which means the picture is even worse than they indicate."
The 50th anniversary of the first moon walk has caused me a full-blown geek-out. I remember the space race with fondness. Aerospace was the biggest story out there. The 50s and 60s saw an explosion of technological growth. Some favorites of mine from that era include the F-104, the U-2, the SR-71, the Boeing 707, 727, and 747—the "jet age" planes that changed travel and even music by democratizing flight.
I "graduated" from my Erector Set stage straight into model airplanes—the ones that flew and made a bunch of noise. And even though the space race was on, I was never seduced into model rocketry. It was expensive and the available examples didn't do much—restricted as they were by the same sort of regulations as fireworks (which where I lived were essentially outlawed.)
Real-world rockets were kind of boring as well. The most notorious of the test pilots out at Edwards Air Force Base (Chuck Yeager) even labeled the early astronauts as nothing more than "spam in a can." After all, the first "American" in space was a chimp. But that wouldn't last long. The original astronauts were extremely competent test pilots and before long, they were demanding greater control of their missions.
Even so, I was far more interested in the flight testing at Edwards where they pushed the limits of supersonic flight with real airplanes like fighters jets. But soon, they eventually embraced rocketry with the incomparable X-15. They had to. If you want to set speed and altitude records, eventually you run out of atmosphere where air-breathing power-plants simply do not work. The X-15 was insanely fast, complex and dangerous. It wasn't going to be piloted by a chimp. In fact, these things required the skills of the best pilots we could find. And I had a favorite—Neil Armstrong.
Armstrong was a superb pilot. On one mission a failure of a new instrument caused him to fly nearly 50 miles beyond where he was supposed to turn back to Edwards. His propulsion was spent so he was flying a glider with the aerodynamic performance (4:1 glide ratio) of a brick. He nursed that X-15 back to Edwards coming over the lake bed at less than 100'. This would be the same guy who landed on the moon with less than 30 seconds worth of fuel.
His degree in aeronautical engineering came from Purdue. This is NOT a school that grants engineering degrees to goof-offs. In fact Purdue would contribute a serious fraction of the top engineers to the space program. The rest mostly came from State Universities in the USA Midwest like Michigan.
He grew up in Wapakoneta, Ohio about an hour north of Dayton—the home of the Wright Brothers. His father paid for a ride in a Ford Tri-motor at 6. He soloed an airplane on his 16th birthday (the legal minimum age) and spent much of his childhood building model airplanes. This last fact is what endeared him to me. I too built model airplanes which were insanely difficult to get to fly well. The problem is that models and real airplanes conform to the same laws of nature which means to indulge in this hobby, it really helps to learn things like fluid dynamics, lightweight structures, and drag coefficients. You know—kid stuff.
Yes that is me with a model that required at least 150 hours to build. Didn't fly very well—too little power and too much paint.
Flying is something that only happens on the boundaries of perfection. You can get 15,000 things right and one wrong and your precious airplane is a flaming heap. Good pilots are followers of check lists—as diligent on the 1000th time through as the first. They read the operator's manuals. They know what all those switches do. They understand that dishonesty and corner-cutting could end their lives.
Armstrong was notorious for insisting on understanding every part of his aircraft. He wanted to know what everything was supposed to do and what it COULD do in an emergency. But even better, he understood that flying is a team effort and it was critical for every member of the team to take their jobs seriously. Here's what he says about the people who built Apollo.
Armstrong: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and for the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.
I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it." And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.
The Triumph of the Squares
Nearly a year after the landing of Apollo 11, NASA head Thomas Paine gave a commencement address at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he declared that the successful moonshot was a triumph of the squares, the validation of the values of "Squareland" which he listed as foremost a profound faith in reason. It was "outward looking and mathematical," was "time oriented...and deeply concerned with future consequences." It "accepts as true only rational facts and theories which predict future events with mathematical precision under rigorous standards of reproducibility. Only Squareland's rationality could ensure the "crops yield, lights light, bridges carry loads, children avoid polio, and men walk on the moon." In fact. to Squarelanders, a solid definition of "truth" might be "that which successfully takes two men to the moon."
This speech made me groan and roll my eyes. On one hand, going to the moon really DID require the "square" virtues that Paine so celebrated. Beside, I was clearly a prototypical "square" (see photo above.) Building airplanes sort of demands squareness. I was also the son of a small-town clergyman—building airplanes was one way of staying above the reproach of the church ladies. On the other hand, this speech set off the scolds who assumed that "square" virtue included an unquestioning support of the Vietnam War, a marked preference for booze over pot, white shirts and neck ties, and above all, short hair for men.
Unfortunately, the space race had been sold as Cold War macho and a real-live Nazi named Wernher von Braun was chosen to head the effort. So the link between the space race and unbridled militarism was pretty damn short. NASA was acutely aware of this problem. It was one of the reasons that Neil Armstrong was chosen to take the first step—he was the only civilian pilot to have reached his advanced status. This turned out to be an excellent choice. In the goodwill tour following the moon landing, he charmed his listeners around the world into believing that this was a triumph of human (not American) genius. The reason this worked is because Armstrong deeply believed it was true.
But while the moon landing was clearly a triumph of the squares, the squares would not triumph. By 1972 the Apollo program was ended and no human has gone beyond low-earth orbit since. The can-do attitude of Apollo has so completely disappeared from American culture that many now actually believe the landing was a hoax. It is probably more accurate to call Apollo "Peak Square" because the vast majority of my fellow citizens in 2019 look on a profound faith in reason as a weird psychological disorder.
BBC calling
In the summer of 1970, I found myself in UK. I kept running into people who wanted to talk about the moon landing. Most of them were very well informed. I had to scramble to keep up at times. One night in London, a waitress in a pub sat down next to me and asked if I was the American space expert she had overheard. I humbly admitted I was probably who she was looking for but I was FAR from being an expert. Then she asked, "How did they know how long the burn for the lunar insertion midflight correction should be? And how did they know they were pointing the engine in the right direction?" I didn't have a canned response so I pulled out my understanding of inertial navigation. It wasn't a very good answer but she seemed to understand, smiled and went back to work. I was left wondering just how a random London barmaid knew enough to even ask such good questions.
In 1978, PBS would air a 10-part series called Connections starring a fascinating storyteller named James Burke. (There was a companion coffee-table book by the same name). Burke had carved out an awesome assignment for himself. He wanted to explain the products of the modern world (computers, plastics, powered flight, etc.) in such a way that his listeners would understand how their world came to be. It was absolutely brilliant. Episode #1 The trigger effect traced the development of a modern city like New York back to the invention of the plow. The nine that would follow were equally good. Somewhere along the way we are informed that Burke was the man who covered Apollo for BBC.
AHA! That explained why the Brits knew so much about the moon landing—at least partly. So in the near-infinity of Apollo 11 at 50 coverage on YouTube, I went looking to see if I could find any of Burke's descriptions. I found a good one—an hour of Apollo highlights.
Just in case you need a reminder of how utterly lame the Apollo coverage was on USA corporate media, here is an example from ABC. I am pretty sure all the CBS and ABC coverage of the whole mission can be found at YouTube.
Of all the footage of the Apollo 11 mission that I have uncovered in the past few months, the following may be my favorite. It was done by NASA and has even more in capsule footage than the recently released Blu-Ray of Apollo 11. Of course, the new version has far superior imagery because restoration techniques are so much better. But this one is narrated by Wernher von Braun himself and the technique he used is to compare the 1969 effort against the description of a trip to the moon from Jules Verne's 1865 From Earth to the Moon.
As for the speculation that the Apollo program could provide a template for how this nation should take on the challenges of climate change, my responses are:
It might work
If we can restock our seriously depleted supply of "squares."
If we can find leadership that understands that this problem will be at LEAST 1000 times more difficult than the moon landing—and that's the best reason to do it.
The award-winning documentary film Zero Weeks explores the crisis of unpaid leave in America. Immediately following the screening of the film will be a discussion featuring leaders working on paid leave for all.
Starting first with mob-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel and later with Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel’s protege and future mentor to Donald Trump, Epstein’s is just one of the many sexual blackmail operations involving children that are all tied to the same network, which includes elements of organized crime, powerful Washington politicians, lobbyists and “fixers,” and clear links to intelligence as well as the FBI.
Some of the worst memories of my community organizing days in the 1980s involve my trying to convince people that USA’s industrial base was being destroyed by takeovers largely financed with money from organized crime. People just did want to hear the details. They especially did not want to hear that St. Ronnie’s political career had been promoted by the mob. Amazingly, the people most resistant to these facts were the “organized” leftists in CPUSA and SWP. The communists and socialists almost invariably dismissed the details of these organized crime connections, and wanted only to discuss impersonal theoretical forces like “historical materialism” and “capitalist accumulation.” I came to detest talking to them.
For three decades now, I have occasionally referred to this issue of organized crime taking over the USA industrial economy, and hypothesized that one major effect has never been studied: replacing competent industrial management with the criminal mentality and inclinations of the mob-financed corporate raiders. It was Jon Larson at RealEconomics who about 15 years ago pointed me to Thorstein Veblen’s (The Theory of the Leisure Class) explanation of how “Leisure Class” predatory elites are “barbarians: who gain power through force and fraud: “The traits which characterise the predatory and subsequent stages of culture, and which indicate the types of man best fitted to survive under the régime of status, are (in their primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, and disingenuousness — a free resort to force and fraud.” Veblen explained how the rise of criminal predators to economic power creates a pecuniary culture.
“At the basis of the [standard neoclassical microeconomics] ‘solution’ is the belief that there is a trade-off between, say, environmental damage and economic growth (production). And the market failure skews that trade-off towards growth at the expense of environmental health. So all that is needed is some intervention (a tax) that will skew the trade-off back to something more preferable. The problem is that the whole idea that there is a trade-off between protecting our environment and economic production is flawed at the most elemental level.
There is no calculus (which underpins this sort of microeconomic reasoning) that can tell us when a biological system will die. The idea that we can have a ‘safe’ level of pollution, regulated via a price system, is groundless and should not form part of a progressive response. Carbon trading schemes (CTS) are neoliberal constructs which start with the presumption that a free market is the best way to organise allocation.”
Lamber Strether adds: "Worth repeating: Mark Blyth says that “Markets cannot internalize their externalities on a planetary scale. They just can’t. It’s impossible.” "
The 2016 ruling in Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana v. USA is one of the greatest recent events in our system of law. (See Opinion and Order, Case No. 6:15-cv-01517-TC, US District Court for Oregon, Eugene Division. Anne Aiken, Judge, filed 11/10/16.) A group of children between the ages of eight and nineteen filed suit against the federal government, asking the court to order the government to act on climate change, asserting harm from carbon emissions. The federal government’s motion to dismiss was denied. Although I am not involved in the case, I am a lifelong environmentalist, and I teach environmental law (to non-law students). This case is a shining example of what law can be. This case gives me hope that we will not continue to cooperate in our own destruction, and future generations will be able to rely on us to uphold the spirit of the law and purpose behind government....
So Juliana v. United States is a lawsuit that’s being sponsored and facilitated by Our Children’s Trust, which is a nonprofit organization in Eugene, Oregon, that’s been working on atmospheric climate litigation to try to deal with the climate crisis for a while. So our lawsuit was filed in August of 2015, with 21 plaintiffs from all over the country that each have their own complaint, as part of a large declaration that gives a standing to sue the U.S. Federal Government. And basically, we’re asserting that the U.S. Federal Government has known since 1960 that climate change could be potentially disastrous. We have proof from administrations going back all the way to the Johnson administration, saying that they knew climate change could be an issue and they knew that fossil fuel infrastructure was causing it. And the U.S Federal Government still chose to take direct action to continue to perpetuate the fossil fuel industry and the U.S. fossil fuel economy that we have.
And we’re asserting that by taking that direct action, they’ve disproportionately put the rights of young people at risk, and the rights of life liberty and property as promised to us in the Constitution....
Judge Aiken had found that the plaintiffs had standing to sue because they had demonstrated three things: that they had suffered particular, concrete injuries; that the cause of their injuries was “fairly traceable” to the government’s actions; and that the courts had the ability, at least partially, to remedy these injuries. On the first two parts of standing, the government’s case is weakening by the minute, owing especially to the growing body of attribution science—studies published in peer-reviewed journals that directly link extreme weather events, such as huge hurricanes and raging wildfires, to climate change. “Evidence to meet the standing burden has gotten much stronger,” Ann Carlson, an environmental-law professor at U.C.L.A., told me....
....
Here is a lawyerly disquistion on the public trust doctrine from the American Bar Association, “Climate Change Litigation: A Way Forward“, with citations and everything....
“[Olson] began constructing the case eight years ago out of this spartan space now dominated by this paper diorama that winds its way through the office.”
OLSON : So this is a timeline that we put together… [D]uring President Johnson’s administration, they issued a report in 1965 that talked about climate change being a catastrophic threat. Every president knew that burning fossil fuels was causing climate change.
Fifty years of evidence has been amassed by Olson and her team, 36,000 pages in all, to be used in court.
OLSON: Our government, at the highest levels, knew and was briefed on it regularly by the national security community, by the scientific community. They have known for a very long time that it was a big threat.
KROFT: Has the government disputed that government officials have known about this for more than 50 years and been told and warned about it for 50 years?
OLSON: No. They admit that the government has known for over 50 years that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. And they don’t dispute that we are in a danger zone on climate change. And they don’t dispute that climate change is a national security threat and a threat to our economy and a threat to people’s lives and safety. They do not dispute any of those facts of the case.Steve Kroft: So you’ve got them with their own words.
OLSON: We have them with their own words. It’s really the clearest, most compelling evidence I’ve ever had in any case I’ve litigated in over 20 years.
30,000 pages. It looks like there’s a reason Juliana has survived as long as it has.
the recent bounty of exceptional work on the history of neoliberalism [including] Quinn Slobodian, Globalists (Harvard, 2018); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (Zone, 2015); Thomas Biebricher, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Stanford, 2018); Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains, (Viking, 2017); Melinda Cooper, Family Values (Zone, 2017); and Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, (Verso, 2019).
Mirowski observes:
...it seems many activists on the left hold out few ambitions for any sort of ‘fusionist’ project themselves, and instinctively shy away from an explicit political economy, and therefore have not been capable of understanding the relative unity of the forces arrayed against them. If someone suggests otherwise, the tendency has been to disparage such thinking as tainted by ‘conspiracy theories’....
The biggest intellectual failure of the left is its demonstrated incapacity to theorize the role and significance of markets. Curiously, unlike the most sophisticated neoliberals, much of the left still buys into the myth of the government vs. the market. That is, they imagine a separate entity called government existing outside of something called ‘the market’, with the former possessing the wisdom to identify ‘market failures’ and rectify them with judicious ‘regulation’.
After discussing how neoliberals themselves have not agreed on any exact definition of "markets" -- perhaps intentionally ("to render political action by the masses so difficult as to be permanently stymied, both by restricting the franchise but also by the strategic production of ignorance, which renders political understanding inchoate") -- Mirowski gets to his key critique of the left's ignorance concerning neoliberalism:
There are two very important facts about neoliberals that the left needs to take to heart: [1] They do not believe in laissez faire, but are unrepentantly constructivist about government—that is, they acknowledge the tenet that their minions must occupy the government at whatever level (local, national, transnational) and in whatever ways are deemed effective to bring about the sort of ‘reforms’ they believe are urgent; and [2] They take seriously the epistemic premise that people are generally imperfect cognitive beings, and that (their definition of) The Market knows more than any human being ever could about the world. Both principles may seem rather paradoxical given their publicly stated doctrines, something that numerous writers have explored in detail. But those on the Left seem especially incapable of taking either one seriously, and thus to attain understanding how these two principles interact.
Ever since Hillary Clinton lost a presidential election that was uniquely hers to lose, I have thought it almost comical that we have Democratic Party elites and liberal leaders who, on one hand, have repeatedly rejected the argument that the creation and promotion of movement conservatism amounts to a dedicated conspiracy by wealthy reactionaries with manifold ties to Wall Street, and on the other hand, have been almost hysterical in their insistence that the election was stolen from Hillary by a conspiracy run by Vladimir Putin and his Russian minions. Why they reject the one conspiracy theory but embrace the other, is not too difficult to understand, in the context of the USA political system's utter dependency on the rich for campaign contributions.
During my community organizing days in the 1980s, when I was with a radical group within the Democratic Party trying to stop NAFTA, I repeatedly encountered an unwillingness among leftists to even consider direct political action targeting specific individuals responsible for political atrocities. This unwillingness to "name names" approached hysteria when facts were presented that much of the USA industrial base was being bought and looted by "leverage buyout" corporate raiders with significant financial backing from organized crime. I remain of the opinion that this unwillingness to face these facts was a reflection of personal and institutional cowardice to confront the immense political power of Wall Street, and the potentially violent retribution of organized crime. Especially by the late 1980s, when it was clear to those willing to see that Wall Street and organized crime had pretty much merged. (See for example the conclusion by Catherine Austin Fitts, managing director of Dillon, Read & Co. at the time, that the $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989 only made sense if Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts -- and whoever KKR actually was acting on behalf of -- needed to launder billions of dollars of dirty money).
My group was also tracking a number of different economic metrics that by the mid-1990s clearly indicated that we had lost -- and lost big. The significant ones I remember was that the dollar amount of mergers and acquisitions had eclipsed measures such as private expenditures on new plant and equipment, total national research and development spending, and total national capital expenditures.
Today, I think the same type of unwillingness to "name names" is reflected in the insistence that there are no solutions because the real problem is overpopulation. My three decades of political fighting is informed by my apparently unusual historical reading on the USA Whig Party that gave way to the Republican Party in the 1850s, and the "American School" political economy of that now forgotten faction in USA political history. (It is highly instructive that the Wikipedia entry on the American School is flagged for possible violation of "neutral point of view.") One of the key tenets of American School economists was their explicit and often fierce rejection of the "overpopulation" doctrine of British East India Company apologist Thomas Malthus.
