Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 13, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 13, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Thoughts on the Canadian Trucker “Freedom Convoys”

Lambert Strether, February 10, 2022 [Naked Capitalism]

Let me confess at the outset that, sadly, I have come to regard “freedom” as a tell for the expression of today’s brand of sociopathic and therefore highly adaptive libertarianism[1]. So, when I see “the Canadian truckers” (as I will call them) branded as a (highly replicable) “Freedom Convoy,” my back teeth start to itch….

If we ask ourselves what sort of trucker is able to drive their rig to Ottawa, stay there for days, and even render their truck dysfunctional[4], the answer is clear: Owner operators (that is, (100% – 64%) * 50% = 18% of all truckers).[5] Without real data, it’s impossible to be certain, but I’m not the only one who’s come to this conclusion. From Passage:

“It’s safe to assume that the people who made the trek to Ottawa aren’t the same people filing labour violation claims with the federal Labour Program. Rather than exploited workers in a deregulated industry, my guess is that the ‘truckers’ actually present in Ottawa were by and large self-employed owner-operators: the small contingent of wealthier small proprietors who have made out quite well in the new wild-west of for-hire trucking. It was a ‘revolt’ of the petit-bourgeoisie, financially backed[6] by wealthy right-wing grifters.

“This weekend’s idiotic pageantry was thus a political consequence of the decades-long class project to remake the trucking sector, a project which has dismantled a highly unionized industry, formerly made up of relatively well-paying and stable jobs, and replaced it with a poorly regulated labour market of hyper-competition among small owner-operators and other precariously-positioned workers.”

 ….Given that democidal elites are a parsimonious explanation for Covid policy in Canada as well as the United States, we can surmise that the Canadian truckers gave Trudeau and the Liberal Party the excuse and the cover to do what they have wanted to do all along….

One of those organizers was Pat King, a former organizer with the Western Canada separatist party Wexit. King gained notoriety after he helped organize a rally in Red Deer, Alberta, that turned violent, and thanks to his repeated attempts to weaponize his misunderstanding of the law to repeal Alberta’s COVID-19 measures. King is a prolific streamer, using his social media pages to warn of “Anglo-Saxon replacement” and to make disparaging remarks about immigrants and the LGBTQ community, per videos cataloged by Anti-Hate Canada….

TW: Best to read the entire essay, before getting to the excellent, precision targeted end. 

Facilitating Civic and Political Energies for the Common Good 

Ralph Nader [Counterpunch, via Naked Capitalism 2-6-2022] 

Corporate power stems not from votes (corporations don’t vote, yet) nor so much from the campaign money. It comes as a byproduct of the almost wholly unorganized populace not utilizing its powerful exclusive sovereignty (“We the People”) under our Constitution. In our country’s history, it is remarkable what a small percentage of people (often under one percent) when organized and representing broad public concerns, have achieved against all odds. (See my book, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, 2016).

Resource Limits to American Capitalism & The Predator State Today (interview)

James Galbraith [GPE Newdocs, via Naked Capitalism 2-10-2022]

GALBRAITH:  ….the development of the system [described by Galbraith’s father] does start really in the early 1930s. It starts with Roosevelt’s New Deal. I mean, you had an earlier system which was very unstable; which went through an explosive period of growth in the 1920s and then collapsed. And the collapse didn’t go away. It lasted for four very long and painful years in which the factories were idle and the people on the farms couldn’t sell their products and then there was mass migration and all kinds of ecological disaster.

Then Roosevelt in the New Deal created an entirely different structure within which the American economy could function. And that was a federal project and it culminated in the vast industrial mobilization at the time of the Second World War.

FRIES: Let’s turn now to the shift from the form of American capitalism described by your father in The New Industrial State to what you describe in The Predator State as a corporate republic. So talk now about your argument that when weakened by adversity, the US model was destabilized from within and made vulnerable to fraud, predation, and looting.

GALBRAITH: Here’s another case where we can talk a little bit about convergence between the late Soviet model and what happened in the United States. In the Soviet Union when it was no longer profitable or no longer possible to produce in the previously existing structures, the people who had control of the assets liquidated them….

GALBRAITH: Well to begin with it wasn’t my father who directly advised the Chinese. Actually, I did that. In the 1990’s I had for four years a position in a consultancy under the United Nations Development Program as chief technical advisor to the State Planning Commission for Macroeconomic Reform. It was mostly an exercise in providing training and exposure to the people who were working there, rather than direct policy advice.

The interesting thing though is that when I got there in 1993, I got a whiff of a fact that I’ve later confirmed through the work of a young economist named Isabella Weber who has written on this in a very important book about China. The people I was dealing with were very, very familiar, especially, with the American experience with price control in the Second World War. Which was my father’s doing.

And the things that they knew about it were what he’d written about it. And they had his books. They’d been translated internally. They’d studied them. And so this fed into if you like the historic Chinese economic management. Which has always been about stabilizing prices, agricultural prices and then the new problem was industrial prices. And that’s where they drew on my father’s work.

That approach is completely opposite to the idea in Western economics that the prices are supposed to adjust. And that the markets are supposed to, you know, let them go up and down and do whatever. Now that’s just not the way it works.

In the thousands of years of Chinese history, the emperor has always bought the grain when it was cheap and sold it when it was expensive in order to keep the peasants from rising up in revolt. And by and large, it worked. So this is a big difference.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy –February 6, 2022 by Tony Wikrent

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy –February 6, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Mark Blyth – Asset Manager Capitalism

Mark Blythe [Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, February 2, 2022, via YouTube]

TW: After an excellent overview of the economic work focused on inequality, and the emergence of the concept of Asset Manager Capitalism, Blythe explains how this new form of capitalism is focused entirely on preservation of wealth, at the expense of entrepreneurship and increasing productivity. Asset Manager Capitalism also locks society into Piketty’s model equation of returns to capital increasing at the expense of returns to labor. Blythe then explains the very important consequences for the fight to stop climate change: the financiers will finance a green New Deal Deal, but only if governments eliminate entirely any risk of loss to investors. This is where the Federal Reserve comes in. In Blythe’s words: “You can get a transition, but forget the ‘just” part.” 

Notice Blythe’s discussion of the slide “Who actually owns capital?” This annihilates the presently reigning model of shareholder capitalism. In 1945, USA households directly owned 94 percent of USA corporate shares. Today, just three asset management firms — Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard — own 20 percent of every company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, and control 80 percent of all exchange traded funds (ETFs). 

Alexander Hamilton’s proposal that no one should ever have more than 30 votes in a company, no matter how many shares they own, is an obvious solution to this problem. No wonder hardly anyone knows about this aspect of Hamilton’s work. Under Asset Manager Capitalism, shares in a company are not the means of providing investment capital, but rather are assets to generate fees. 

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Credit Traders Lack Edge in Fed’s New Regime: The corporate bond market used to be the economy’s early warning signal. That’s no longer the case.

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 1-31-2022]

Citadel Securities: how the Wall Street outsider became ‘the Amazon of financial markets’ 

[Financial Times, via The Big Picture 1-31-2022]

Involved in more than 25 per cent of all US stock trades, and tipped to float, the company is the focus of SEC scrutiny 

“America Is Facing a Great Talent Recession”

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-4-2022]

“The deeper problem is that the talent model that has served America so well, especially since World War II, is breaking down. Korn Ferry, a human resources consultancy, warns that “the United States faces one of the most alarming talent crunches of any country” in its 20-country study. The institutions, practices and mind-set that enabled the U.S. to create a workforce capable of powering the world’s biggest and most dynamic economy are threatened by decay, disarray and disruption. And that is happening while China, a rival hostile power that poses an even greater challenge than the USSR once did, pulls ahead of it in world-defining technology. Once galvanized to action by the USSR’s launch of Sputnik, the U.S. now witnesses the equivalent of the launch of a dozen Sputniks from Beijing every year, with no corresponding response. In that respect, the Covid pandemic provides both a timely warning and a spur: a warning of what happens to a historically rumbustious economy when workers become scarce, and a spur to fixing America’s long-term talent and labor-supply problems while there is still time…. The country needs to add a new strand to educational reform: not just giving a helping hand to the poor or average performers but also identifying and nurturing the superstars who will help the U.S. beat back the challenge from Xi Jinping’s China.” • Yeah, that’s the trouble: Too much of a helping hand to the poor….

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 30, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 30, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Yuan overtakes yen in global transaction volume 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-26-2022]

China in the Middle East 

Chas W. Freeman, Jr. [Naked Capitalism 1-27-2022]

How Supply-Side Reaganomics is linked to the slave holding Confederacy

Heather Cox Richardson, January 27, 2022 [Letters from an American]

On January 21, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained to the World Economic Forum that the Biden administration rejected Republican supply-side economics, ushered in during the Reagan administration. That system relied on tax cuts and aggressive deregulation to spark private capital—the supply side—to drive the economy. Supply-side economics has not increased growth, Yellen said, while it has failed to address climate change and has shifted money upward as it moved the burden of taxes from capital and put it on workers.

Biden’s economic policy, Yellen explained, rejected this philosophy in favor of what she calls “modern supply-side economics.” This term appears to be intended to suggest a middle ground between the supply-side economics of the 1980s, which focused on putting money in the hands of the wealthy, and the post–World War II idea that the government should manage the economy by investing in infrastructure and a social safety net.

Biden’s plan, Yellen explained, has focused on “labor supply, human capital, public infrastructure, R&D, and investments in a sustainable environment.” Rather than focusing on putting money into the hands of the “demand side” of the economy—consumers—it focuses on developing a strong labor force in a strong democracy to create growth through hard work and innovation.

In its emphasis on education and access to resources, the Biden administration’s economic policy echoes the ideology Abraham Lincoln articulated in 1859. Wealthy southern enslavers insisted the government should simply defend the property rights of the wealthy, who would amass wealth that they would then put to its best use to develop the country. But Lincoln argued that the government should nurture the country’s laborers, who were the nation’s true innovators and hardest workers and who, if properly supported, would move the country forward much faster than a few wealthy men would.

The pandemic

The American sickness

[Indignity, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-27-2022]

“Across this large and otherwise fractious country, in its famous “blue states” and “red states” alike, the United States is converging on an ever-more-clearly articulated answer to the coronavirus pandemic: the pursuit, in defiance of most of the rest of the world, of a nationwide Unlimited Covid policy….. But the movement for Unlimited Covid has a uniquely American character. It represents an informal yet powerful collaboration between the country’s two mutually hostile political parties, across two different presidential administrations. The country’s pandemic response was initially defined by Trump, who chose to deny the risks of the virus, to suppress testing to keep official case counts low, and to delay any mobilization to produce tests or protective equipment. Facing a reelection campaign, and encouraged by a party line that the disease would be no worse than seasonal influenza, Trump and the Republican Party counted on allowing the virus to spread freely, generating natural herd immunity, after which they hoped it would subside on its own. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party took power at the beginning of 2021, claiming a mandate to change the way the country handled the pandemic. In line with the party’s technocratic spirit, and with the benefit of the newly available vaccines, Biden quickly launched a mass immunization program. That same technocratic outlook, however, led the administration to pursue what it hoped could be the most narrowly efficient strategy against the coronavirus—a domestic vaccination program only, rather than promoting international immunization, and without trying to catch up with the sort of testing, tracing, and targeted suppression that other countries had deployed. When the virus kept mutating and proved itself able to spread even among vaccinated people, the Biden administration had not stockpiled tests or masks with which to respond to new waves. Caught up in its promise of a return to normalcy, and unable to narrowly tailor closures to meet specific problems, the administration failed to bring the country to a pandemic-fighting footing and allowed economic relief measures to expire. In the end, the country settled on a contest between the original Republican program of counting on the unchecked virus to produce national herd immunity and a Democratic program of counting on a combination of vaccines and infections to produce national herd immunity. Although the details of it played out as partisan conflict—right-wing commenters went so far as to obfuscate their own vaccinations, to undermine Biden’s efforts—the result either way was Unlimited Covid. By redefining its failure to control the coronavirus as a success, the United States has rewritten its social contract and reshaped the expectations of its people.”

Lambert Strether adds: “The ruling class will have slaughtered a million Americans and gotten away clean. It’s a remarkable achievement. These impressive numbers are, well, let’s be polite and say “world historical.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 23, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 23, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

How to Prepare for Climate Change’s Most Immediate Impacts 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 1-18-2022]

Strategic Political Economy

1/25 Live Chat: The Author Of “Davos Man”

David Sirota [The Daily Poster, January 7, 2022]

New York Times reporter Peter Goodman will talk to Daily Poster subscribers about his new book on billionaires conquering the world….

In his new book Davos Man — How the Billionaires Devoured the World, Goodman delivers a searing exposé of how the global billionaire class has engineered a bottom-up transfer of wealth that has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. The book lays bare the roots of Trump, Brexit, and anti-democratic movements sweeping the globe, exposing how wealthy executives perpetuated the agony of the pandemic by monopolizing the benefits of COVID vaccines and laying the groundwork for the rise of Omicron.

RICH AMERICANS’ OUTSIZED ROLE IN ELECTING REPRESENTATIVES

[Public Citizen, January 18, 2022, via The Daily Poster, January 19, 2022]

A new report finds two-thirds of all “maxed-out” campaign donations to members of Congress came from the richest 10 percent of zip codes across the U.S., and 25 percent of all maxed-out contributions were from the wealthiest one percent of zip codes. The study, authored by consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, also shows that zip codes with mostly white residents gave five times the amount of maxed-out contributions per capita as zip codes with mostly Black residents. “This study confirms that the very wealthiest Americans play an immensely greater role than regular voters in choosing our elected officials, and that members of Congress have a strong incentive to align their positions with wealthy donors’ interests,” said Taylor Lincoln, Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division research director and author of the study. The Freedom to Vote Act — one of two federal bills under debate that creates stronger protections for voters — would offer a six-to-one match on political contributions of $200 or less and allow congressional candidates to raise campaign cash without relying on the wealthiest donors, as long as they agree to forgo donations over $1,000.

'Time for Citizens United to Go': US Oligarchs Poured $1.2 Billion Into 2020 Elections

Jake Johnson, January 21, 2022 [Common Dreams]

The figure represents a 39-fold increase compared to spending in 2010, the first election held after the widely decried ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 16, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 16, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-2022]

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Heather Cox Richardson, January 14, 2022 [Letters from an American]

Yesterday, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s requirement that businesses with more than 100 employees address the coronavirus pandemic by making employees either get vaccines or, if they choose not to be vaccinated, to test weekly and wear a mask at work….

In his opinion, Gorsuch explicitly raised the concept of the “nondelegation doctrine” and the related concept of the “major questions doctrine.” The nondelegation doctrine relies on our government’s separation of powers. It says that, as its own branch of government, Congress cannot delegate regulatory authority to the executive branch, where agencies like OSHA live.

But, since Congress has, in fact, been delegating authority to the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington, those who want to reduce federal authority sometimes rely instead on the more limited major questions doctrine, which says that although Congress can delegate minor authority to administrative agencies, it cannot delegate major questions (although just how to define a major question is unclear).

A recent study by University of Southern California professor of public policy Dr. Pamela Clouser McCann and University of Michigan professor of social science Dr. Charles R. Shipan, both experts on intergovernmental delegation, found that 99% of today’s federal laws involve delegation. Unwinding them and requiring Congress to make all its own regulatory decisions would paralyze the modern government.

Those who support the idea of nondelegation argue that it guarantees government by the people rather than by an unelected bureaucracy, and this is a worthy thought. But unfortunately, it depends on the goodwill of those elected to state legislatures, and because those lawmakers also get to decide who votes in their states, that goodwill can be thin on the ground.

At heart, this is the same states’ rights argument that the U.S. has grappled with since the 1830s. Since that time, while some state legislatures have used their power to reflect the will of the people, others have limited the vote, putting a small group of people into power. Once in power, they have used the state government to promote their own interests. States’ rights advocates have consistently said that any federal interference with a state’s unfair laws is tyranny…

Since the 1930s, though, lawmakers have used the federal government to combat unfair state laws. They have regulated businesses when state lawmakers wouldn’t, protected civil rights from discriminatory state laws, and, ultimately, guaranteed the right to vote in states that kept their citizens from the polls, with the expectation that if everyone could vote, they would, indeed, create state governments that reflected the will of the majority..

TW: “lawmakers have used the federal government to combat unfair state laws.” In other words, guarantee to each state a [civic] republican form of government. 

The Republicans’ Death Panel Finally Emerges! The Supreme Court’s Republican Six rule that the government lacks the power to fight a pandemic.

Harold Meyerson, January 13, 2022 [The American Prospect]

For a bunch of jurists who claim to adhere to textualism, the six Court right-wingers gave no indication that they’d actually read the act that established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which was signed into law by left-winger Richard Nixon. That law gives OSHA the authority to protect workers “exposed to grave danger” from “substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 9, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 9, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Yes, Maggie, There Is Such a Thing as “Society”

Lambert Strether, January 3, 2022 [Naked Capitalism]

The Iron Lady, the late Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, famously remarked: “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

In this short and simple post, I will show that we can prove Thatcher wrong, using what we have learned about airborne transmission in the current pandemic. First, I will present an experiment, and then I will show why it is disproves Thatcher (and, if one should wish to undertake the task, a lot of libertarian and libertarian-adjacent foofra about “methodological individualism” as well, although that is a task for another day).

First, the experiment. (I am using The Asahi Shimbun‘s coverage; here is the original study.) Here is a photo of the setup….

Now, let’s reframe the experiment as a model, the sort of simple model that pseudo-Nobel prize-winning economists construct. Let’s model “interactive coexistence” of humans or “persistent social interaction” as two mannequins locked in a box together, sharing air. This is, in fact, not as far-fetched a model of humanity as it seems at first. We are an indoor species:

“We spend more time in our homes, than whales spend submerged beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Dr. Richard Corsi of Portland State University, who has studied indoor air quality for 30 years. “The average American lives to 79 and spends 70 of those 79 years inside buildings.”

And unless we are Ted Kaczynski, in solitary confinement, leaving on the street, or Simeon Stylites — all surely edge cases — we spend our time indoors with others, sharing air. In other words, breathing is a social relation[2]. We have the most material social relationship possible — sharing air — between two individuals, and they do not have to be family. Ergo, Maggie Thatcher is wrong….

It’s interesting to rethink the arguments for “freedom” — a word, though not a concept, I am coming to loathe — in terms of seat belts or cigarette smoking. Ultimately, seat belts became mandatory, and cigarette smoking in shared air was forbidden. Auto accidents and cancer weren’t multiplying exponentially in the space of days, however….

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-7-2022]

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“The liberty of local bullies”

Noah Smith [Noahpinion, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-4-2021]

“I have often remarked in the past how libertarianism – at least, its modern American manifestation – is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call ‘local bullies.’ The modern American libertarian ideology does not deal with the issue of local bullies. In the world envisioned by Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and other foundational thinkers of the movement, there are only two levels to society – the government (the ‘big bully’) and the individual. If your freedom is not being taken away by the biggest bully that exists, your freedom is not being taken away at all.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 2, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 2, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

[Youtube, 

Happy new year! 

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Strategic Political Economy

“The collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it”

Heather Cox Richardson, December 26, 2021 [Letters from an American]

...the collapse of the USSR gave the branch of the Republican Party that wanted to destroy the New Deal confidence that their ideology was right. Believing that their ideology of radical individualism had destroyed the USSR, these so-called Movement Conservatives very deliberately set out to destroy what they saw as Soviet-like socialist ideology at home. As anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home. Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn't have nuclear weapons.”

In the 1990s, they turned their firepower on those they considered insufficiently committed to free enterprise, including traditional Republicans who agreed with Democrats that the government should regulate the economy, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. Movement Conservatives called these traditional Republicans “Republicans in Name Only” or RINOs and said that, along with Democrats, such RINOs were bringing “socialism” to America.

With the “evil empire,” as President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union, no longer a viable enemy, Movement Conservatives, aided by new talk radio hosts, increasingly demonized their domestic political opponents. As they strengthened their hold on the Republican Party, Movement Conservatives cut taxes, slashed the social safety net, and deregulated the economy.

In the 1990s, as well-connected businessmen began to gather wealth and power in the former Soviet republics, that deregulation made the US and the UK attractive places for these oligarchs to place their illicit money. According to a fascinating new study from Chatham House about the UK, that investment ultimately weakened the rule of law. The study concerns the UK alone, but since the UK and US are by far the world’s top exporters of financial services, many of the report’s findings are suggestive for the US as well….

The financial deregulation that made the US a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, after the September 11 attacks on the US, Congress in 2001 passed the PATRIOT Act to address the threat of terrorism. The law took on money laundering and the illicit funding of terrorism, requiring financial institutions to inspect large sums of money passing through them. But the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) exempted many real estate deals from the new regulations.

In the years since, the United States has become one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Experts say that hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the US every year. As Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted last year, “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns, but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”

….

In some ways, the collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it. In the past thirty years, we have torn ourselves apart as  politicians adhering to an extreme ideology demonized their opponents. That demonization is escalating now as Republican radicals who were born after the collapse of the USSR and who therefore see their primary enemies as Democrats, are moving the Republican Party even further to the right. North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn, for example, was born in 1995.

That demonization has also helped to justify the deregulation of our economy and then the illicit money from the rising oligarchs it attracted, money that has corrupted our democratic system. 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 26, 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 26, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Twitter

https://twitter.com/MazzucatoM/status/1473641220941484043

Capitalism Didn’t Make the iPhone, You iMbecile

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The creation of the entire new era of computers and information technology can be precisely traced back to one event, when U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory and the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research convened a seminar to deliberately share the technologies developed by various government programs and projects during World War Two:

August 1946: The Moore School Lectures

[Wikipedia]

The Moore School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was at the center of developments in high-speed electronic computing in 1946. On February 14 of that year it had publicly unveiled the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, developed in secret beginning in 1943 for the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. Prior even to the ENIAC's completion, work had begun on a second-generation electronic digital computer, the EDVAC, which incorporated the stored program model. Work at the Moore School attracted researchers including John von Neumann, who served as a consultant to the EDVAC project, and Stan Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis of the Manhattan Project, who arrived to run one of the first major programs written for the ENIAC, a mathematical simulation for the hydrogen bomb project…. The 8-week course was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Army's Ordnance Department and the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research, who promised (by verbal authorizations) the $3,000 requested to cover lecturer salaries and fees and $4,000 for travel, printing, and overhead. ($1,569 over this figure was ultimately claimed.)

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 19, 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 19, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Political Philosophies and Positive Political Psychology: Inter-Disciplinary Framework for the Common Good

Masaya Kobayashi [Frontiers in Psycholog, via Mike Norman Economics 12-14-2021]

This manuscript explores the relationship between positive psychology and political philosophy, revealing an inter-disciplinary approach that speaks to the concerns of the common good. Since positive psychology has been expanding its reach into social and political spheres, its relationship to philosophical arguments has been worthy of exploration. Positive psychology is associated with utilitarianism, and aspects of hedonic psychology. However, an alternative concept of eudaimonic well-being has enabled this psychology to have links to other political philosophies. Therefore, this manuscript provides an overview of contemporary political philosophies: first, it discusses the debate between liberalism and communitarianism, and secondly, it summarizes the subsequent developments of liberal perfectionism, capability approach, and deliberative democracy. Then, the configuration of these political philosophies is indicated by the figure of two axes of “individual/collective” and “ethical/non-ethical.” The following section compiles the inter-relationships between the conceptions of citizenship, justice, and well-being, regarding the main political philosophies: egoism, utilitarianism, libertarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, and conservatism. Utilitarianism is associated with happiness, while liberalism and libertarianism rely on the concept of rights, which is almost equal to the idea of justice. Accordingly, utilitarianism is a philosophy of well-being, while liberalism and libertarianism are philosophies of justice. However, there is little connection between well-being and justice in these philosophies because the two kinds of philosophies are incompatible. The latter kind criticizes the former because the maximization of happiness can infringe on people’s rights. Moreover, these philosophies do not particularly value citizenship. In contrast, communitarianism is intrinsically the political philosophy of citizenship most attuned to increasing well-being, and it can connect an idea of justice with well-being. The final part offers a framework to develop an inter-disciplinary collaboration. Positive psychology can provide the empirical basis of the two axes above concerning political philosophies. On the other hand, the correspondence makes the character of political philosophies clearer. While libertarianism and liberalism correspond to psychology as usual, utilitarianism and communitarianism correspond to positive psychology, and the latter can be regarded as positive political philosophies. This recognition leads to the interdisciplinary framework, enabling multi-disciplinary collaboration, including work with the social sciences, which could benefit the common good….

...Sandel typically argued for the resurgence of republicanism as a public philosophy in America instead of the liberalism that has been dominant since WWII (Sandel, 1996). Republicanism originates in res publica in ancient Greek and Rome, and it means active political participation for self-government by people with civic virtue. If people lack civic virtue, they tend to fall into political apathy or become manipulated by demagogues. Thus, civic virtue has a vital role in making democracy sound and better in quality.

Although liberalism sometimes supports republicanism, it respects the institutional mechanism against dictatorship, typically separation of powers. Accordingly, it sometimes supports people’s political participation: this version is liberal republicanism (Ackerman, 1993/2000). Nevertheless, liberalism, including even this version, tends to disregard the ethical aspect of republicanism. In contrast, communitarianism emphasizes the vital significance of civic virtue for political participation. It advocates civic virtue as one of the essential human virtues, and therefore it frequently accompanies republicanism to be termed communitarian republicanism.

In sum, while liberalism and libertarianism are individualist and non-ethical, especially concerning public spheres, communitarianism has an ethical and communal (or public) orientation: it attaches importance to various collaborative activities and communities, as well as to the good life sustained by morality and virtue, not only in private lives but also in public lives.

“The force of historical decline.”

Haydar Khan [The Scrum, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-17-2021] Galbraith v. Thiel. 

Galbraith: “The institutional, infrastructure, resource basis, and psychological foundations for a Keynesian revival no longer exist.” 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 12, 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 12, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

… the playing fields of Eton:

x

The Pandemic That Capitalism Made 

Umair Haque, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-2021]

It Would Cost Less to Vaccinate the World Than Big Pharma Earns in Vaccine Profits. If That Doesn’t Make Sense…That’s Because It Doesn’t

Do you ever wonder about those pharma TV commercials, and why any company would pay millions to have a speed-talker drone on about bad side-effects for 30 seconds? The intended result is what Haque writes about former CDC Director Tom Frieden's comments in Europe that “Big Pharma is war profiteering” off COVID: 

Why does he say that? Well, first note that he had to head to the UK, to say it on Dispatches, which is one of the nation’s finest and most hardest-hitting news programs. In other words, nobody in America would even run the story.

Normalizing Corruption: The Biden White House purports to be worried about corruption — just not the kind now dominating American politics.

Andrew Perez, December 9, 2021 [Daily Poster].

“Corruption robs citizens of equal access to vital services, denying the right to quality health care, public safety, and education,” the Biden administration wrote Monday [report], adding that corruption ‘has been shown to significantly curtail the ability of states to respond effectively to public health crises.’ The Biden administration, as it turns out, is a perfect example of this: Every policy solution they propose involves some sort of corporate giveaway. This is the kind of institutionalized and legalized bribery that’s almost never discussed — the corruption that’s responsible for high health care costs and poor health care outcomes in the U.S., and that has made it effectively impossible for lawmakers to rationally respond to the COVID-19 pandemic here and around the globe. As if to drive the problem home, within hours of releasing their corruption report, the Biden White House was flailing on TV trying to defend an overly complex COVID testing plan that will keep Americans paying inflated retail prices for at-home tests with the hope that their health insurer will agree to reimburse them at some later point. This plan is wildly impractical, but it would be a boon for the same testing manufacturer that just so happened to start paying Biden’s former top aide shortly after Biden was elected president.” • Ouch. That petty? More: “One company that stands to benefit from this convoluted testing regime is Abbott Laboratories, which hired Biden’s former legislative affairs director Sudafi Henry shortly after the 2020 election. Abbott executives and employees donated $174,000 to Biden’s presidential campaign, according to OpenSecrets. Abbott has dominated the at-home test market in the U.S., in large part because the Biden administration has failed to quickly approve other rapid tests.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 5, 2021

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 5, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

The pandemic and (de)population policy

Background: Henry Kissinger’s December 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200, Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM 200)

“Omicron’s Message”

[Nonzero, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-2-2021]

“[T]he acceleration of global vaccination… is something the world’s most powerful leaders aren’t focused on. If they were focused on it, we’d be seeing the unfolding of a project that looked something like this: (1) loosening the intellectual property rights enjoyed by vaccine makers; (2) compelling them to share the know-how that would allow factories around the world to take advantage of this loosening and ramp up vaccine production; and (3) making sure, with subsidies if necessary, that (a) the vaccine makers who thus sacrifice profits are rewarded amply enough to preserve their incentive to innovate; and (b) the newly abundant vaccines are inexpensive, especially in low-income countries. So incompetent are the world’s leaders that they can’t even get to step 1 of this project.” • Incompetence is the charitable explanation.

2.5 Million Nurses Demand UN Probe Into ‘Covid-19 Criminals’ Blocking Patent Waiver

[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2021]

More than two million nurses from 28 countries across the globe filed a complaint Monday calling on the United Nations to investigate the rich countries that are blocking a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, an appeal that came as public health experts raced to understand the newly detected Omicron variant.

In a detailed letter addressed to Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Physical and Mental Health, dozens of nursing unions noted that "the end of this pandemic is nowhere in sight" as "Covid-19 cases continue to soar in numerous parts of the world, while pharmaceutical companies and governments have failed to ensure that critical treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably in order to respond to the pandemic."

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 28, 2021

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 28, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Destroying Democracy Is Central to the Privatization of Public Goods 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-2021]

How Delaware Became the World’s Biggest Offshore Haven 

[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 11-21-2021]

The American Ruling Class Has Never Let Us Build Back Better 

[Jacobin, via The Daily Poster, November 21, 2021]

The defeat of Reconstruction was the nation’s first failure to build back better, and it set the stage for the failures that followed. American austerity politics found their first full expression during this period, pivoting on an ideological turn to classical liberalism within the Republican Party. The events of the 1870s created a pattern of missed opportunities and reactionary blowback that has since been repeated time and again.”

Fighting the Inflation Profiteers

David Dayen, November 24, 2021 [The American Prospect]

Companies are raising prices well above increases in their costs. The only antidote is to finally take action against corporate power….

“Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices,” reads a Wall Street Journal storyexplaining that around two-thirds of the largest publicly traded companies are showing profit margins higher today than they did in 2019, before the pandemic. Over 100 companies show profit margins of 50 percent or more above those 2019 levels…. Corporate executives are not hiding their handiwork; instead, they’re boasting about it in financial disclosures and earnings calls. “We have not seen any material reaction from consumers,” said the chief financial officer of Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer goods company, which has hiked prices three times in the past year. “What we are very good at is pricing,” said Colgate-Palmolive’s CEO. “We find that taking several small price increases is more effective than one large price jump,” added the CFO of Unilever. Dollar Tree, a discount store which has the word “dollar” in its name, has decided to permanently set its price point at $1.25, stating specifically that the move is “not a reaction to short-term or transitory market conditions.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 21, 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 21, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Conservative / Libertarian Drive to Civil War

Notes on an Authoritarian Conspiracy: Inside the Claremont Institute’s “79 Days to Inauguration”

[The Bulwark, via The Big Picture 11-14-2021]

... report published in mid-October 2020 by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) called “79 Days to Inauguration,” prepared by “Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, and media . . . coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of wargames.”

Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

….Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen “posses” of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office….

are via emailThere’s more irony in how the task force imagines right-wing gangs would operate during such a period: with quiet discipline and in cooperation with law enforcement…. In reading the report, it becomes clear that task force participants see law enforcement as a critical adjunct to the more traditional political actors and that they believe law enforcement could act with greater impunity and force, independent from—and at times in defiance of—elected leaders…. Earlier this year the Claremont Institute created a Sheriffs Fellowship program. Claremont claims that this program will offer “training of unparalleled depth and excellence in American political thought and institutions.” But then, this is the same group that produced a report hoping that “several sheriffs in conservative counties” would give groups like the Proud Boys actual legal authority.

According to ConservativeTransparency.org, the largest funders of the Claremont Institute are the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($300,000 to $400,000 a year for the past several years; the John M. Olin Foundation ($100,000 annually), and The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation ($100,000 annually). The Sarah Scaife Foundation is part of the late Richard Mellon Scaife network, whose wealth was inherited from the Mellon banking family.In a healthy republic, dedicated to promoting the General Welfare, the rich would not be allowed to pass massive wealth from from one generation to another, thus solving the two interrelated problems of wealth inequality, and the worsening sclerosis and maintenance deprivation of the national economy and physical infrastructure. The Wikipedia entry states that in April 2021, Claremont senior fellow Glenn Ellmers wrote an essay in Claremont's The American Mind,  “ “Conservatism” is no Longer Enough: All hands on deck as we enter the counter-revolutionary moment,” arguing that the United States had been destroyed by internal enemies and that

“Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.... “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 11-14-2021]

Threats of violence have become commonplace among a significant part of the party, as historians and those who study democracy warn of a dark shift in American politics. 

At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.

“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 14, 2021

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 14, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

China files 2.5 times more patent applications than U.S. in 2020

[Xinhua, via Mike Norman Economics 11-8-2021]

China's intellectual property (IP) office led the world in 2020 by reporting 1.5 million patent applications, 2.5 times more than the United States, which ranked second, the World

Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said on Monday....Industrial design is another area where China has taken the lead, followed by the EU, South Korea, the United States and Turkey.…

Civic republicanism and the looming civil war

“Madison Saw Something in the Constitution We Should Open Our Eyes To” 

[Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2021] This is very good. The scene-setting:

Not content to simply count on the traditional midterm swing against the president’s party, Republicans are set to gerrymander their way to a House majority next year…. It is true that Democrats have pursued their own aggressive gerrymanders in Maryland and Illinois, but it is also true that the Democratic Party is committed, through its voting rights bills, to ending partisan gerrymandering altogether…. The larger context of the Republican Party’s attempt to gerrymander itself into a House majority is its successful effort to gerrymander itself into long-term control of state legislatures across the country. In Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other states, Republicans have built legislative majorities sturdy enough to withstand all but the most crushing ‘blue wave.’ And in the age of Donald Trump, they are using their majorities to seize control of election administration in states all over the country, on the basis of an outlandish but still influential claim that the Constitution gives sovereign power over elections to state legislatures…. 

In Article IV, Section 4, the Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

In this vision of the Guarantee Clause, the touchstone for “a republican form of government” is political equality, and when a state imposes political inequality beyond a certain point, Congress or the federal courts step in to restore the balance…. Still, a broad understanding of the Guarantee Clause might be a potent weapon for Congress if a Democratic majority ever worked up the will to go on the offensive against state legislatures that violated basic principles of political equality.

“An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy”

Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol]

The Bulwark, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2021]

“Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger. The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020 and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.”

Lambert Strether: If you take Bouie’s article above seriously, this is not true. It takes a long time to take control of state legislatures, and it also takes time to seize control over election administration. Again, it’s not an issue of personality. It’s a party movement that began before Trump, and would continue if (say) Chris Christie ran and won in 2024.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 7, 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 7, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2021]

Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America's billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So we're talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don't….

Billionaires should not exist. They should have their power and wealth taken from them, and the steering wheel of humanity should be given to the ordinary people who are infinitely more qualified to navigate us through the rough waters ahead for our species.

 

The Democracy Crisis That Is Never Discussed

David Sirota and Andrew Perez [The Daily Poster, November 2, 2021]

In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors. Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” ….New polling demonstrates the silencing effect that systemic corruption is having on voter preferences:

• 82 percent of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare — and this is voters’ “top priority” for Democrats’ social spending bill, according to survey data from Morning Consult. Conservative Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill, following an aggressive lobbying campaign by health insurers who enjoy massive profits from the privatized Medicare Advantage program.
• Another top priority for voters is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 72 percent saying they support the idea, according to Morning Consult. Sinema and a few House Democrats backed by the pharmaceutical industry managed to block the party’s original drug pricing measure from being put into the reconciliation bill….

This Is The Hostile Takeover

Taken together, this is the democracy crisis thrumming underneath all the media noise — the day-to-day erosion of democracy by corporations that use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which then erodes Americans’ faith in their government and leads to all the down-ballot that unfolded on Tuesday night.

And yet this erosion does not get discussed in a media-directed democracy discourse that focuses almost exclusively on the January 6th insurrection or Republican efforts to deny election results and limit voting.

That dichotomy is an expression of corporate power. Corruption is omitted from most corporate media coverage because their corporate sponsors are the ones doing the vote-buying. By contrast, the insurrection and GOP assault on voting are safe topics for corporate media, because they do not threaten the power of the media’s corporate sponsors.

The US Coast Survey under Bache - excerpt from Dupree, Science in the Federal Government - HAWB

HAWB - How America Was Built

Though the US Constitution contains several explicit and implied benedictions on science, the history of national scientific institutions is one of struggle to exist on precarious and often miserly Congressional spending. Nonetheless, the national governments support and promotion of scientific inquiry and invention is the basis of the USA’s development as an industrial superpower. It is a history that flatly contradicts the conservative and libertarian myths of American economic development driven by hardy risk-taking entrepreneurs. No better examples exist than today’s computers and cell phones, which are comprised of scores of technologies, every single one of which began as one or another USA federal government research program.  

Another example is steam engine design and building, which was not put onto a scientific footing until the 1850s when Captain Benjamin Franklin Isherwood of the U.S. Navy began a careful and meticulous collection of the operating characteristics of every marine and naval steam engine he could find. Isherwood would go on to become the Admiral in charge of the Bureau of Steam Navigation during the Civil War, overseeing the expansion of the fleet from around 50 steam vessels to over 600 – a quarter with steam engines of his own design. After the war, Isherwood created a curriculum for the Naval Academy to teach officers how to properly command a steamship, which was copied around the world, and formed the foundation for a new avocation, that of mechanical engineer.  

Today, the idea of “progress” has been bowdlerized by corporate ad campaigns for “new and improved,” and a new awareness of the damage to the environment caused by modern industrial societies seeking the cheapest means to the greatest profit. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of progress was cherished and revered, for it meant quest to free humanity from the scarcity, toil, drudgery, and disease of humanity’s struggles against the forces of nature, at a time when life expectancy limited to 30s to 40s years. 

“The great object of the institution of civil government,” President John Quincy Adams declared in his first annual message to Congress, December 6, 1825,

“is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established…. moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.”

In the Introduction to his landmark history, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Harvard University Press, 1957), — sponsored by Sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — A. Hunter Dupree wrote 

“…all the institutions of the country in which science exists have found the actions of the government in conducting research and and in contracting for it are factors of first importance…. Indeed, before the rise of the universities, private foundations, and industrial laboratories, the fate of science rested more exclusively with the government than it did later…. The idea that the federal government should become the patron of science was easily within the grasp of the framers of the Constitution. As educated men of the eighteenth century they knew that European governments had often supported science, and their set of fundamental values led them to hold all branches of philosophy in high regard.”