Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 22, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 22, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Buffalo mass shooting

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 5-16-2022]

x

.

Real Scarcity Informed Buffalo Shooter’s Racist Conspiracy 

[Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 5-18-2022]

Addressing this violence, though, also requires considering the role of scarcity — not a conspiracy theory, but a very real system of extreme inequality and ecological destruction. It is a system in which the most wealthy and powerful continue to see their wealth and power grow — at the expense of the masses. Faced with actual strained resources and environmental calamity, some of these forsaken people are turning to dark fantasies like the “great replacement theory” to make sense of it all.

It’s Time To Talk About Capitalism — The shooting in Buffalo spotlights the taboo topic we must discuss: the link between hypercapitalism and racism.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook, May 16, 2022 [The Lever]

Particularly in the U.S. — where the socialist branch of the labor movement that brought us the eight-hour workday, the weekend, and Social Security was crushed in the McCarthy era and never recovered — we must start explaining the virtues of worker control over production and worker power in politics, and how it addresses the problem we face: The rich make every economic decision in society, while treating workers as subhuman.

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children,” King said.

The one percent — like Rupert Murdoch, the misanthropic owner of Fox News, and TV host Tucker Carlson — uses racism to get a portion of the white 99 percent to act against their own economic interests.

Strategic Political Economy

Who is leading the United States to war? 

[Monthly Review, via Mike Norman Economics 5-20-2022]

This article comes to three conclusions: first, in the Biden administration, two foreign policy elite groups that used to compete against each other, liberal hawks and neoconservatives, have merged strategically, forming the most important foreign policy consensus within the elite echelon since 1948 and bringing the country’s war policy to a new level; second, in consideration of long-term interests, the big bourgeoisie in the United States has reached a consensus that China is a strategic rival, and has established solid support for its foreign policy; and third, due to the design of the U.S. Constitution, the expansion of the far-right forces, and the sheer monetization of elections, the so-called democratic institutions of checks and balances are completely incapable of restraining the belligerent policy from spreading..

The Merging of Belligerent Foreign Policy Elites

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of U.S. unilateralism, the neoconservatives entered the mainstream in U.S. foreign policy with their thought leader, Paul Wolfowitz, who was once an aide to Henry Jackson. In 1992, just a few months after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Wolfowitz introduced his Defense Policy Guidance, which explicitly advocated a permanent unipolar position for the United States to be created through the expansion of U.S. military power into the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union and along all its perimeters, with the object of preventing the reemergence of Russia as a great power. The unipolar U.S.-led “grand strategy”, through the projection of military force, served to guide the foreign policies of George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, along with Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. The first Gulf War was made possible, in large part, due to the Soviet weakness. This was followed by the U.S./NATO military dismemberment of Yugoslavia. After 911, the Bush Jr. administration’s foreign policy was completely dominated by the neoconservatives, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

While they both advocated foreign military interventions, there are two historic differences between liberal hawks and neoconservatives. First, liberal hawks believed that the United States should influence the UN and other international institutions to carry out military intervention, while neoconservatives intended to ignore multilateral institutions. Second, liberal hawks sought military intervention alongside U.S.-led Western allies, while neoconservatives were not afraid to conduct unilateral military operations and violate anything resembling international laws. 

The Return of a Criminal Neocon: Why does the foreign-policy and journalistic establishment still welcome Elliott Abrams?

Eric Alterman, May 20, 2022 [The American Prospect]

Post-Afghanistan and Ukraine, neocons have attempted to seize an opportunity to return themselves to the center of foreign-policy debate, now that (maybe) people don’t remember Iraq so well. Abrams, who literally has never met a potential U.S. (or Israeli) military action for which he did not cheerlead (and simultaneously accuse its opponents of lily-livered cowardice), showed up to argue that the nearly 40 percent of world military spending we account for is far too little….

Some neocons have shown a willingness to reconsider their previous errors in light of their politics having led to Trump. Max Boot gets most of the honors in this category. (William Kristol is in a sort of purgatory for acting like he now knows he was wrong about pretty much everything, but would just as soon move on. I wrote a sort of scorecard on this point back in 2009.) But Abrams, perhaps the man who needed to do more than anyone else alive to repudiate his past views, is sticking to his rhetorical (and metaphorical) guns. This would almost be funny in the way that Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz’s constant brownnosing of Trump is almost funny. Abrams, however, is particularly problematic because he continues to be taken seriously by most of the members of the mainstream media and what remains of the foreign-policy establishment. (He is after all a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, among his other appointments.) Yet not only has he been demonstrably wrong about virtually every major issue since he was a “child prodigy,” but he was also convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal while holding the very position that Nordlinger thinks ought to recommend him….

Well, it’s been said, not by me, that “where there is no vision, the people perish,” and vision on the left as far as foreign policy has been in decidedly short supply. Fortunately, we now have two prescient pieces in Foreign Affairs by Bernie Sanders’s foreign-policy guru (and Altercation good friend and long-ago American Prospect intern) Matt Duss. Following up on his 2020 piece, “U.S. Foreign Policy Never Recovered From the War on Terror,” Duss’s new contribution lays the groundwork for a policy that is both hard-headed and soft-hearted; providing a framework for the rest of us to think about individual places and issues that elude simple slogans. In the article entitled “The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of Biden’s Foreign Policy,” Duss recognizes that Russia’s war against Ukraine requires a “paradigm shift” in our approach to the world, and credits the Biden administration with handling the crisis well so far. But taking us well beyond just holding NATO together (or further expanding it), he seeks to locate how it might be possible to actually apply the principles to which our politicians so frequently pay tribute in rhetoric while ignoring them in practice. I cannot do justice to all, or really any, of Duss’s proposals in this space except to say that if you read these two articles, you will come away with the single best discussion of what’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy and how it might possibly be repaired. 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 15, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 15, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Your health is in your hands? US CDC COVID-19 mask guidance reveals the moral foundations of public health 

[The Lancet, via Naked Capitalism 5-8-2022]

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) May 28, 2021 guidance, which lifted masking recommendations for vaccinated people in most situations, exemplifies a troubling shift—away from public health objectives that center equity and toward a model of individual personal responsibility for health. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky emphasized that “your health is in your hands”, undermining the idea that fighting COVID is a “public” health responsibility that requires the support of institutions and communities. The social impacts of this scientific guidance, combined with the emergence of new variants, have exposed the fallacy of this approach, with most local mask restrictions lifted and infections rising dramatically among disadvantaged populations. Rapidly rising cases prompted the CDC on July 27th to recommend resuming indoor masking even for vaccinated people in “areas of substantial or high transmission” , but US policy continues to frame the pandemic largely as a matter of individual responsibility—to the detriment of public health. As public health professionals and advocates, we call for a renewed commitment to core public health principles of collective responsibility, health equity, and human rights.

Public health implicates government obligations to realize the health of populations, focusing on “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy” . Securing public health does not merely reflect the health of many individual persons, rather a collective “public” good that is greater than the sum of its parts. Public health actions protect and promote the health of entire populations through multi-sectoral interventions to address underlying determinants of health.

TSA Covid Infections Have Jumped 50% Since The Mask Mandate Was Lifted 

[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 5-9-2022]

Public Health Theory and Practice in the Constitutional Design (pdf)
Lawrence O. Gostin [11 Health Matrix: The Journal of Law—Medicine, 265 (2001)]

This article views public health through the lens of constitutional law by exploring government duty and authority, the division of powers under our federal system, and the limits on government power. Part I examines constitutional duties, if any, imposed on government. It observes that the Supreme Court sees the Constitution in negative, or defensive, terms and argues that this provides a sterile, uninspiring vision of government obligation. Part II examines governmental powers under the Constitution. While the Court sees few affirmative obligations, it does acknowledge a broad governmental authority to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the population. This Part reviews the emergence of "new federalism" in Supreme Court jurisprudence, altering the power between the federal government and the states. In particular, it inquires whether the Rehnquist Court, by restricting the scope of national authority, is seriously thwarting public health policy and practice.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Despite the Despair, It Was Great Seeing You

Mark Blyth, May 7, 2022 [Youtube]

At 28:29: It's absolutely clear that this is not a monetary phenomenon... There's a thing called the Milton dictum: inflation is always... a monetary phenomena and it's this case is proving that it's really not, it's simply the fracturing of global supply chains.

That's what's driving all this, and you could say the pandemic spending, but then you've got to say yeah but the pandemic spending wasn't actually a stimulus it was income replacement because the economy had shut down… The last of those checks went out 12 months ago and were spent nine months ago...that's not powering the the price of goods anymore….

It's not the fact that the Fed's spending all this money because you don't spend central bank money, you spend money that you get issued through the commercial banking sector. The banking sector's making money hand over fist because everybody's buying a bunch of stuff but as inflation goes up that will slow down. So it's really not clear to me that, you know, let's raise interest rates, is going to actually do anything about the fact that you’ve got 500 ships parked off of Shanghai and you can't get any stuff because the city's in a lockdown. 

These things seem to be totally disconnected but as usual we've managed to whip ourselves up into a narrative whereby, well it's inflation, so it must be about money; the Fed must do something and they probably spent too much — look at all that pandemic money. Just ignore the facts of the supply chain stuff you know or mention it but then immediately you know pivot towards a monetary explanation for no reason….

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 8, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 8, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Tactics and techniques

“How the White Overalls Beat the Cops with Tactics of Radical Defense”

[Gentleman Bandit, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 5-5-2022]

From 2020, still germane. “You might have heard about The Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protesting hard in France for the past few years. There was a comparable movement in the late 90s and early 2000s, which focused on radical group tactics of defense in order to successfully stand up to riot police and other forms of crowd control. That is to say that, unlike the Yellow Vests who actively seek out fistfights and other physical battles with the cops; [the “White Overalls” (Tute Bianche) dreamed up an innovative and highly effective set of tactics to protect themselves from harm so that they could go where they wanted (such as smashing through the outer fence at the G8 Summit in Genoa) and stay there…. Put the whole thing together, and it looks something like this. One or more front lines set up with inner tubes and/or shields, front section backed up by mobile skirmishers, with additional shields and large crowds of people who either perform their own specialized roles or just push.” • With many photographs.

Strategic Political Economy

How London became the dirty money capital of the world | FT Film 

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 5-3-2022]

The Dollar System in a Multi-Polar World

James K. Galbraith [Brave New World, via Mike Norman Economics 5-5-2022]

The multipolar financial world is here. The United States can survive it – but only with major political and economic changes at home. It’s time to start thinking about what those need to be.…

But the Marshall-Lerner conditions did not hold, and trade balances did not return to equality of exports and imports. Instead, the US issued Treasury bonds, while Japan and Germany accumulated financial assets. And in the Third World, ex China and India, the balance depended largely on the presence or absence of oil. Demand for oil, it turned out, is notably invariant to price. So as prices went up, for producers it was the best of times. And so long as oil importers wished to grow, they were obliged to cover the bill with borrowings from commercial banks, on terms that the bankers controlled, and at rates governed in the final analysis by the policy of the Federal Reserve.

In this way the abolition of the Bretton Woods system set in motion the final defeat of New Deal banking law and of balanced international financial governance, in the end restoring the financiers to the center of American and world economic power. For forty years that genie had been bottled up, internally by regulation, deposit insurance, and the Glass-Steagall Act, so that in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s banks were largely adjuncts to the large industrial corporations and under the fairly-effective discipline of the state. There were, accordingly, no financial crises from 1934 to 1974, when Franklin National Bank failed, followed in 1975 by the “fiscal crisis” – really a bankers’ crisis – of the City of New York. On the international side, capital controls and the IMF had provided (in principle) a similar damper. After 1971 and especially 1973, the currency casinos were open again.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 1, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 1, 2022 

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

What is propelling the U.S. into increasing international military aggression?
John Ross [MR Online, via The Big Picture 4-24-2022]

Reduced to the most essential facts, the key forces that have driven this escalating U.S. policy of military aggression, which has now lasted over more than two decades, are clear. It is that the U.S. economy has permanently lost its overwhelming weight in world production, but that at the same time the U.S. still retains its preponderance in military power and spending. This, therefore, creates a very dangerous period for humanity during which the U.S. may attempt to compensate for its relative economic failure by use of military force.…

Summarising the trends above, the U.S. lead in productivity, technology and company size means that its economy overall is still stronger than China’s, but the gap between the U.S. and China is far narrower than the gap between the U.S. and the USSR. Furthermore, whatever is the exact judgement on the relative bilateral strengths of the U.S. and Chinese economies, it clear that the U.S. has already lost its global productive economic predominance. By 2021, in PPPs, the U.S. accounted for only 16% of the world economy—that is 84% of the world economy is outside the U.S. Purely economically the global era of multipolarity, instead of unipolar domination by the U.S., is not ahead it has already arrived….

 The aim of the U.S. in Ukraine is precisely to attempt to bring about a fundamental change in policy and government in Russia so that a government is installed which no longer defends Russia’s national interests, which is hostile to China, and is subordinate to the U.S. If that were achieved then not only would China faced a greatly increased military threat from the U.S. but China’s enormously long northern border with Russia would become a strategic threat to China. China would be surrounded from the north.

But the conclusion which he U.S. policy derives from this, as will be analysed, is that it must therefore try to use military and political means to prevent this economic multipolarity from expressing itself.

2022 Strategic Investment Conference: Goodbye Normal

[The Big Picture 4-27-2022]

The highest inflation in 40 years, war in Europe, and economic shock waves….

Featuring an exclusive interview with the undead ghoul Henry Kissinger. 

Russia / Ukraine

Why Europe cannot understand Russia 

Pepe Escoba [The Cradle, via Mike Norman Economics 4-30-2022]

Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret 

[Foreign Policy in Focus, via Naked Capitalism 4-25-2022]

From 2014, still germane.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 24, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 24, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Godless Empire: Evil Cannot Create Anything New, Only Corrupt What Good Created 

[The Reading Junkie, via Mike Norman Economics 4-18-2022]

Analysts in Washington study a culture and find its most primal, barbaric roots, and create a cartoonish caricature of it. With that caricature as a false god, that whole society is turned into a death cult, the perfect, self-destructing weapon against Washington’s rivals. The suicidal nature of Washington’s pawns is deliberate. After Russia is destroyed, there would be no use for a Ukraine anymore, so it is actually better for Ukraine to be destroyed in the process too…. The West loves “blood harvests” and projects that idea onto other cultures like Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine, but it originated on our own shores. Look at modern movies and shows like 300 and Vikings. Why do our filmmakers dream so much of mass killings, rapes, and blood gods? Why do they love depicting barbarians raping and massacring weak and pathetic Christians? It’s weird.

TW: This is why it is a tragedy that contemporary scholars of civic republicanism such as Pettit sand Rawls are misleading people by defining civic republicanism as “freedom from domination.” What makes civic republicanism a superior philosophy of political economy and governance is its insistence on promoting the human capacity to “do good,” by striving toward perfection.

Samuel Scolnicov, “An Image of Perfection: The Good and the Rational in Plato's Material Universe” (Revue de Philosophie Ancienne, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1992)

Matt J. Rossano, Seeking Perfection: A Dialogue About the Mind, the Soul, and What it Means to be Human (Routledge, 2015)

This idea is, of course, reflected in the Preamble of the USA Constitution (“a more perfect union”) , but the philosophical importance of its inclusion is today all but forgotten. 

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-20-2022]

x

.

The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers 

[Palladium, via Naked Capitalism 4-22-2022]

Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan: A History is the first history to adequately capture this story. Malkasian deployed as a civilian officer in Kunar and Helmand provinces in the aughts, and then returned to Afghanistan as an advisor to General Joseph Dunford in 2013, and stayed at Dunford’s side through his tenure on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Malkasian speaks Pashto fluently, traveled widely across Afghanistan conducting interviews, and participated in the Trump era negotiations with the Taliban.

Malkasian’s account of American error builds on these personal experiences. His catalog of American mistakes and miscalculations is long….

Most accounts of the conflict are one-sided portrayals of the American experience in Afghanistan. Malkasian’s fluency in Pashto allows The American War in Afghanistan to escape the limitations of the genre. Entire chapters are built on Afghan sources that other histories of the war ignore. From their perspective, the U.S. war in Afghanistan was not really American at all. Over the last two decades, it was Afghans, not Americans, who have done the majority of the killing, bleeding, and dying. The war in Afghanistan was first and foremost a civil war. Any account of the Taliban’s victory must start with what each side of this civil war was fighting for.

Mexico nationalises lithium in populist president’s push to extend state control 

[FT, via Naked Capitalism 4-212-2022]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 17, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 17, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“The policy of the USA has always been to prevent Germany and Russia from cooperating more closely” 

[Swiss Standpoint, via Naked Capitalism 4-12-2022]

We forget that Crimea was independent, even before Ukraine became independent. In January 1991, while the Soviet Union still existed, Crimea held a referendum to be managed from Moscow and not from Kiev. It thus became an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Ukraine did not get its own independence referendum until six months later in August 1991. At that point, Crimea did not consider itself a part of Ukraine. But Ukraine did not accept this. Between 1991 and 2014, it was a constant struggle between the two entities. Crimea had its own constitution with its own authorities. In 1995, encouraged by the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine overthrew the Crimean government with special forces and abrogated its constitution. But this is never mentioned, as it would shed a completely different light on the current development.

Liberalism, conservatism and the lack of discussion of civic republicanism

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid It’s not just a phase.

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 4-16-2022]

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past….

Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society....

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 10, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 10, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Jerks

Michael Brenner [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 4-9-2022].

...it is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.  At a more personal level, this impression is reinforced by messages from persons whom I’ve known and respected telling me that I’m in the pay of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “mad,” “too clever by half,” 

...Third, it is self-evident that our national leaders, elected or appointed, are equally incapable of sober deliberation, of intellectual honesty (with themselves as well as us), of elementary logic, even of acknowledging factual realities. Consequently, the resulting behavior defies rational analysis.

NATO to target China – Stoltenberg 

[RT, via Naked Capitalism 4-6-2022]

The West is losing its mind:

NATO plans to deepen its cooperation with partners in Asia as a response to a rising “security challenge” coming from China, which refuses to condemn Russia’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine, the US-led bloc’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg revealed during a press conference on Tuesday.

Bill Clinton: “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path”

Bill Clinton [[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-8-2022]

“I did everything I could to help Russia make the right choice and become a great 21st-century democracy.”

Comments were savagely on target:

Darthbobber April 8, 2022 at 4:11 pm

Clinton makes it all the way through that Russia screed without so much as mentioning the October ’93 Russian constitutional crisis, the shelling of parliament, suppression of the opposition press, end of the independence of the high court. Or of our considerable efforts at reelecting Yeltsin under-err–less than democratic conditions.

Sacrificing the fledgeling democracy of the Gorbachev constitution on the altar of shock therapy was pretty decisive in terms of Russia’s evolution since, also in terms of creating the oligarchs in the first place. Odd how none of this is worth even a passing mention. Priorities, I guess.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 3, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 3, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Nearly 1 in 3 food companies forced to reduce or shutdown production 

[Brussels Times, via Naked Capitalism 4-2-2022]

Yves Smith added: “From IM Doc, independent of above story, by e-mail:”

2 interesting patient conversations this week…The other was the retired CEO of one of our big Ag corps. He told me in no uncertain terms to begin to do everything I could to prepare. All kinds of problems are brewing with the nation’s food supplies and supply chains and the real pain will not start until later this summer or fall – but it is going to be really ugly. He rates the likelihood to be somewhere between “epic and biblical”

Child poverty spiked by 41 percent in January after Biden benefit program expired, study finds 

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 3-29-2022]

‘Their Inflation Strategy Is Working’: Corporate Profits Soared to Record High in 2021

Jake Johnson [Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 3-31-2022]

The US Empire’s Ultimate Target Is Not Russia But China 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Mike Norman Economics 3-31-2022]

Ukraine / Russia

Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War 

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 3-28-2022]

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.  

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark.

Just where is Joe Biden going to find gas for the EU? 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 3-28-2022]

A senior U.S. official clarified that the promise of 15 bcm this year is actually a commitment to try and help convince companies in Asia or elsewhere that were expecting cargoes this coming winter to agree to send them to Europe instead. That would be a repeat of what happened this past winter, the official said.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 27, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 27, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

Bill McKibben [New Yorker, via The Big Picture 3-26-2022]

The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels….

…the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

“Beauty and wonder of science boosts researchers’ well-being”

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-21-2022]

“Scientists’ ability to experience wonder, awe and beauty in their work is associated with higher levels of job satisfaction and better mental health, finds an international survey of researchers. Brandon Vaidyanathan, a sociologist at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, and his colleagues collected responses from more than 3,000 scientists — mainly biologists and physicists — in India, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. They asked participants about their job satisfaction and workplace culture, their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of aesthetics in science. The answers revealed that, far from the caricature of scientists as exclusively rational and logical beings, “this beauty stuff is really important”, Vaidyanathan says. “It shapes the practice of science and is associated with all kinds of well-being outcomes.'”

Fed headed for crack up? [video]

Mike Norman [Mike Norman Economics 3-26-2022]

Mike doing some projections this week on by how much or perhaps how fast the Fed can increase its policy rates while avoiding insolvency, ie a situation where their current interest income would be exceeded by their current interest payable…

You can see here current UST yields are less than the Fed’s overnight rates (inverted) out to 8 weeks … no bueno…

To be safe they may want to somehow pivot from the current perhaps implied policy of an acceleration in the increase in their policy rates to a policy of acceleration in their rate of asset/liability reduction… keep an eye out for this pivot…

Biden Says The Quiet Part Out Loud 

Thomas Lifson [AmericanThinker.com, via Mike Norman Economics 3-22-2022]

(the not-so-hidden agenda. reassertion of unquestioned American primacy in the world. Not that this is anything new.)

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 20, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 20, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Orwell Was Right (excerpt)

Matt Taibbi [TK News, via Naked Capitalism 3-14-2022]

The ideal citizen of Orwell’s Oceania bubbled with rage a mile wide and a millimeter deep and could forget in an instant passions that may have consumed him or her for years. We just did this, with a pandemic that had the country steaming with indignation until it was quietly declared over the moment Putin rolled over Ukraine’s borders. We switched from “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” to “Putin’s price hikes” in a snap. National outrage moved a few lobes over with zero fuss, and now we hate new people; instead of “anti-vax Barbie,” we’re barring Russian and Belarussian kids from the Paralympics.

“At least NINE House Democrats test positive for COVID after party held maskless retreat in Philadelphia”

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-18-2022]

I include this under “Strategic Political Economy” because it illustrates the extreme arrogance and stupidity of USA ruling elites — including Democratic Party elites. The have failed completely to confront an epidemic by refusing to even consider major expenditures such as reworking the ventilation systems and air filters of all buildings. As Lambert Strether noted: “Closed, close-contact, crowded, lots of talking, probably shouting and singing, no masks. What did they think was going to happen? The outcome they all worked so hard to create; that’s what happened.” 

Say hello to Russian gold and Chinese petroyuan 

Pepe Escaobar [Vineyard of the Saker, via Mike Norman Economics 3-15-2022]

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday, after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.

“Saudi Arabia Considers Accepting Yuan Instead of Dollars for Chinese Oil Sales”

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-15-2022]

“Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia…. China buys more than 25% of the oil that Saudi Arabia exports. If priced in yuan, those sales would boost the standing of China’s currency. The Saudis are also considering including yuan-denominated futures contracts, known as the petroyuan, in the pricing model of Saudi Arabian Oil Co. , known as Aramco.” • Since the dollar is now evidently a pure form of power projection by the United States, it’s not surprising that other sovereign states would want to get out from under it, if they can.

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Eric Helleiner ─ The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History

Eric Helleiner interviewed by Mark Blythe [Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University]

x

x

.

How the World Works

James Fallows [The Atlantic, December 1993]

Americans persist in thinking that Adam Smith's rules for free trade are the only legitimate ones. But today's fastest-growing economies are using a very different set of rules. Once, we knew them--knew them so well that we played by them, and won. Now we seem to have forgotten….

The more I had heard about List in the preceding five years, from economists in Seoul and Osaka and Tokyo, the more I had wondered why I had virtually never heard of him while studying economics in England and the United States. By the time I saw his books in the shop beneath the cherry trees, I had come to think of him as the dog that didn't bark. He illustrated the strange self-selectivity of Anglo-American thinking about economics.

TW: There is a simple answer to why Henry Carey and Friedrich List are unknown in USA today: the economics profession was corrupted. Michael Hudson explains what happened at Wharton to suppress and eventually bury the economic thought of Simon Patten. 

From the Archives: ‘How the World Works’

James Fallows, December 26, 2021

The United States knows how to help foster advanced, high-wage, high-employment, globally successful businesses. But it has forgotten how to talk about that process honestly, and instead sinks into familiar political and media slogans.

TW: For Carey and his followers, political economy included a moral dimension, including strong opposition to slavery and to Britain’s opium trade. The aim of political economy was not the allocation of scarce resources, but the building of civilization and the continual improvement of the human condition. As John Quincy Adams explained in “Society and Civilization” [American Whig Review, July 1845]:

Unceasing labor is not suitable to the nature or condition of man. Hours of relaxation and repose are necessary to relieve the labors of every day…. all the powers of the body and all the faculties of the mind of every individual, from the cradle to the grave, should be exercised to the utmost extent of which they are capable, in improving the condition of his kind. The duties of man consist in alternate action and meditation, mutually aiding and relieving each other; and both, directed with undeviating aim, to the progressive improvement of himself and his fellow creatures. Heaven has given him in charge, to promote the happiness and well-being of himself, his wife, his children, his kindred, his neighbors, his fellow citizens, his country, and his kind; and the great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community, that this gradation of duties, may be made to harmonize in all its parts—that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same.

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

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

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-1-2022]

x

.

[Twitter, via Avedon's Sideshow 4-6-2022]

x

.

Putin the Apostate. We thought he would be our bastard. Then, he became his own bastard.

Matt Taibbi, February 28, 2022

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there…. I’ve been bitter in commentary about Putin in recent years because I never forgot the way the West smoothed his rise, and pretends now that it didn’t. It’s infuriating also that many of us who were critical of him from the start are denounced now as Putin apologists, I think in part because we have inconvenient memories about who said what at the start of his story. The effort to wipe that history clean is reaching a fever pitch this week. Before they finish the job, it seemed worth getting it all down….

The oligarch class was formalized in a stroke via a deal brokered at Davos in 1996…. The “relatively fair” privatization auctions were historic events. As my friends and former Moscow Times reporters Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein reported, “financiers” like Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were loaned the capital to become controllers of, respectively, a third of the world’s nickel and a fourth of its cobalt, and 2% of the world’s oil reserves. Meanwhile murderous gangsters like Boris Berezovsky were gifted controlling stakes in companies like Aeroflot (from which he siphoned to a Swiss shell company roughly a third of its annual $400 million in revenues) and Russia’s seventh-largest oil concern, Sidanko. 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 27, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 27, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Ukraine — Russia

“Shipping braces for impact as Russia-Ukraine crisis intensifies”

[Freight Waves, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-24-2022]

“Military action could curtail ship movements in the Black Sea, a key transit point for dry bulk exports. In fact, Russian military exercises have already done so. VesselsValue analyzed ship-movement data and found that Russian naval maneuvers ‘visibly impacted traffic.; Russian and Ukrainian waters of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov were designated ‘listed areas’ by the insurance industry’s War Risk Council on Feb. 15, meaning higher war risk insurance premiums. According to BRS [brokerage], the Black Sea area was the world’s second-largest grain-exporting region in 2021, with 111.2 million tons of cargo; Russia and Ukraine accounted for 30% of global wheat exports, and Ukraine accounted for 16% of global corn exports. Ukrainian corn could be first in the line of fire. BRS noted that by the end of January, Ukraine had already exported 71% of wheat predicted for the current marketing period but just 32% of its predicted corn exports. Agribulk exports face risks on land as well, not just at sea. ‘An attack or land grab by Russia could sharply reduce grain production as farmers flee the conflict, agricultural infrastructure and equipment are damaged, and the region’s economy is paralyzed,’ said BRS. “A substantial part of Ukraine’s most productive agricultural land is in the east and therefore vulnerable to any potential Russian attack.’ According to Braemar ACM Shipbroking, this landside risk could affect the coming wheat marketing season. ‘The main grain-producing regions are notably located along the Russian border,’ said Braemar, which pointed out that the military threat coincides with the beginning of the spring wheat planting period.”

Putin Looks to Win Both the War & the Peace

Ian Welsh, February 25, 2022

The sanctions which are about to hit Russia are serious, but if they don’t include wheat, aluminum, energy, or maritime shipping or hit oligarchs by kicking them out of London and other European capitals, they aren’t really going to matter.

Putin has made fools of the Western elite class again. Yes, the intelligence was right, but it didn’t matter. He’s figured exactly out what the West will and won’t do. He calculated right, they calculated wrong….

Let’s be clear, China will never let the West choke out Russia because China knows that the US (and increasingly the EU) considers China the real enemy — once Russia is taken out, China’s next. If Russia goes down, China no longer has a secure back, or a secure source of oil, minerals, or food. With Russia, China has a good chance of winning the oncoming Cold War. Without it, China loses that war.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 20, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 20, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“‘We conclude’ or ‘I believe?’ Study finds rationality declined decades ago”

[Phys.org, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-17-2022]

“Analyzing language from millions of books, the researchers found that words associated with reasoning, such as ‘determine’ and ‘conclusion,’ rose systematically beginning in 1850, while words related to human experience such as ‘feel’ and ‘believe’ declined. This pattern has reversed over the past 40 years, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as ‘I’/’we.’ ‘Interpreting this synchronous sea-change in book language remains challenging,’ says co-author Johan Bollen of Indiana University. ‘However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as non-fiction. Moreover, we observe the same pattern of change between sentiment and rationality flag words in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed.’ ‘Inferring the drivers of long-term patterns seen from 1850 until 1980 necessarily remains speculative,’ says lead author Marten Scheffer of WUR. ‘One possibility when it comes to the trends from 1850 to 1980 is that the rapid developments in science and technology and their socio-economic benefits drove a rise in status of the scientific approach, which gradually permeated culture, society, and its institutions ranging from the education to politics. As argued early on by Max Weber, this may have led to a process of ‘disenchantment’ as the role of spiritualism dwindled in modernized, bureaucratic, and secularized societies.” What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. However, according to the authors there could be a connection to tensions arising from changes in economic policies since the early 1980s, which may have been defended on rational arguments but the benefits of which were not equally distributed.”

See chart here. TW: 1980 was the Reagan “revolution.”

Rhodes Center Podcast: ‘How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Policy”  Mark Blythe interview of Elizabeth Popp Berman

[Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, via YouTube 2-13-2022]

x

x

On this episode Mark talks with Elizabeth Popp Berman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, and author of Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy. In it, she explains how in the middle of the 20th century a new kind of economic thinking took hold among policymakers at all levels of government. It replaced bold visions of justice and equality with a more technocratic style, one whose goals could be summed up in one word: efficiency. Over the last half century this quest for efficiency has guided policies in everything from public education to defense to environmental management. It’s dominance is also reflected in the wild proliferation of MPA programs that exist in American universities today that have cost-benefit analysis at their heart. Elizabeth and Mark discuss where this thinking came from, and why it appealed (and continues to appeal) to so many policymakers. They also talk about what’s lost in this focus on efficiency, and why it isn’t the panacea its advocates claim.

The cost / benefit analysis of Robert McNamara’s Vietnam War Defense Department is an overlooked but important root of today’s neoliberal / conservative political economy. Being forced to find numerical measures of performance and efficiency especially had brutal effects on education and welfar and medical care. 

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. 

x

x

.

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….