Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 12, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 12, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

War

Seymour Hersh: Navy Divers + Spooks + Norway Took Out Nord Stream 2 on Biden’s Orders, Using Timer

[Naked Capitalism, 2-8-2023]

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

Seymour Hersh, February 8, 2023

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center…. has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades….

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning….

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

Sources say 

[Washington Examiner, via Naked Capitalism, 2-10-2023]

Hersh's story — all 5,000-plus words of it — is based entirely on a lone anonymous source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning." That's it. Hersh supplies no further evidence proving unequivocally the United States planned and executed what would be rightly viewed as an "act of war."

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE HERSH REPORT ON THE NORD STREAM ATTACKS 

John Helmer [Dances with Bears, via Naked Capitalism, 2-11-2023]

The Top Five Lessons from Year One of Ukraine’s War 

Stephen Walt (Professor of International relations at the Harvard Kennedy School) [Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism, 2-10-2023]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 5, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 5, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

War

Russian Foreign Ministry Rejects Blinken and Nuland Proposals, Condemns Scholz for Reviving Hitler’s Plan to Destroy Russia 

John Helmer [Dances with Bears, via Naked Capitalism 1-29-2023]

The Russian Foreign Ministry has dismissed proposals issued this week in Washington by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Under Secretary, Victoria Nuland. Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova has confirmed that Russia’s military plan for the Ukraine will not be interrupted or delayed.

“It is not necessary to talk about what will happen if someone does something [in the Ukraine],” Zakharova said. “There is a situation on the ground that we are solving. Everything. This is not a question of guesswork, but of our assessment of what is happening. This is based on the situation on the ground and direct political statements by Western politicians. Given that all negotiations have been terminated by Ukraine, this issue will be resolved on the ground. Under pressure or on its own, Kiev has banned any negotiations with Russia at the government level. So that’s it. The rest is for the military experts.”

Russia has also dismissed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the successor of the Nazi Wehrmacht and the puppet of the US Government. Scholz, according to Zakharova,  is one of the Germans who “lack[s] the spirit to make the right choice, not to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors, for which the people of Germany, among others, paid a huge price… We remember well what German tanks are. These are machines which have become a symbol,  not just of death and deadly ideology, but of hatred of humanity — a global, existential threat to the entire planet…

[TW: Not the language of diplomacy. At all.]

Sanctions and Geography are Replacing the Russian Oligarchy With State Planning, Producing a Better Growth Rate than the US, Germany

John Helmer [Dances with Bears 1-31-2023]

There is nothing like facing the gun muzzles of the Germans, British and Americans to teach Russians what to do to correct their past mistakes.  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be the last US bank in the world to admit as much.

Nor would the IMF concede that everything it bribed the Kremlin to accept, when Boris Yeltsin was president and Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin were his economic ministers,  is now being reversed – at a speed unmatched since Joseph Stalin directed the relocation of heavy industry out of reach of German guns between August and December of 1941.  

This time round, the IMF is reporting that after Russia recorded a 2.2% drop in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurement in 2022 – 35% less than the IMF had been forecasting – by 2024, the second and third years of the war, the Russian growth rate will be more than double the US, British and Japanese rates; 33% better than Germany’s; 24% better than France; 29% better than Canada.    

This is the first official acknowledgement by the US and international banks that the long war against Russia is being lost.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 29, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 29, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Altercation: Goodbye and Thanks

Eric Alterman, January 27, 2023 [The American Prospect]

The key question I want to leave people with is this: Given the lack of guardrails, how far are these people willing to go? Trump is as popular as he was before January 6th and has been invited back on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. His only credible alternative for the Republican nomination at this point, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is in many significant respects even worse than Trump. Kevin McCarthy is elevating lunatic insurrectionists who fear Jewish space lasers and children’s books about loving gay parents to positions with real power and rejecting people merely because they are competent and committed to the Constitution. Tucker Carlson, a paranoid, racist co-conspirator of the morally disgusting Alex Jones, has the highest ratings in cable news. Thanks in part to a great lineup at the New York Jewish Film Festival this month, I’ve just recently seen a whole bunch of films about the fate of fascism in Germany, Austria, France, Ukraine, and Poland—I’m considering Stalinism to be a form of fascism here—and another about Eichmann’s trial and death in Israel, and elsewhere in theaters about town, about fascism in Argentina, in Italy (which I wrote about here), and another one about Austria. They speak to this question, which has long been on my mind: How far are these people willing to go and what is to stop them?

War

What Russian elites are saying:

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-2023]

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Why is Egypt’s Navy commanding a NATO-led coalition in the Red Sea? 

[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 1-24-2023]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 22, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 22, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

How Much Income Do You Need to Be Rich? 

[Of Dollars And Data, The Big Picture 1-19-2023]

Based on the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, what are the top 10%, top 5%, and top 1% of household incomes in the U.S.? We take a high level overview of how much income the highest earning households make so that you can determine for yourself what it means to be rich…

• Top 10% = $191,406
• Top 5% = $290,164
• Top 1% = $867,436

Thomas Frank On Why Democrats Suck

Katie Halper [YouTube, January 3, 2023]

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10:49 If you go back and look at the sociological literature in … the mid-1960s, it was triumphant … about … the middle class achievement; that the gap between rich and poor had shrunk; that we had solved the problem [of inequality]; that we were the “affluent society…” there's a a book that came out in 1966 … by an economic [with] a whole chapter establishing that white collar and blue collar people basically had the almost exactly the same standard of living….

..the richest man in the world in 1965 … was J Paul Getty, an … American Oil Baron he was living in London by that time and his net worth in 1965 was one billion dollars and this is the richest man in the world … he wrote an article for one of the popular magazines … complaining …  that it wasn't really awesome he was the richest man in the world a… because even the middleclass man could afford all the things that he had….

...look at what has happened to us since… billionaires shooting themselves sinto space … billionaires making billion dollars in a single year…

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 15, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 15, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

[TW: Dear readers: I was on the road much of this past week, so had limited time and access. If this wrap seems a bit short and abbreviated, it’s because it is. Should be back to normal this coming week.]

Life Lessons from 1,000 Years

[Curiosity Chronicle, via The Big Picture 1-13-2023]

I asked a number of 90-year-olds a simple question: “If you could speak to your 32-year-old self, what advice would you give?” In total, there was over 1,000 years of lived experience captured. The responses were…incredible. They range from fun, playful, and witty to deeply moving. I’d encourage you to read through them with your loved ones and reflect on those that hit you the hardest.

Global power shift

Why the CIA attempted a ‘Maidan uprising’ in Brazil 

[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-2023]

A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.

On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and  presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation – which bears visible signs of hasty planning – now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.

That suggests CIA planners are avid readers of Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the New York Fed. In his ground-breaking 27 December report titled War and Commodity Encumbrance….

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 8, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 8, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World

Paul Krugman [New York Times, via The Big Picture 1-3-2023]

...the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.

When an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.

The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch….

Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology that writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public….

[TW: Montesquieu wrote (see below)]  

“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury....” [emphasis by TW]

SBF and the Injustice Democrats: How SBF, AIPAC and pro-Trump billionaires coordinated to crush the left 

Max Berger [via Naked Capitalism 1-4-2023]

When I looked into SBF’s political giving to write a follow up to last week’s piece, I thought I knew what I was looking for. It’s a subject I’ve written about before.

But, when I looked at the end-of-cycle FEC data, the results were truly shocking.

I found more evidence SBF was collaborating with AIPAC and Trump supporting billionaires to stop the growth of the squad and the electoral left.

Five billionaire funded PACs were coordinating closely on a strategy to defeat progressive candidates in Democratic primaries — a kind of Injustice Democrats.

Mark Mellman, a long-time operative and AIPAC ally, appears to be at the center of the effort and likely spearheaded the shared campaign. He was hired by four of the five groups this cycle, who collectively paid his firm $476,016.67… According to FEC data, over 75% of the money SBF contributed to Democrats in 2022 went to groups that spent nearly all their money on competitive primaries in the Democratic Party.

SBF personally contributed $29,250,000 to Protect Our Future and DMI PAC (which later contributed the money to Web3 Forward). Both of these groups spent the vast majority of their money on Democratic primaries. They also worked closely with two AIPAC affiliated SuperPACs called the United Democracy Project (UDP) and the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and a group called Mainstream Democrats which aimed to defeat the “far-left.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 1, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 1, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

The dark side

Dress Rehearsal: Trump’s attempt almost two years ago to undermine the 2020 election reads today like a blueprint drawn for a future autocrat.

Fintan O’Toole, January 19, 2023 issue [The New York Review]

To understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to Donald Trump’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented Trump with a detailed plan for the transfer of power to his incoming administration. It was literally trashed. As Christie recalled in his self-pitying memoir, Let Me Finish, “All thirty binders were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.”  Trump didn’t want an orderly transition to his own presidency, let alone to Joe Biden’s. To a raging narcissist a plan is an impertinence, a Lilliputian restraint on the inspired instincts of a giant….

A coup, in this context, does not mean tanks on the streets, helicopter gunships strafing public buildings, thousands of people rounded up by soldiers, and a junta of generals or colonels addressing the nation on TV. On the contrary, the story that needed to be told by the plotters of 2020–2021 was not the overthrow of democracy, but its defense. Trump, as his chief of staff and co-conspirator Mark Meadows put it in his book The Chief’s Chief, was merely seeking “to uphold the democratic process.”….

To understand what Trump could have done instead, it is necessary to revisit a long meeting at the White House on the evening and night of December 18, 2020. This episode is easy to dismiss because it was described by Hutchinson as “unhinged” and because the proposals aired at it were called “nuts” by one of the saner attendees, the former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. These characterizations are accurate. Yet the meeting matters for two reasons. The first is that it immediately preceded Trump’s fateful decision to summon his followers to Washington on January 6. The other is that one of the ideas put forward at this meeting would be of great interest to any future conspirator.

In spite of all of this idiocy, however, Byrne did have one seriously interesting proposal to put to Trump at the meeting. It was that, having seized control of the voting machines through some kind of military task force, there would then be a live TV event in which all of the paper ballots in the six most contested states would be counted in front of the cameras: “If there are not big discrepancies, Trump concedes. But if there are big discrepancies, we would rerun the election in those six counties, or states, using that federal force.” This was actually quite an intelligent idea. By appearing to commit to conceding defeat if no discrepancies were found, Trump could pose, as he had to do if a coup were to succeed, as the defender of American democracy….

Most importantly, there would be a public drama, an elaborate spectacle of “democracy” in action. It is not hard to imagine how Trump’s enablers in the media would sell this show: Why are the Democrats afraid to see what the paper ballots say? The mechanics of this performance remain obscure. How were “discrepancies” to be created? What would the Supreme Court have done? To have a chance of success, the plan would surely have to have been put into effect much earlier—well before the Electoral College met on December 14 to confirm Biden’s victory. Yet Byrne had the germ of the right idea. The best way to steal a presidential election would indeed be through a staged display of democratic process backed by elaborate precooked “evidence” of foreign conspiracy and amplified by Fox News, social media campaigns, and other media. This is the upside-down shape of a successful American coup. Democracy is destroyed by the enactment of its protection. 

Strategic Political Economy

"The Contest on Corporate Purpose: Why Lynn Stout was Right and Milton Friedman was Wrong

Thomas Clarke [From the journal Accounting, Economics, and Law, via Avedon’s Sideshow 12-15-2022]

It is now 50 years since Milton Friedman set out his doctrine that 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.' This paper seeks to add fresh and compelling new evidence of why Lynn Stout was correct in her resolute critique of the thesis of shareholder primacy at the heart of the Friedman doctrine, and how this doctrine remains profoundly damaging to the corporations that continue to uphold this belief."

Global power shift

Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union 

[Hudson Institute, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2022] 

[TW: As Lambert Strether noted, this is a glimpse at what USA ruling elites really believe. ]

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2022]

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

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

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Strategic Political Economy

Come to America and Live a Shorter Life!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

We need the return of the state 

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

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

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

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

Creating new economic potential - science and technology

Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl’s incurable cancer 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough

Daniel Clery, December 14, 2022 [Science]

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

“The People Cheering For Humanity’s End”

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

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

Global power shift

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

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

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

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

The semiconductor industry and the China challenge 

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

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

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Professional Management Class war on workers

Railroading workers

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

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

Biden Breaks His Promise, Betrays Rail Workers 

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

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

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

Senators Help Donors Derail Paid Sick Days

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Here's WHY your inbox is a dumpster fire of fundraising spam, and what we can do about it.

Will Easton, November 18, 2022 [DailyKos]

Over the past couple cycles here, certain Democratic consulting firms, candidates & organizations have simply decided that it’s in their best interests to sell, rent, swap & trade your email address around the ecosystem, without bothering to ask you first.  So if you’ve contributed to one campaign … you’re going to be emailed by dozens, perhaps hundreds.

The DCCC condones and encourages this practice; it’s my understanding they REQUIRE their endorsed candidates to share email addresses into the pool.  OTOH, a lot of progressive candidates do NOT engage in these practices -- most notably Senator Sanders, whose refusal to just hand his entire email list over to the party in 2016 was the cause of much handwringing ...but he made the right call.

Global power shift

Ukraine is a ‘Warm Up’ for Fighting China: Why the Head of America’s Nuclear Forces Just Warned of an Imminent ‘Very Long’ War  

[Military Watch Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2022]

John Mearsheimer on Putin’s Ambitions After Nine Months of War 

Isaac Chotine [The New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 11-18-2022]

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

One point of view, does not show the whole picture!

AQEL Tech [YouTube, 2019]

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The Pandemic

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-9-2022]

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How to Hide a Plague: How Elite Capture and Individualism Made Covid Normal

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[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 11-11-2022]

The US has experienced among the highest cumulative mortality rates from Covid-19 in the Global North. This lecture will argue that the failures of the US pandemic response were mainly driven by economic elites who used their influence to undermine public health protections. The initial phase of the Covid response was collective, including a massive temporary expansion of the welfare state, but this approach threatened the power of the capitalist class. In response, there was an abandonment of economic interventions followed by a wholesale reframing of the virus as an issue of personal responsibility and individual choice. This lecture will explore how the exertion of elite influence went far beyond lobbying politicians, extending to government bureaucracies and civil society institutions such as news media and schools of public health. This process of constructing a new, deadlier normal holds lessons that can be transferred to climate change and other collective crises of the 21st century.

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

The Pandemic

The Worst Pediatric-Care Crisis in Decades 

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 11-2-2022]

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-2-2022]

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[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2022]

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[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2022]

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How Republicans Claimed COVID as a Winning Campaign Issue 

[New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2022]

The backlash against pandemic restrictions has become a more potent talking point than the public-health crisis itself.

[TW: For me — because I believe we need to revive civic republicanism and especially its principle of civic virtue — the public hostility to adopting individual measures to protect the public health, is very demoralizing. ]