Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 13, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 13, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Heather Cox Richardson, August 12, 2023 [Letters from an American]

In Marion, Kansas, yesterday morning, four local police officers and three sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the Marion County Record newspaper; the home of its co-owners, Eric Meyer and his 98 year old mother, Joan Meyer; and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel, 80. They seized computers, cell phones, and other equipment. Joan Meyer was unable to eat or sleep after the raid; she collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.

The search warrant alleged there was probable cause to believe the newspaper, its owners, or the vice mayor had committed identity theft and unlawful computer acts against restaurant owner Kari Newell, but Magistrate Laura Viar appears to have issued that warrant without any affidavit of wrongdoing on which to base it. Sherman Smith, Sam Bailey, Rachel Mipro, and Tim Carpenter of the nonprofit news service Kansas Reflector reported that federal law protects journalists from search and seizure and requires law enforcement instead to subpoena materials they want.

On August 2, Newell had thrown Meyer and a Marion County Record reporter out of a meeting with U.S. Representative Jake LaTurner (R-KS), and the paper had run a story on the incident. Newell had complained on her personal Facebook page,

On August 7, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of illegally getting information about a drunk-driving charge against her and giving it to Herbel. Eric Meyer says the information—which was accurate—was sent to him and Herbel over social media and that he decided not to publish it out of concerns it was leaked to help Newell’s estranged husband in divorce proceedings. Those same concerns made him take the story to local police. Newell accused the newspaper of violating her rights and called Meyer to accuse him of identity theft….

The Marion County Record will sue the city and the individuals involved in the raid, which, the paper wrote in its coverage, “legal experts contacted were unanimous in saying violated multiple state and federal laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and multiple court rulings.” “Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer said, “but we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”

Executive director of the Kansas Press Association Emily Bradbury noted “An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know. This cannot be allowed to stand.”

Global power shift

Oil sanctions have failed after budget revenues surge as Russia completes the switch from European to Asian markets 

[Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 8-6-2023]

Russia overtakes Germany to become fifth biggest economy in the world in GDP on a PPP basis 

[BNE Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 8-9-2023]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 6, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 6, 2023
by Tony Wikrent

Climate and environmental crises

Is A Mega Ocean Current About to Shut Down? 

[Scientific American, via Naked Capitalism 7-30-2023]

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Commentary:

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 7-30-2023]

x

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South America is topping 100 degrees, even though it’s winter 

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 8-3-2023]

I searched hell on Earth for a story. What I found will haunt me forever 

[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 7-30-2023]

As a kid in Miami, I thought I knew heat.

In the mornings before school, the windows of my parents’ house would be fogged with humidity, as if the swamp of South Florida were trying to press its way in.

As an adult in Los Angeles, I thought I knew heat — that sizzling dryness that arrives each summer and fall, curing the grasses and prickling the skin.

But never have I felt anything like Death Valley last week, where the temperature climbed to 128 degrees, within striking distance of the all-time world record the valley set in 1913 — 134 degrees.

It was the kind of heat that burns your eyeballs, that shocks your brain and makes your body feel nauseous and weak….

We can’t afford to be climate doomers 

Rebecca Solnit [Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 7-31-2023]

The Case Against Both Climate Hope and Climate Despair 

Liza Featherstone, July 31, 2023 [The New Republic]

There’s ample fodder for both optimism and pessimism on climate—but all that matters is what we do.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 30, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 30, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

A rare opportunity to be heard

Antitrust Guidelines and Overthrowing a Corrupt Priesthood  

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 7-23-2023]

Today’s issue is about an obscure but important document on corporate power released this week known as merger guidelines. It is in many ways the overthrow of the corrupt antitrust priesthood…. this particular issue of BIG is important. There aren’t a lot of real actions people can take to influence government, but this one is real, and will make a meaningful difference in whether we truly address corporate power….

Over the past four days, I’ve been watching the business press go crazy about an obscure document that the antitrust agencies put out, known as ‘merger guidelines.’ And like the Catholic Church of the 1500s, or really members of any authoritarian social hierarchy, the antitrust priesthood is very upset.

For instance, Larry Summers, the avatar of Democratic Party economic policymaking under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, is in a rage, asserting these represent a “war on business.” Biglaw firms are sending out alerts to clients, saying “investors, boards and C-suites should anticipate significant delays and expenses associated with a far broader range of proposed transactions.” And the House Republicans are even trying to defund the very ability of the government to publish this document in their government funding bills.

Why does this document create such anger? The answer is that it is an attempt to return antitrust back to the rule of law, and away from the corporate revolution of the 1980s….

Nearly every major dangerous social trend today, from wage inequality to regional collapse to social despair to the inability to efficiently shift energy sources, is a result of monopolization, and mergers are the primary mechanism through which firms monopolize. In 1890, 1913, 1950, and 1975, Congress passed various laws to deal with it. The current key law on mergers today is called the Clayton Act, and it is still on the books. Unfortunately, because of the Reagan administration, and the ideological acceptance by the Democrats of what Reagan wrought, under-enforcement has been so poor that, well, Ticketmaster….

Now, here’s where you come in. Two days ago, I asked a question to Antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter at a Federalist Society event about the role of public comments in this process, and he said that hearing from the public is incredibly important in helping the agencies understand how markets actually work. Thousands of people chimed in a year and a half ago, including doctors, writers, truck drivers, nurses, and software programmers. Now it’s time to do it again. These guidelines are in draft form, they will be finalized soon.

There are 60 days to give our feedback. The government has set up a site on Regulations.gov where you can tell them about your experience with mergers, or offer thoughts on antitrust law, mergers, big business, or unfair methods of business. It looks like this, click on the comment button in the red circle.

So that’s how you can help. Tell the government about your experience with mergers through this site. There are already over one hundred comments, and you can browse and read them.

Oligarchy — not a republic if you can’t keep it

The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges 

Tyler Cowen, via Naked Capitalism 7-25-2023]

Affirmative Action for rich kids: It’s more than just legacy admissions 

[NPR, via The Big Picture 7-27-2023]

Chetty and his colleagues provide compelling evidence that fancy schools are promoting a kind of neo-aristocracy, with admission programs that help to perpetuate a family’s class privilege from one generation to the next

Climate and environmental crises

Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-25-2023]

“The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 23, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 23, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

COVID

Covid Origins Scientist Denounces Reporting On His Messages As A “Conspiracy Theory” 

[Public, via Naked Capitalism 7-21-2023]

First major survey of doctors with Long Covid reveals debilitating impact on health, life and work

[BMA, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-21-2023]

“Around 60% of doctors told the BMA that post-acute Covid ill health has impacted on their ability to carry out day-to-day activities on a regular basis; Almost one in five respondents (18%) reported that they were now unable to work due to their post-acute Covid ill-health; Less than one in three (31%) doctors said they were working full-time, compared to more than half (57%) before the onset of their illness; Nearly half (48%) said they have experienced some form of loss of earnings as a result of post-acute Covid.”  

War

‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China 

[NYT, via Naked Capitalism 7-16-2023]

Though delivered in the unassuming form of updated export rules, the Oct. 7 controls essentially seek to eradicate, root and branch, China’s entire ecosystem of advanced technology. “The new policy embodied in Oct. 7 is: Not only are we not going to allow China to progress any further technologically, we are going to actively reverse their current state of the art,” Allen says. C.J. Muse, a senior semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI, put it this way: “If you’d told me about these rules five years ago, I would’ve told you that’s an act of war — we’d have to be at war.”

If the controls are successful, they could handicap China for a generation; if they fail, they may backfire spectacularly, hastening the very future the United States is trying desperately to avoid.

The Looming War Against China

Michael Hudson [On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism, via Mike Norman Economics, July 22, 2023]

Why Russia pulled out of its grain deal with Ukraine – and what that means for the global food system 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 7-20-2023]

What makes Ukraine such an important part of the global food supply chain?

Ukraine has been called the breadbasket of Europe and is a major supplier of wheat, barley, sunflower products and corn to Europe as well as to developing countries such as in the Middle East, Northern Africa and China.

More than 400 million people relied on foodstuffs from Ukraine before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

One key reason for that is Ukraine has approximately one-third of the world’s most fertile soil, which is known as chernozem, or black soil. And before the war, Ukraine was able to rely on its year-round access to ice-free harbors in the Black Sea to ship grains to nearby markets in the Middle East and Africa….

The U.N. and Turkey brokered what is officially known as the Black Sea Grain Deal with Ukraine and Russia on July 22, 2022…. Ukraine has exported more than 32 million tons of food products through the Black Sea since August 2022. The World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian agency, purchased 80% of its wheat from Ukraine. Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Turkey have been the biggest recipients of humanitarian shipments.

The U.N. has estimated that the grain deal has reduced food prices by more than 23% since March 2022….

Russia has threatened to exit the deal before, but each time it has chosen to stay in.

But on July 17, 2023, it said it’s unwilling to stay in the deal unless its demands are met to ship more of its own food and fertilizer. Over the following two days, it attacked Odesa with drones and missiles in one of the largest sustained assaults on the port. Russia also said it would deem any ship in the Black Sea bound for a Ukrainian port to be a legitimate military target.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 16, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 16, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Global power shift

Has the West lost control of oil? 

[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 7-10-2023]

Led by the odd pairing of the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), and Vladimir Putin, the Opec Plus oil producers’ cartel exists to maintain a price floor for its fractious members in an energy environment where oil prices have crashed three times over the past two decades. But its importance in a geopolitical world defined by Sino-American competition is beginning to extend well beyond the gyrations of oil markets. Opec Plus has remained resilient even as the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis has hardened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the recent Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This raises questions about whether Saudi Arabia is now defecting into the anti-Washington camp….

Forging an association between Opec and Moscow was an act of Saudi desperation. For the previous two years, Riyadh had sought to bankrupt the American shale sector by allowing prices to slump, but largely succeeded only in emptying its own foreign exchange reserves. When they finally reversed course in September 2016, the Saudis found that, having alienated most other Opec members with their recklessness, they could no longer control prices. Two months later, Russia and 10 other states agreed to support a second Opec oil output cut, and Opec Plus was born….

Undoubtedly, some broader geopolitical convergence between Riyadh and Moscow against Washington followed over the next three years. When King Salman visited Putin in October 2017 — the first ever state visit of a Saudi monarch to Moscow — the two leaders discussed military co-operation and the possibility of the Saudis purchasing Russian arms….

When, in September 2019, Iran — either alone or acting with its Houthi allies in Yemen — destroyed the large Saudi oil processing facility at Abqaiq with drones and cruise missiles, that chasm was laid bare. While the Saudis were crushed by the failure of their Patriot missile defence system, bought at great expense from the Americans, Putin appeared with the Iranian president and mock-solemnly pronounced that Moscow could sell Riyadh protection that would actually work….

The Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, which saw the UAE and Bahrain normalise relations with Israel in September 2020, compounded the cartel’s lack of internal coherence on Middle Eastern matters. In oil terms, the Accords also appeared strategic: the UAE is the only member of Opec Plus other than Saudi Arabia with clear spare capacity, and Bahrain has been sitting on a known large offshore shale oil formation since 2018.

But for the past three years, events have conspired decidedly to strengthen Opec Plus. With the new Democratic administration in Washington unable to bring Iran into another nuclear deal in 2021, and post-pandemic growth in the shale sector nearly entirely concentrated in the Permian Basin, Biden, just eight months into office, had to ask Opec Plus to increase production. His trip to Riyadh the following summer for the same purpose yielded little. Indeed, in the months after Biden’s visit, Opec Plus appeared to toy with the American president, announcing a major production cut just weeks before the mid-term elections. Unable at any time during his presidency to influence the cartel, Biden has had to release so much reserve US oil that in March 2023 the Strategic Petroleum Reserve contained only 58% of what it did three years previously.

The World China Is Building 

[NOEMA, via Naked Capitalism 7-14-2023]

...The International Monetary Fund expects Asian countries to account for 70% of growth globally this year. China must “shape a new international system that is conducive to hedging against the negative impacts of the West’s decoupling,” the scholar and former People’s Liberation Army theorist Cheng Yawen wrote recently….

The world China is reorienting itself to is a world that, in many respects, looks like China did a generation ago. On offer are the basics of development — education, health care, clean drinking water, housing. But also more than that — technology, communication and transportation.

Back in April, on the eve of a trip to China, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sat down for an interview with Reuters. “I am going to invite Xi Jinping to come to Brazil,” he said, “to get to know Brazil, to show him the projects that we have of interest for Chinese investment. … What we want is for the Chinese to make investments to generate new jobs and generate new productive assets in Brazil.” After Lula and Xi had met, the Brazilian finance minister proclaimed that “President Lula wants a policy of reindustrialization. This visit starts a new challenge for Brazil: bringing direct investments from China.” Three months later, the battery and electric vehicle giant BYD announced a $624 million investment to build a factory in Brazil, its first outside Asia….

Across the Global South, fast-growing countries from Bangladesh to Brazil can send raw materials to China and get technological devices in exchange. The idea is that what China is today, they could be tomorrow….

The majority of human beings alive today live in a world of not enough: not enough food; not enough security; not enough housing, education, health care; not enough rights for women; not enough potable water. They are desperate to get out of there, as China has. They might or might not like Chinese government policies or the transactional attitudes of Chinese entrepreneurs, but such concerns are usually of little importance to countries struggling to bootstrap their way out of poverty.

The first world tends to see the third as a rebuke and a threat. Most Southeast Asian countries have historically borne abuse in relationship to these American fears. Most American companies don’t tend to see Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sumatra as places they’d like invest money in. But opportunity beckons for Chinese companies seeking markets outside their nation’s borders and finding countries with rapidly growing populations and GDPs. Imagine a Huawei engineer in a rural Bangladeshi village, eating a bad lunch with the mayor, surrounded by rice paddies — he might remember the Hunan of his childhood.  

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 9, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 9, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Climate and environmental crises

World Registers Hottest Day Ever Recorded on July 3 

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 7-5-2023]

6 southern Colorado counties, facing drought and thirsty neighbors, move to block water exports 

[Colorado Sun, via Naked Capitalism 7-4-2023]

Economic Armageddon

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 7-5-2023]

x

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Global power shift

China Restricts Exports of Two Metals Used in High-Performance Chips 

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 7-5-2023]

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 7-5-2023]

x

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 2, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 2, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

War

The Darkness Ahead: Where The Ukraine War Is Headed 

John Mearsheimer [via Naked Capitalism 7-1-2023]

The real casualties of Russia’s ‘civil war’: the Beltway expert class 

Max Blumenthal [The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-2023]

FSB spooked the CIA on Prigozhin coup 

[Indian Punchline, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-2023]

THIS Is How NATO’s War On Russia Has FAILED w/ Scott Ritter 

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-2023]

[Yves Smith: “Worth the listen even though long. Revealing opening section on Iraq.” Ritter explains, for the first time to my satisfaction, why Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. And why no weapons of mass destruction were found: because the UN inspection teams Ritter had been a member of had found them and forced their destruction before the war. ]

Further thoughts on the lessons of the Prigozhin armed rebellion 

Gilbert Doctorow, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-2023]

All aboard the gravy train: an independent audit of US funding for Ukraine 

[The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 6-28-2023]

The War Between My Two Words 

[Between Two World: The "Art" of an American Surviving in Small Town Russia, via Naked Capitalism 6-28-2023]

The Americans were wrong about Russia militarily and politically. There is no qualified Russian expert among the advisors to President Biden. The sanctions and the war prove that. I know from watching the U.S. news. Their descriptions of the impact the war has had on life in Russia are so far from reality that I really cannot believe these people get paid to fabricate such news.

My fear, as I have expressed in many contexts, is that the powers-that-be in the U.S. will not have the moral courage to admit they were wrong and they were lying. These are not people of strong convictions and integrity at the helm in America. I had two friends who posted two videos on my Facebook “wall” yesterday. One was the testimony of an FBI official, whose name I did not get, in a congressional hearing. The two representatives questioning him under oath caught him lying and evading their questions time after time. He just could not muster the courage to admit they had lied in reports which had been filed and then concealed those non-classified documents from Congress and the American public.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 25, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 25, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In Delaware, Corporations Are Dangerously Close to Acquiring the Right to Vote 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 6-22-2023]

As GOP states across the country aim to limit voter participation, Delaware’s Democratic-controlled legislature has been considering a bill to allow the expansion of the franchise to businesses. The Republican legislation would explicitly permit the city of Seaford, Delaware, “to authorize artificial entities, limited liability corporations’ partnerships and trusts to vote in municipal elections.”

The legislature has until June 30, when the legislative session ends, to vote on the bill.

With hundreds of thousands of corporations officially headquartered in a small Wilmington warehouse, Delaware has long been known for its business fealty. The state’s new legislation would allow corporations to upend the balance of power in Seaford, a small eight thousand–person city twenty miles north of Salisbury, Maryland. Just 340 people voted in the most recent election on April 15 — and the bill would potentially provide as many as 234 votes to businesses in the community.

The State That May Let Corporations Vote In Elections

Matthew Cunningham-Cook, June 20, 2023 [The Lever]

No, We Haven’t Lived with Diseases for Millions of Years. 

Jessica Wildfire [via Naked Capitalism 6-21-2023]

You hear this a lot: Apparently humans have lived with germs and diseases for millions of years. There’s no need for masks or vaccines. Nobody needs clean air. Natural immunity works just fine.

It’s wrong.

It couldn’t be more wrong.

We’ve never been able to live with diseases, not like we do now. Most westerners have no idea. Before medicine, life looked different.

You couldn’t even drink the water.

As an article in Scientific American points out, “water was unsafe to drink for most of human history.” According to Paul Lukacs, humans had to drink wine. It wasn’t fun, either. Ancient texts describe wine as “wretched, horrible, vinegary, foul.” The only thing worse was plain water. You often had no idea if it was safe to drink. For thousands of years, humans opted for beer and wine instead. There was just enough alcohol to kill germs….

Scientists and historians from all disciplines agree on this point: For most of our history, our lives were short. Average life expectancy remained well below 50 for millennia. We didn’t get eaten by tigers.

We got eaten by plagues.

When you look at the last 2,000 years across the world, you see the same thing. About half of all children died before reaching adulthood. Scientists confirm this trend all the way back to the stone age. As Oxford scholar Max Roser says, “Whether in Ancient Rome, in hunter-gatherer societies, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in Medieval Japan or Medieval England, in the European Renaissance, or in Imperial China, every second child died.”

Epidemics have upended countless civilizations, from Rome to the Akkadian Empire. These societies didn’t just live with it. Death and grief played a central role in their cultures, because it happened all the time. It was a different world that most people today can’t wrap their heads around.

They didn’t shrug it off.

They chased answers.

History is full of doctors and scientists who devoted their entire lives trying to treat and cure diseases that plagued us. It’s also full of quacks and charlatans who made fortunes by selling fake miracle cures. There’s a reason why historical novels and movies feature apothecaries and snake oil salesmen. Almost everyone was sick or scared of getting sick and dying….

Diseases have always hit the poor worse than everyone else. Throughout history, the rich have invested in sanitation for themselves first while leaving everyone else behind and blaming them for their own deaths….

 [TW: The role of government in fighting disease is central, One indication is to scan the list of Nobel Laureates affiliated with or funded by the USA National Institutes of Health.

“To date, 169 scientists either at NIH or whose research is supported by NIH funds have been the sole or shared recipients of 101 Nobel Prizes.”

And, then there is the fight for clean water supplies.
Chronology of American Waterworks from 1649 to 1865
Chronology of American Waterworks from 1866 to 1880 ]

Conservative charade of poising as economic populists

[TW: The next few links are about the new conservative manifesto just published by American Compass, which has been carefully written to reflect working Americans’ economic angst. The liberal response so far is frighteningly inadequate. There is a good chance conservatives using this new manifesto can steal the thunder of the Democratic Party and much of “the left” to make significant electoral gains. But as I discuss later, liberals are philosophically incapable of defending against this new conservative manifesto. It is best refuted by appealing to core principles of civic republicanism. ]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 18, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 18, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

 

MY FIFTY YEARS WITH DAN ELLSBERG 

Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 6-17-2023]

 

Climate and environmental crises

WTF is Happening? An Overview 

[Watching the World Go Bye, via Naked Capitalism 6-14-2023]

As of June 10, 2023, worldwide data showed the remarkable concurrence of three dramatic climate events.

The first WTF is in the Antarctic, where sea-ice extent is setting record lows daily, now fully over 2 million kilometers below the 1991-2020 mean.…

For the second WTF we are going to move from the ocean to land and consider global 2-meter surface temperatures, where on June 10, for the third consecutive day temperatures breached the 1.5°C barrier (above the 1850-1900 IPCC baseline)….

And the third WTF is perhaps the furthest from any notion of normalcy. WTF is happening to the world’s oceans, and in particular the North Atlantic? Ocean temperatures have been setting unprecedented daily records, spiking to highs that are shocking climate scientists, as they look for possible reasons….

Narrowing the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act 

[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 6-13-2023]

How Arizona squeezes tribes for water 

[High Country News, via Naked Capitalism 6-15-2023]

 

Strategic Political Economy

The AMLO Project 

[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 6-12-2023]

The Mexican political system was shaken on 1 July 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his new party MORENA achieved a resounding electoral victory, winning 53% of the votes in a four-way race – a thirty-point lead over his closest contender….

The idiosyncrasies of AMLO’s left-populist presidency have pitted him not only against the neoliberal right, but also against the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan intelligentsia and neozapatista-adjacent autonomists. These groups have variously accused him of ‘turning the country into Venezuela’, peddling ‘conservativism’ and acting as a ‘henchman of capital’. Yet as his six-year term reaches its final lap, a closer look at AMLO’s record reveals a much more complex picture. His overarching project has been to move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. To what extent has he succeeded, and what can the left learn from this endeavour?

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 11, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 11, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

What Happens When Corporations are Taxed at 50% - Like Before the Reagan Revolution?

Thom Hartmann, June 5, 2023 [DailyKos]

The main benefit of raising the top personal income tax bracket back up to nosebleed levels is that it causes CEOs and business owners (people who can essentially determine their own pay) to restrain themselves from draining the corporate coffers just to buy a new super-yacht, jet, private island, or a fourth 70-room mansion in the Swiss Alps.

Back in the 1933-1981 era, instead of behaving like spendthrift wastrels, CEOs and business owners would take income up to the edge of the top tax bracket and then stop (with the most prosperous CEOs maxing out at around 30 times average worker income), leaving the rest of the money in the company….

The second, though, is really the most important: taxes are used to incentivize behaviors that are good for the nation and discourage behaviors that are destructive to the nation.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

Thom Hartmann, June 3, 2023 [DailyKos]

[TW: Ian explained the damage tax cuts inflict on real investment in a January 2008 post on FireDogLake, which is now longer even archived. It was entitled, “Why Financial Crises Will Keep Happening” and I saved this excerpt of it: 

At this point to wring the excesses out of the system and to stop the systemic incentives to keep blowing bubbles is going to require doing something to make it so it doesn’t pay. There are two parts to any solution. The first and simplest way is to put a very progressive tax on all income no matter how or where earned that probably comes in at over 95% of all income over, say, $500,000 or a million at the most. Suddenly, needing to actually keep the companies sound, and knowing that in 7 years when the loans go bad, they’ll still be there taking the heat for it, will tend to concentrate the mind not on "can I make enough money to be in a yacht in 3 years" but into "does this deal make sense over the longrun".

-TW ]

The economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich (PDF)

[LSE Research Online, via Naked Capitalism 6-8-2023]

The Abstract: “This paper uses data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment. First, we use a new encompassing measure of taxes on the rich to identify instances of major reduction in tax progressivity. Then, we look at the causal effect of these episodes on economic outcomes by applying a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences indicator that implements Mahalanobis matching in panel data analysis. We find that major reforms reducings taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 4, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 4, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Why elites are misanthropic

Billionaires and the Evolution of Overconfidence

[The Garden of Forking Paths, via The Big Picture 5-31-2023]

To understand billionaires, you need to understand horizontal inequality, illusory control, self-selection bias, quantified self-worth, and the evolution of overconfidence.

What would you do if you suddenly had a billion dollars?

The way you answer that question will tell you something about how likely you are to become a billionaire in the first place.

For most of us—myself included—the answer to that question gets split into two parts: logistics and philanthropy. First, for logistics, you might consider: what would you change about your life once I never have to worry about money ever again? This is the “would you quit your job?” or “would you move somewhere else?” part of the question. Second, if you’re a decent person, you’d probably consider who you’d help and how you’d allocate a substantial portion of your obscene, newfound wealth to people who need support. To us, money is for something, it’s not a goal in itself.

That means we probably won’t become billionaires.

When billionaires first become billionaires, they have a different answer to the question of what they’d do if they reached a billion dollars: “I’d figure out how to make two billion.” This is a trait that pretty much every billionaire has….

I’ve spent much of my career studying powerful people, interviewing more than 500 leaders all over the world, from America to Zambia, Belarus to Thailand, Madagascar to Tunisia. As part of my research, I’ve met many billionaires. And the most important lesson I learned in those interactions was that these people were not normal. I don’t mean that in a nasty way (though often they deserved it). I mean it in a statistical way — they were abnormal outliers….

Now, consider other social systems such as power and wealth. If you want to become powerful, you usually have to want power. We have a word for that: “power-hungry,” and it’s not a compliment. It quite literally means someone who seeks power — and rarely do you get power without seeking it. The most powerful people in our societies are therefore those who, by self-selection bias, seek power — and then have managed to get power and stay in power.

But now, unlike the spelling bee, there’s a bit of conceptual leakage. What we want is someone who is good at wielding power for the benefit of us all. But what we’re actually selecting for in our political systems is someone who wants power, is good at getting it, and then never letting go. Our systems select for the wrong thing. It’s as though you were to hold a spelling bee but then choose then winners based on who is best at convincing you that they can spell, rather than who can actually spell.

The same is true for wealth. In an ideal world, the people most rewarded financially in our social systems would be those who generate the most shared wealth and prosperity, or those who innovate and help humanity the most; or those who are the wisest and most selfless and could therefore use their wealth for its maximal impact.

But that’s not what our modern economies select for at all. Many of the smartest people on the planet are not driven by money, so they’re not even in the running to become a billionaire — just as many of the people who would make the best politicians are those who least want political power. They’re not in the game, so they can’t win. Many theoretical physicists are geniuses; none of them are billionaires.

By contrast, few billionaires are geniuses, but all of them think they are…. when someone becomes a billionaire, it’s the ultimate validation of their overconfidence.... 

This leads to a dangerous delusion known as illusory control, in which a person mistakenly thinks they can shape outcomes to their liking even when they can’t. This occurs frequently when someone who has been successful in one domain chalks that success up purely to talent rather than to a more accurate assessment of their abilities and knowledge. They then assume that everything they touch will turn to gold and are surprised when it doesn’t….

The problem is worsened by a phenomenon known as horizontal inequality. We measure ourselves not against society as a whole, but relative to those closest to us. Billionaires often live near other billionaires and socialize with them (this is why yacht clubs exist), so their benchmarks shift. They compete with each other, so assessments of their wealth are transferred within the 0.000033 percent of the population, rather than relative to the 99.999967 percent of the population they’re above…. because of their obsession with horizontal inequality, a billion dollars is never enough for a billionaire. They just keep angling for that next billion, in a Quixotic quest to entrench their status and outcompete their peers….

Rather, these lessons are a call to action. The billionaire class is the visible manifestation of a broken system, which attracts and promotes the wrong kind of people into wealth and rewards them in a way that is very unlike a meritocratic spelling bee. The good news is that, like all systems, these systems can be changed, to create stronger overlap between who we hope to reward—those who help society and improve our world—and who we actually reward too often: greedy overconfident narcissists who can never get enough of their grotesque wealth.

The Man Who Knows What the World’s Richest People Want (and How To Get It)

[Vice, via The Big Picture 6-3-2023]

Rey Flemings has become one of the premiere fixers for the global elite. More than that, though, he gives the rich a place to admit what they can’t say publicly: that they need help finding happiness. 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 28, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 28, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

War

Why Are We in Ukraine? 

Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne [Harpers, June 2023 issue, via Naked Capitalism 5-22-2023]

Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would….

Initiated by the Clinton Administration while Boris Yeltsin was serving as the first democratically elected leader in Russia’s history, NATO expansion has been pursued by every subsequent U.S. administration, regardless of the tenor of Russian leadership at any given moment... Thus did the United States recklessly embark on a policy that would “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,” as the venerable American foreign policy expert, diplomat, and historian George F. Kennan had warned. Writing in 1997, Kennan predicted that this move would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

….By embracing what came to be called its “unipolar moment,” Washington demonstrated—to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow—that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a “focus on relations within nations, on a nation’s form of governance, on its economic structure.” 

….Moscow’s alarm over the hegemonic role America had assigned itself was intensified by what could fairly be characterized as the bellicose utopianism demonstrated by Washington’s series of regime-change wars....

Rather than attempting to maintain that stable nuclear balance, however, Washington has been pursuing nuclear dominance for the past thirty years…. [While there] was the precipitous qualitative erosion of Russian nuclear capabilities…. [US] didn’t fit with the aim of deterring an adversary’s nuclear attack—which requires only the nuclear capacity for a “countervalue” strike on enemy cities. They were, however, necessary for a disarming “counterforce” strike, capable of preempting a Russian retaliatory nuclear response. “What the planned force appears best suited to provide,” as a 2003 RAND report on the U.S. nuclear arsenal concluded, “is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.”

….Two critical events precipitated Russia’s war in Ukraine. First, at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, the U.S. delegation, led by President Bush, urged the alliance to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership. German chancellor Angela Merkel understood the implications of Washington’s proposal: “I was very sure . . . that Putin was not going to just let that happen,” she recalled in 2022. “From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.” America’s ambassador to Moscow, William J. Burns, shared Merkel’s assessment. Burns had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a classified email….

The second precipitating event came when Ukraine began talks about forming an “association agreement” with the European Union in September 2008 and, in October, applied for a loan from the International Monetary Fund to stabilize its economy after the global financial collapse. 

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace 

[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 5-24-2023]

IS NATO A NAZI ORGANIZATION?

[MATT EHRET AND CARY HARRISON ON KPFK 90.7 FM] 

[Bitchute, via Naked Capitalism 5-24-2023]

What if the celebrations of the victory over fascism in 1945 was a bit premature? What if leading Nazis were absorbed into NATO after the war and went on to play leading roles in carrying out terrorism, assassinations and a broader infiltration of western governments under the banner of a new rules-based order of globalization?

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 21, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 21, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

(anti)Republican Party debt charade

Six Legal Reasons the Federal Budget Is Its Own ‘Debt Ceiling’ - and ‘Floor’

Robert Hockett, May 11, 2023 [Forbes, via It’s not just the 14th Am. There are (at least) 5 other ways the Debt Ceiling is unconstitutional, by Bethesda 1971, DailyKos]

... In 1921, through the Budget & Accounting Act, Congress vested primary budget formulation responsibility with the President, establishing both detailed timetables and the predecessor of today’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to help shepherd the process along. The ‘debt ceiling’ is rooted in this era, during which Congress relinquished its previous role as legislator of every distinct federal bond-issuance. This Congress did to afford the President – by their own law our primary budget-formulator – more flexibility in determining revenue sources for funding the growing variety of legislated programs. That’s right, the original ‘ceiling’ was about affording the President more discretion, not less.

It is no accident that the Liberty Bond Act of 1917 (original source of the ‘ceiling’), the 1913 vintage 16^th Amendment to the Constitution authorizing the federal income tax, the thereby enabled Revenue Act of 1913, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and the aforementioned Budget & Accounting Act of 1921 all came in rapid succession. In effect, these enactments, all passed by Congress and signed into law by the President, constituted one coherent federal budget regime.

All of this changed, however, in 1974. The ‘crisis’ that occasioned the change was brought on, like so many others of the era, by President Richard Nixon. Nixon had an unfortunate tendency to think himself more ‘imperial’ than the Constitution allowed, and took it upon himself to decide with unprecedented frequency what Congressionally legislated and funded programs, even though he had signed them into law in the first place, were worthy of actual execution and funding.

The practice in which he manifested this proclivity was known as ‘impoundment.’ The idea was that instead of spending what Congress had instructed him to spend and what he had agreed, by signing their legislation, to spend, Nixon was routinely spending only what he wished to spend, while ‘impounding’ the rest – in effect, holding it hostage.

Congress put an end to this chicanery by passing the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, pursuant to which both Congress and the President go through detailed procedural steps in formulating their own budgets, which budgets are then ‘reconciled’ and collated before being legislated into law piecemeal through sundry program authorization and appropriations acts passed by Congress and signed by the President. (The Supreme Court closed all plausible loopholes in the Act in Train v. City of New York one year later.)

AOC Dunks on McCarthy: If You Want To Cut Spending, What About No Yacht Tax Breaks?

Prem Thakker, May 19, 2023 [The New Republic]

[Twitter, via The New Republic 5-19-2023]

x

The Beltway Media Is Spreading Debt Limit Misinformation  

Jason Linkins, May 20, 2023 [The New Republic]

The political press bears a share of the blame for the fact we are once again on the precipice of default.

...this might be a good occasion to point out the other big mistakes that have brought us to this point. Namely, those of the political media, who can rightly be said to have spent the last decade botching their coverage of the debt ceiling, mainly by failing to speak one plain truth: We keep getting dragged to the brink of default because the GOP has become a gang of extremists. This is villainy—their villainy—and the media has let them off the hook by treating this psychosis as all part of the natural order….

That the media cannot keep what is and what isn’t a “norm” straight in their head is the venial sin embedded within their debt ceiling coverage. The mortal sin is that the media has essentially conferred on the Republican Party the right to regularly stage these extortions. Imagine what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot—that a Democratic-controlled House majority was threatening to push the country into default unless a Republican president consented to a massive increase of the welfare state. It’s hard to imagine journalists referring to liberal hostage-taking as merely “the ordinary stuff of politics.”

This is another big lesson of the Obama era: The burden of bipartisanship, and the compromises that the media covets to a fetishistic extent, must be entirely shouldered by Democrats. (Marvel at the double standard: David Broder once made the insane insistence that the Obama-era Democrats needed to earn 70 Senate votes for any law they passed to be considered legitimate.) Throughout his tenure, Obama was regularly filleted for failing to reach a compromise with a Republican Party that had vowed to make him a one-term president by denying him a bipartisan win on anything. Pundits contorted themselves into pretzels in an attempt to ignore the fact that Obama and his fellow Democrats were the only party willing to stand in the ideological middle to make deals….

Obama spent an inordinate amount of time trying to play this game and please the naysayers. He allowed bipartisan “gangs” to build out their own health care reform ideas alongside the Affordable Care Act. He stumped for the votes of people like Olympia Snowe and Charles Grassley. He signed the Budget Control Act into law, unleashing the doomed “super committee” and the brutal sequestration budget cuts. And as soon as Obama was out of office, the moronic pundit drumbeat demanding more and bigger compromises fell silent. Donald Trump was never burdened by any such demands. The media’s bipartisanship fetishists essentially took four years off.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 14, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 14, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Population Decline Will Change the World for the Better 

Stephanie Feldstein, May 4, 2023 [Scientific American, via Naked Capitalism 5-7-2023]

[TW: Feldstein’s article is representative of elite thinking on the issue of population growth, which is neo-Malthusian while straining to avoid the appearance of eugenics, which is considered very politically incorrect. Notably absent in this elite thinking is a sense of human purpose and even human grandeur, which used to be imparted by the ideology of civic republicanism before it was smothered by liberalism. Basically, human purpose should be to uplift and better the condition of all human beings, economically, materially, and culturally—in short, to build civilization. This does not mean humanity has absolute dominion to use and exploit nature at will. Rather, the human purpose includes a stewardship over nature: to continually explore and investigate nature and advance our understanding of nature, so that our use of nature and our relationship to nature becomes ever more aligned with the laws of nature. We know now that certain elements are toxic—in the 1950s, radium dosages were acceptable as a means of treating certain skin conditions, and widespread use and discharge of lead caused no concern. We also now realize that liberalism as political economy violates a number of laws of social science (very well documented in the 2009 book by Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Fieldstone reflects some of these lingering ideas of civic republicanism when she writes:

Governments must invest in health care, support caregivers, help people who want to work longer do so, and redesign communities to meet the housing, transportation and service needs of older people. We need to move our economy toward one where people and nature can thrive. That means managing consumption, prioritizing social and environmental welfare over profits, valuing cooperation and recognizing the need for a range of community-driven solutions. These practices already exist—in mutual-aid programs and worker-owned cooperatives—but they must become the foundation of our economy rather than the exception.

We also need to bring together the reproductive rights and gender equity movements, and the environmental movement. Environmental toxicity, reproductive health and wildlife protection are deeply intertwined. Pollution, climate change and degraded ecosystems harm pregnant people, fetuses and children, and make it difficult to raise safe and healthy families.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that he was greatly influenced by Cotton Mather’s 1710 tract Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good.

There needs abundance to be done, that the Miseries of the World may have Remedies and Abatements provided for them; and that miserable people may be Relieved and Comforted. The world has according to the Computation of Some, above Seven hundred millions of people now Living in it. What an ample Field among all these, to Do Good upon! In a word, The Kingdom of God in the World, Calls for Innumerable Services from us. To Do SUCH THINGS is to Do Good. Those men Devise Good, who Shape any DEVICES to do Things of Such a Tendency; whether the Things be of a Spiritual Importance, or of a Temporal. You see, Sirs, the General matter, appearing as Yet, but as a Chaos, which is to be wrought upon. Oh! that the Good Spirit of God may now fall upon us, and carry on the Glorious work which lies before us!

This is the component of civic republicanism that modern proponents, such as Arendt, Rawls, and Skinner over: the positive requirement to do good. Or as Franklin summarized these ideas in his 1743 A PROPOSAL for Promoting USEFUL KNOWLEDGE among the British Plantations in America (pdf), citizens should aim to fellow human beings “at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts and improve the common Stock of Knowledge.”]