Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 23 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 23 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Is the 4th Amendment Dead in Cyberspace? 

Tracy Mitrano [Inside Higher Ed, via Thomas Neuburger, God's Spies, June 21, 2024]

Over a year ago former director of both the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden, flat out admitted, "we kill people based on metadata." He quickly distinguished between the metadata about which the debate was focused, telephone records, and other forms of surveillance metadata upon which covert actions are taken. Not surprised about the actions, I confess I was taken aback when I considered the implications that this disclosure has on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in cyberspace.

Ever since the USA-Patriot Act in 2001, I have been harping on complications of the Fourth Amendment between content and metadata in data networking. For as many years I have hoped for a revision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to correct the discordance. In all that time, I have assumed that a restructuring of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence around these distinctions might be possible.

I no longer believe that is a reasonable fix. The advanced algorithms applied to metadata in government surveillance make metadata the equivalent of content. That is what struck me about Hayden’s remarks. Not just occasional leaks of subject lines or an Internet Protocol address that resolves to a web page found in routing records, but the sorting, combining and redefining of that data into identifiable predictive behaviors that function as the basis of military or law enforcement actions. It is in this sense that I declare the Fourth Amendment dead in cyberspace. The only way to resurrect the Fourth Amendment could be to place all data, both content and metadata, under Fourth Amendment rubric.

[Neuburger: “The Fourth Amendment is gone. It was lost in 1928. So, to the question above, will we see it enforced again — in today’s security-fed state, the answer is no.” ]

Why Won't the US Help Negotiate a Peaceful End to the War in Ukraine?

Jeffrey D. Sachs, June 19, 2024 [Common Dreams] 

For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S. over security arrangements, this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations in favor of a neocon strategy to weaken or dismember Russia through war and covert operations. The U.S. neocon tactics have failed disastrously, devastating Ukraine in the process, and endangering the whole world. After all the warmongering, it’s time for Biden to open negotiations for peace with Russia.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance bombed Russia’s ally, Serbia, for 78 days in order to break Serbia apart and install a massive NATO military base in breakaway Kosovo. Leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war against Russia in the early 2000s.

To secure these U.S. advances against Russia, Washington aggressively pushed NATO enlargement, despite promises to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany. Most tendentiously, the U.S. pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, with the idea of surrounding Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea with NATO states….

Brzezinski spelled out a chronology of NATO enlargement in 1997, including NATO membership of Ukraine during 2005-2010….

...In my view, [the February 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine] was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation, of which there have been several dozen around the world, including sixty-four episodes between 1947 and 1989 meticulously documented by Professor Lindsey O’Rourke. Covert regime-change operations are of course not really hidden from view, but the U.S. government vociferously denies its role, keeps all documents highly confidential, and systematically gaslights the world….

Global power shift

US reputation on the line at Second Thomas Shoal 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2024]

June 17 saw the most recent and most violent effort yet by the China Coast Guard to prevent the Philippines from resupplying the BNP Sierra Madre, an old navy ship deliberately grounded on Second Thomas Shoal and manned by a detachment of sailors and marines to assert Philippine control of the sea feature.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 16 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 16 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

‘The whole supply chain is subsidised’: inside the EU’s blockbuster Chinese EV probe 

[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 06-13-2024]

...the tariff percentages the EU would slap on electric vehicle imports from China landed with a bang.

In the Belgian capital, officials set about briefing reporters on what had been uncovered in an investigation that saw dozens of case handlers spend 250 mission days on the ground in China, conducting 100-plus company visits, piecing together thousands of pages of evidence, which cumulatively tore a new rift in an already fraught relationship.

“The whole supply chain is subsidised,” said a senior official, who read through the charge sheet on a case that many predict could launch a trade war.

“This means that the Chinese government provides subsidies to all operators,” he continued. “Starting from the refining of lithium used in the batteries, to production of cells and batteries, to the production of BEVs [battery electric vehicles], and even transport of BEVs to EU markets.”….

Between January 2020 and September 2023, Chinese companies increased their EU market share from 4 per cent to 25 per cent, while local rivals’ share dropped from 69 per cent to almost 60 per cent, officials said.

[TW: If you really want to transition off of fossil fuels, it is basic common sense you should support in any way possible the design, manufacture, and sale of electric vehicles. This is a monstrous example of how the leadership of the West has been lobotomized by neoliberal “free market” ideology.” ]

Global power shift

MAJOR: Russia Officially Becomes World’s 4th Largest Economy, Passing Japan 

[Simplicius the Thinker, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2024]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 09 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 09 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

骑 虎 难 下

Average Old Democrat, June 02, 2024 [DailyKos]

...What happens to the Republican Party?  Where do they go and who will lead them?

The Chinese have an adage -- 骑 虎 难 下 – “When you ride the tiger, it is impossible to dismount.”

For the past several decades, the GOP has mounted up on a lot of tigers, none of which will be happy when, post-Trump, the Republican Party tries to dismount and return to being the Republicans I grew up with – responsible, reasonable, fiscally cautious, internationalist, willing to compromise . .

... with Reagan’s August 1980 speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the GOP mounted the Southern white supremacist tiger. 

Then there’s the NRA tiger, which the GOP is only to happy to ride.

The list of tigers they must get down from is long — the anti-abortion tiger that now is the anti-contraception tiger; the “great replacement theory” tiger; the reduce and kill Social Security and Medicare tiger; the “teachers are grooming your children” tiger; elections are rigged tiger . . . I could go on and on but you get the picture.

How 1978 Shifted Power In America And Laid The Groundwork For Our Current Political Moment

Joshua Green, January 12, 2024 [Talking Points Memo]

...There is a backstory that illuminates the Democratic Party’s embrace of finance in the years leading up to the [2008] crash — a story that begins in 1978. At the time, Democrats were still reliable partisans of the New Deal, but the steady economic progress of the American middle class was coming to a turbulent end. Jimmy Carter was president. He was struggling, without much success, to manage an economy buffeted by inflation, oil shocks and recessions — problems for which his party had no answers. A conservative countermovement of business groups and Republican politicians was beginning to gather force. One of history’s critical inflection points arrived that fall, when Wall Street made its first deep incursion into the Democratic Party in a way that would have lasting significance, although it passed mostly unnoticed at the time.

The great irony of this early conquest is that it began with Carter’s ambitious attempt to change the tax code to favor workers at the direct expense of Wall Street investors. Instead, Carter and his fellow reformers suffered a defeat so thorough that the financial lobby not only got to preserve its favorable tax treatment, but was able, with Democratic help, to rewrite the rules of the economy in a way that gave Wall Street an enduring structural advantage at the expense of the middle class — the opposite of what Carter had set out to do....      

Soon after Carter launched his presidential bid, [Charls] Walker took over a sleepy financial industry trade group called the American Council on Capital Gains and Estate Taxation and rebranded it as the more exalted-sounding “American Council on Capital Formation,” a euphemism for the aggressive accumulation of wealth. Walker began pushing the idea that the economy’s productivity crisis could be solved if the government changed the way it induced business investment. Since the New Deal, the preferred method had been the investment tax credit, which rewarded companies for building factories. This generally satisfied labor interests, since factories produce jobs. The major business lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers liked the investment tax credit because many of their members were large industrial corporations. Carter’s plan to eliminate the capital gains preference didn’t threaten them.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 02 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 02 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Can Democracy and Billionaires Coexist?

Sam Pizzigati, May 30, 2024 [inequality.org]

...Back in that same 1976, the always helpful World Inequality Database reminds us, the 40 percent of Americans in the nation’s statistical middle held just over a third of America’s wealth, 33.7 percent. The top 1 percent’s considerably smaller share that year: 22.6 percent. Today’s story? Our richest 1 percent hold just about 35 percent of our nation’s wealth, our middle 40 percent less than 28 percent.

The wealthiest of our wealthy, a just-released report from Americans for Tax Fairness points out, are doing their best to keep these good times — for America’s rich — rolling.

“Just 50 billionaire families,” the new ATF report details, “have already injected more than $600 million collectively into the crucial 2024 elections, with that number sure to show accelerating growth in the final six months of the campaign.”….

What can we do to significantly limit how deeply political candidates can feed at the billionaire trough? The Billionaire Family Business — the new Americans for Tax Fairness report — advances two core recommendations.

Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat 

Ken Silverstein, May 30, 2024 [The New Republic]

Military contractor Erik Prince started a private WhatsApp group for his close associates that includes a menagerie of right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and journalists. We got their messages….

All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”….

Off Leash was launched less than two months after Israel commenced its assault on Gaza following Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on Israel, and that topic has been one of the group chat’s main concerns since it was established by Prince on December 2….

But Biden was merely a figurehead controlled by “elements that are actually ruling for the Deep State,” he continued. The real problem was that Democrats had been “in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood and infiltrated by their proxies and agents, as well as Ayatollah sympathizers” ever since President Bill Clinton’s administration.

With the Democratic Party captured by Islamic terrorists, Marxists, globalists, and other foreign and domestic evildoers, the U.S. was “being destroyed from within,” warned Kasraie, whose fears were shared by many among the Off Leash crew.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 26 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 26 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Middle-Out Moment Is Here

[Democracy Journal. Spring 2024, No. 72]

Eleven years ago, this journal published a symposium called “The Middle-Out Moment,” touting a new theory of growth no one had heard of. Today, everyone has heard of middle-out economics, but most people still don’t know exactly what it is. With this issue, we revisit the topic: naming its core tenets, touting its successes, acknowledging its hurdles and complexities—but still arguing forthrightly that this is the economic future the country needs.

A New Economics Takes Hold
BY NICK HANAUER DAVID GOLDSTEIN

Industrial Policy’s Triumphant Return
BY FELICIA WONG

Moving Past Global Neoliberalism
BY TODD TUCKER

Vladimir Roosevelt and Franklin Putin

Chuck Lindeberg, January 8, 2023 [VoteNo2BigDough Newsletter]

The prevailing popular understanding is Roosevelt and Churchill saw eye to eye on World War II grand strategy. In fact there were fundamental differences between them from the outset, as indicated by this exchange between the two heads of government at the Atlantic Charter conference held aboard ships anchored in Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941:

“I [Roosevelt] am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now – “

“Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?” [replied Prime Minister Winston Churchill]

“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation – by making sure they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”

This disagreement was no mere tempest in a teapot. It played out in the deliberations of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that established the joint UK/USA strategy to be pursued, which in turn determined why, where and how many soldiers, sailors and airmen would be dying. From FDR down the Americans were determined no Americans should die to preserve the British colonial empire, and Churchill was determined the sun would not set on that Empire on his watch….

As we have seen President Roosevelt believed colonialism was the underlying cause of the wars of the 20th century. However he saw that a much more imminent threats existed and that were Facism and Nazism. Their appeal extended beyond Europe to the dictators the USA supported in Latin America and also, most disturbingly, to more than a few of America’s elite financiers and industrialists. Not to mention the southern wing of his own party, representing states the racist laws of which Hitler used as templates for Nazi legislation. Roosevelt felt it was so urgent the USA join the hostilities against Germany that he risked political suicide by deliberately putting the Pacific Fleet at risk. He understood that only a direct attack on the USA would overcome the America First movement that held sway right up to December 6, 1941. For Roosevelt, World War II was all about defeating Nazism in Germany so thoroughly the movement would never raise its ugly head again. Also it was likely the reason he pushed for the controversial phrase “unconditional surrender” as the ultimate war objective to be included in the Casablanca Conferences communique.

Well before World War II ended President Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Treasury economist Harry Dexter White and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles began planning for a post-war international structure intended to promote widespread prosperity, while minimizing incentives toward war. Historians have dubbed their program “Rooseveltian Internationalism,” and it envisioned two main thrusts: to foster the recovery of the war-torn countries; and to assist former colonies to become prosperous and truly independent sovereign states now that the decolonization movement was re-energized by the exhaustion of the European colonial metropoles. The plan was fully fleshed out when it was presented to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in the summer of 1944.

That gathering is better known by the name of the small resort town in New Hampshire where it was held, Bretton Woods….

But President Roosevelt died in April of 1945, 26 days before the end of the war in Europe and 4 ½ months before the surrender of Japan. This is widely assumed to be the turning point toward the demise of the Rooseveltian vision of the post-war world, however an equally significant pivot took place nine months earlier during the Democratic National Convention. About 10:00 PM July 20, 1944, the delegates were returning to their seats after marching around the floor of the Chicago Stadium celebrating the renomination of President Roosevelt by acclamation, and they were in a mood to do likewise for the incumbent Vice President Henry Wallace. At that point a cabal of southern Democrats and big city party bosses buttonholed the temporary chairman and leaned on him to gavel the session closed. There followed a sleepless night of wheeling and dealing. Wallace led the votes on the 1st ballot the following day, but he was short of the majority needed for the nomination. His support collapsed and Harry Truman, a machine pol from Kansas City in the border state of Missouri won the necessary majority on the 2nd ballot. Wallace was fully on board with Roosevelt’s domestic and internationalist agendas. Truman was not….

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 19 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 19 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

You Can’t Run Industrial Policy OR A War Economy Under Neoliberalism 

Ian Welsh, May 13, 2024

...Neoliberalism is about unearned profits. This is seen most clearly in the stock market and in real estate…. But this isn’t just true of housing and stock prices, it’s true of almost everything. Profit margins have soared during the neoliberal era. Our companies don’t compete on price or quality, they try to create oligpolies or monopolies so that they can charge more without having to provide significantly more value. The way they took advantage of Covid to raise prices far faster than their costs were rising is instructive.

Simply put, neoliberalism is about unearned money: about capital gains; PE plays where you buy a company with debt, load it with the debt and then dump it; monopolies and oligopolies and getting government to juice asset prices or pay you far more than you deserve for shoddy goods (see mil-industrial complex.)…

For about six years, I’ve heard constant complaints from Chinese that it was no longer possible to buy a home. Their housing market, like ours, was being bought up by investors, pricing out young people.

What was the Chinese response? They crashed their housing market and the government has stepped in…. 

We can’t compete with this. It’s impossible. Not because it’s impossible in theory, but because we don’t believe in doing such things and to pursue such policies we would have to hurt rich people, a lot, and they own Congress and the Presidency and our politicians in other countries.

China has repeatedly shown that if a policy is good for the majority, but hurts the rich, they’ll do it anyway. We’ve repeatedly shown the opposite.

And you can’t run industrial policy or a war economy if you want fake profits based on not actually producing good new goods at cheap prices. It can’t be done. If an entire society is based around “give me money for the least possible effort”, you’re cooked….

The West is toast. We can’t compete. It’s that simple. To compete we will have to change significantly, and while putting up tariffs isn’t actually a bad idea, it’s not enough alone. Without changing our fundamental governing and economic policies and ideology so that to get rich and stay rich you have to actually make good cheap new products in a way that improves the majority’s lives, we will never be able to compete.

When Your Rulers Ignore Voters But Are Terrified Of Protesters, That Tells You Something 

Caitlin Johnstone [Caitlin’s Newsletter, via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2024]

It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one.

Oligarchy

US Oligarchs Started One Civil War — and They Could Do It Again

Thom Hartmann, May 17, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The ideology of the Republican Party and the stranglehold of powerful corporations of our political system overall has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible….

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairnessreports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United….

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that….

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things….

[TW: I hope that regular readers, familiar with my dogged insistence on the need to revive civic republicanism as a philosophy of government, know how completely wrong Moore is. ]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 12 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 12 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

'Sad What We Are Doing': Global CO2 Increase Sets New All-Time Record

Olivia Rosane, May 10, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The average monthly concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by a record 4.7 parts per million between March 2023 and March 2024, according to new data from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

The spike, reported by the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography on Wednesday, reveals "the increasing pace of CO2 addition to the atmosphere by human activities," the university said.

How Good, Kind, Caring People Became The Bad Guys 

Jessica Wildfire [OK Doomer, via Naked Capitalism 05-05-2024]

...When you complain, people judge you. It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing. It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake. Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker.

They hear negative words coming out of your mouth. They associate those negative things with you, because you're the person saying them. That's how our primate brains operate. It takes a lot of self-awareness to overcome that, and many people lack it….

The New Anti-Antisemitism 

Rick Perlstein, May 8, 2024 [The American Prospect]

The response to college protests against the war on Gaza exemplifies the darkness of the Trumpocene….

THE PROVOCATIONS FOR THESE ASSAULTS are so much milder now than they were in the 1960s that an administrator then who could peer 55 years into the future would probably smirk. Students peacefully chanting slogans on a single, specific issue, backed by easily realizable demands? Pshaw….

But to repeat: What is happening now, I believe, might be far more dangerous….

Concerns for the “safety” of Jewish students has become a rhetorical commonplace in elite discussions of campus politics these days: “Jewish students of all political beliefs,” Theo Baker, son of New York Times superstar Peter Baker, tells us in The Atlantic in “The War at Stanford,” “have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets.”

It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. You know who has good reason to fear for their safety? People, many of them Jews, getting pummeled by cops and fascists. People getting high-powered rifles aimed at them from rooftops by agents of the state who surely have been told by the people giving them orders to be ready to shoot because of all the “dangerous” things that are going on amid those protesters’ tents.

Sure, offensive things have happened to protesters. And that’s awful. But when I told some Chicago neighbors about all the Judaism going on down in Hyde Park, they were frankly shocked to hear it: They watch Morning Joe, from which they got the impression that Jew-hate was the overwhelming leitmotif of this whole protest thing.

It suggests one of those Talmudic puzzlements, or perhaps the setup for a dad joke: How many Jews have to pray peacefully in a pro-peace encampment (or alternatively, to cite a scene witnessed outside the 116th Street gate of Columbia University, how many black-hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews have to chant, “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism”) for them to stop being an antisemitic mob?

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 5 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 5 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Disrupting mainstream economics

Finding the Money OFFICIAL TRAILER

x

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[Finding the Money, YouTube, 

Release MAY 3, 2024: www.findingmoneyfilm.com

An intrepid group of economists is on a mission to instigate a paradigm shift by flipping our understanding of the national debt — and the nature of money — upside down. FINDING THE MONEY follows Stephanie Kelton, former chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee, on a journey through Modern Money Theory or "MMT," to inject new hope and empower democracies around the world to tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century: from climate change to inequality.

Biden's Economic Adviser Tries and Fails To Explain How Money Works

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[Washington Free Beacon on YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 05-03-2024]

[TW: Jared Bernstein is one of the most progressive, pro-labor mainstream economists out there. He is is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and serves  as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. His stupefaction on this question sparked a very interesting and informative discussion in the comments on Naked Capitalism Links 05-03-2024.]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 28 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 28 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Global power shift

Ukraine: A Guide For The Perplexed 

Aurelien, via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2024]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Naked Capitalism Links 04-21-2024, by Lambert Strether, has a series of X-tweets regarding the suppression of pro-Palestinian protests in USA, France, and other countries, the attempt to label protestors as anti-Semitic, and commentary about ties to intelligence agencies and suborning of police. 

Israel’s defense minister calls for halting pro-Gaza protests at US universities 

[Anadolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2024]

Netanyahu Calls for Crackdown on Pro-Palestine Protesters in the US

Dave DeCamp [via Delphi Initiative, April 24, 2024]

Echoing President Biden, Netanyahu labeled the demonstrations ‘antisemitic’ by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday called for a crackdown on Americans protesting against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza at college campuses across the United States. “What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over 

Israel’s Doom Loop for Our Democracy

Skip Kaltenheuse [via Thomas Neuburger, God's Spies, April 26, 2024]

Would it go over if any other foreign country’s minions publicly announced they’d spend a hundred million dollars to defeat a handful of US Representatives who opposed ethnic cleansing? If they offered bribes of 20 million dollars to people to primary those they want removed?

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 21 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 21 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Will the American Oligarchy Accept Limits or Choose World War Three?

Posted on April 14, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

Database Exposes 'Illicit Network Undermining Democracy Around the World'

Brett Wilkins, April 05, 2024 [CommonDreams]    

"Coups. Assassinations. Riots. Detentions. Disinformation. We know the tactics that have been deployed to undermine our democracies. But who is behind them?"

Progressive International (PI) asks and answers this and other questions with an extensive new database published Wednesday that connects the dots in what the leftist group calls the "Reactionary International"—a loose global network of right-wing leaders and organizations working to subvert democratic institutions.

PI calls it an "illicit network undermining democracy around the world."….

A cursory search of the database's contents shows users can:

• Learn about Israel's NSO, Rayzone, and Team Jorge, and how a team of Tel Aviv tech entrepreneurs fuel unrest in Latin America;
• Meet the Grey Wolves, Turkey's roving death squad with links to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the ethno-nationalists in his governing coalition; and
• Explore the global network of the Falun Gong, its Trump-connected media outlet The Epoch Times, and its traveling dance troupe known as Shen Yun….
  

Global power shift

Checkmate 

Scott Ritter [via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2024]

The world’s attention has, rightfully so, been focused on the fallout from Iran’s retaliatory strike against Israel on April 13-14, 2024. Iran’s purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield….

By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea….

In short, this means that the US and NATO forces in Europe are vulnerable to attack from advanced Russian missile technologies which match or exceed those used by Iran to attack Israel. It also means that China would most likely be able to strike and sink US navy ships in the Pacific Ocean in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. And that North Korea could do the same to US ships and forces ashore in the vicinity of Japan and South Korea.

Until which time the US can develop, produce and deploy missile defense systems capable of defeating the new missile technology being deployed by nations like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, US military power projection capabilities are in a state of checkmate by America’s potential adversaries.  

Precision over power: How Iran’s ‘obsolete’ missiles penetrated Israel’s air defenses 

[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2024]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 14, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 14, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Heather Cox Richardson Politics Chat: April 9, 2024

[Youtube, April 9, 2024]

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[TW: 3:00 Two major things are occurring in USA, and they are closely tied to each other. One is what Trump is doing. The other is what the Republican Party is doing, which since 1981 has operated under the ideology that the way to make the country better is to concentrate wealth at the top of the economy, so the wisest and most business savvy cam invest it most efficiently to create growth and jobs. 

5:30 Why the question “Is Trump a fascist?" is not really interesting or useful. 

8:00 Even though the Founders were including only white wealthy males like themselves, the Declaration of Independence was radically revolutionary because it rejected the ideology that some people are better than others and should be the rulers. They do not believe in human equality. Trump and the people who support him have rejected this bedrock belief of American democracy; they believe some people are better than others, and they have the right to rule. 

Trump is not running to win the popular vote. They realize they are a minority but believe they are correct and morally superior. They believe they are opposing the causes of USA decline.

Corporate leaders are seeking to protect their positions of privilege and the preferential tax treatment they have enjoyed under the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts. They are determined to prevent Biden from upsetting their applecart. 

25:30 The Republicans have only a minority of voters supporting them, and they recognize this. In 1986, they began their campaign of suppressing Democratic votes with their “ballot integrity” campaign. Then they began aggressive gerrymandering after the 2010 election which was the first election after the Citizens United decision allowed unlimited amounts of money into politics.

28:00 ? In 2007, Mitch McConnell became Senate leader, and he recognized that they did not have majority support. The clear majority of Americans liked Social Security, clean air and clear water, and business regulation. But, if Republicans could screw up Congress and prevent progressive legislation from being passed, they could pack the courts with people who believed like they did, and they could rewrite the laws by reinterpreting them, without passing any laws.

40:00 ? HCR lists Biden's accomplishments, and concludes Biden is the most consequential President since LBJ and perhaps FDR. ]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 7, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 7, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Navies are obsolete, but no one will admit it 

[Crooked Timber, via Naked Capitalism 04-04-2024]

Global power shift

Rethinking tanks on the modern battlefield

Stephen Bryen [AsiaTimes 04-02-2024]

...The problem with adding explosive reactive armor (ERA) is that it is heavy. When you already have a 70-ton behemoth, adding another few tons makes its roadworthiness questionable. A key problem for the Leopard and Abrams tanks has been getting stuck in the mud in Ukraine, where they then can be picked off fairly easily....

The US has stopped upgrading the M-1 Abrams tank and canceled the latest modifications. It is clear that, given the new battlefield weapons, even the huge M-1 Abrams is not survivable. A new tank design is needed…. The M1 tank dates back to the period 1972 to 1975, meaning the design is at least 50 years old.  

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza 

[972, via Naked Capitalism 04-04-2024]

A must-read. Exeptionally nasty.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 31, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 31, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

There Are Four Postelection Scenarios, and Not One Is Good 

Brynn Tannehill, March 22, 2024 [The New Republic]

Secret RCMP report warns Canadians may revolt once they realize how broke they are 

[National Post, via Naked Capitalism 03-24-2024]

“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada.

“For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.

The report, labelled secret, is intended as a piece of “special operational information” to be distributed only within the RCMP and among “decision-makers” in the federal government.

Global power shift

This is the way the West ends 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 03-30-2024]

With the United States entangled in conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and the threat of a war with China looming large, Professor Michael Brenner’s insights and views on the state of the US-led liberal order are arguably as timely and important as ever….

MB: The entire foreign policy community in the United States now shares the basic tenets of neoconservatives. Actually, the scripture is Paul Wolfowitz’s notorious memorandum of March 1991 wherein he laid out a comprehensive, detailed strategy for systematizing American global dominance. Everything that Washington is doing, and thinking, now is derivative of that plan.

Its core principles: the United States should use all the means at its disposal to establish American global dominance; to that end, it must be ready to act preventively to stymie the emergence of any power that could challenge our hegemony; and to maintain full spectrum dominance in every region of the globe. Ideals and values are relegated to an auxiliary role as a veneer on the application of power and as a stick with which to beat others. Classic diplomacy is disparaged as inappropriate to this scheme of things.

For Biden himself, a confident, assertive, hard-edged approach to dealing with others derives naturally from belief in Americanism as a Unified Field Theory that explains, interprets and justifies whatever the US thinks and does. Were Biden reelected, this outlook will remain unchanged. And were he to be replaced by Kamala Harris mid-term, which is likely, inertia will keep everything on the fixed course.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 24, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 24, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Global Population Set To Fall For First Time In 700 Years 

[Modernity, via Naked Capitalism 03-23-2024]

Delayed Gratification – Why Are Global Birth Rates Falling, and Does It Matter? 

[Alpha Sources, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2024]

[TW: It is astonishing how upset many people are about the prospect of shrinking populations. The political economic vision of civic republicans should be emphasizing that the entire aim of developing and employing technology that replaces human labor, is to diminish the need for human labor. But the benefits of new technologies must be shared equitably. ]

The Keys to a Long Life Are Sleep and a Better Diet—and Money [ 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-21-2024]

“The top 10 percent in both the UK and the US live over a decade more than the bottom 10 percent. It’s not even that they live more, they live more healthy lives. Why is that? Well the poor often don’t have the chance to exercise, their diets are often poor, and they work multiple jobs and have problems with sleep. All these things we think we can do, they’re harder if you’re poor and have to juggle jobs, child care, et cetera. One worry I have is that if we discover sophisticated interventions—like turning on stem cells and so on, or having to give transcription factors to people intravenously—depending on the sophistication of the intervention only the rich might be able to afford them. That would make the disparity even worse. Not only are the rich living longer, they’re going to live even longer and healthier.” 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 17, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 17, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

 “‘If something requires us to cease production, we will do that:’ FAA  

[Leeham News & Analysis, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-13-2024]

“The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering whether to suspend the Production Certificate of Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) if it’s not satisfied changes to its safety culture are sufficient, LNA has learned. It’s the “nuclear option” LNA has written about on previous occasions following the Jan. 5 in-flight accident/explosive decompression of a Boeing 737-9 MAX operated by Alaska Airlines. Already under heightened scrutiny by the FAA, Boeing took yet another in a series of safety blows when a special panel of experts appointed by the FAA to independently review Boeing’s safety culture issued a scathing report on Feb. 26.” Lambert Strether: “See Water Cooler here; document is now readable.] More: “The FAA levied fines—and suspended some of them—for previous safety violations 36 times, according to a tracking website. And despite pledges and actions taken to improve safety following the 2018-2019 MAX crisis, Boeing still has fallen short.” FAA’s leverage: “So, what’s the ultimate hammer the FAA has? It’s suspending the PC 700 certificate, and this is under consideration, LNA is told…. Boeing holds what’s known as a Production Certificate, named PC 700. This allows Boeing Commercial Airplanes to produce commercial airlines and military aircraft that are based on airliners…. If the FAA imposed a full suspension of PC 700, all 7-Series airliners would be affected. So would the commercially-based P-8 and KC-46A. Deliveries of the inventoried aircraft likely would be suspended. The FAA could choose to segregate the PC 700 more narrowly.” And: “It’s an election year. There is bipartisan Congressional criticism of Boeing, including from Congressional members from Washington State where the 737, 767, KC-46A, P-8A, and 777 are built. Despite the bipartisan nature, if the FAA suspended the PC 700 authority, the damage to Boeing and the affected supply chains would undoubtedly be subject to criticisms of President Joe Biden by Republicans.”

Airplanes and engineering: The way we were  

[Star-Tribune, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-12-2024]

When it changed: “Working for Honeywell in Minneapolis, I was involved in product developments for several Boeing aircraft: new platforms B-757, B-767, B-777 and B-787, and revisions on older designs, including the B-737. Each of these developments involved an intimate relationship between Boeing and Honeywell across multiple levels of organization. At the heart of the work were the customers’ requirements. Meeting these drove daily decisions in the project planning…. One afternoon, we started calling our contacts in Boeing Engineering. Engineering had prioritized the bidders and assured us Honeywell was their first choice. However, they would not confirm that Boeing management had signed off on the selection. We still believed we would win the program. In the past, Boeing always selected the highest technical bidder then renegotiated the price as the program phased into volume production. It was the best process to meet Boeing’s and the passengers’ quality demands… we were notified we were not selected for the program. Through several discussions with the Boeing engineering managers, we later found out that Boeing’s procurement process had changed. Boeing supply management downgraded the engineering assessment from prioritized capability to either meeting or not meeting the requirements. Then, procurement would select the lowest bidder from this pool of suppliers meeting the requirements. Engineering was no longer needed to sign off on the selection. (We heard that Boeing engineers wore a black armband for a month protesting the selection for this program.) The selection process could now be done in a spreadsheet with no account for the uncertainty that engineering often expected and hoped to have some insurance against. This would become a fundamental change in the aircraft industry.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 10, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 10, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Global power shift

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-06-2024]

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Ukraine war and Western system’s fatal flaw 

Alex Krainer, Marck 6, 2024 [substack]

One of the talking points that has been making rounds among the West’s true believers, is that we can outspend Russia by a factor of 10 in military expenditures….

As the New York Times reported last September, Russia is producing at least seven times more ammunition than the US and its Western allies combined, and she is producing it at about 1/10th of the cost of western manufacturers. For example, while the cost per round for a Russian 152 mm round is about $600, NATO must budget between $6,000 and $8,000 per each 155 mm round.

Not only is Russia vastly ahead in terms of sheer production volumes but also in terms of innovation, quality and overall effectiveness. Her arsenal spans a very large array of weaponry from ultra-sophisticated hypersonic precision-guided missiles, world's most effective air-defense complexes and cheap but deadly drones, to the basic stuff like field artillery and ample ammunition to keep it firing 24/7 for months on end. At the same time, the United States and NATO still rely on legacy weapons systems that were state-of-the art in the 1990s, but are in large part obsolete today.

Purpose-driven vs. profit-driven systems: it’s no match

In a superb and important piece of analysis referencing the recent US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS), former Marine and military affairs analyst Brian Berletic dissected many of the reasons why the combined West is now clearly losing the arms race, not only against Russia but also against China. He points out the key differentiator: while Russia's defense industry is purpose-driven, that of the West is profit-driven....

The undiagnosed malignancy

... Even as it endeavors to maintain a dominant geostrategic position in the world, Western powers have cannibalized their own capability to enforce and defend that position. The inescapable conclusion is that there is a deep, systemic flaw in the Western model of governance.

For generations, we'd all been educated to worship at the altar of private capital's unrestrained pursuit of profit for the greatest benefit of its shareholders, as Milton Friedman argued in his 1970 essay entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits” (PDF). No other considerations can shape the development of production and distribution of goods and services in our economies, else someone will shriek, SOCIALISM! Worse, we’ve even allowed ourselves to become convinced that individuals’ unrestrained pursuit of their own interests can somehow automagically lead to the best possible outcome for the whole society.

As it turns out, those ideas were the owner class’s self-serving delusions that incubated the fatal flaw within their system, rendering it fragile and weak. The flaw has festered as an undiagnosed malignancy because it enabled the interests who own our Military Industrial Complex and other key industries (the big banks, big tech, big ag, and big pharma) to become extremely wealthy. They also became deeply entrenched in society’s power networks. As such they’ve grown and wholly resistant to any curtailment of their extraordinary privileges, even when it becomes clear that they are driving their nations to destruction….

China and Russia, the industrial production superpowers that could win a war 

[bne Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 03-03-2024]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 3, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 3, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Amitav Ghosh’s Reckoning With Opium.

Alexander Zaitchik, March 1, 2024 [The New Republic]

His new book, Smoke and Ashes, traces the ravages of British opium on India from the eighteenth century to the present.

[TW: I April 2016 I posted an excerpt from Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization, Versus British Free Trade. Letters in Reply to the London Times, by Henry C. Carey. Philadelphia, Collins, 1876. Though Carey today is rarely mentioned in economics textbooks, he was the leading USA economist of the mid-nineteenth century, a staunch protectionist who was probably the single greatest proponent of what was then called the American School of Political Economy. 

[American protectionism was much more than simply a rejection of the concept of comparative advantage. Michael Hudson explains in the Preface to his 2010 book America’s Protectionist Takeoff: The Neglected American School of Political Economy:

The protectionist doctrine that shaped America's industry and agriculture... went beyond the narrow boundaries of today's economics discipline by deeming public policy and technology central to economic theorizing, not "exogenous." Analyzing what was needed to increase productivity, the American School emphasized that wages and prices had to be high enough to sustain rising living and educational standards for labor, and investment in rising energy mobilization by capital."

[But the American School even went beyond that. Carey and other American School economists always kept in view the ultimate goal of economic policies: the establishment and enhancement of civilization. And unlike the competing British School of Adams, Ricardo, and Mill, a central element of the American School was morality. Note the heavy tone of scorn and sarcasm Carey uses in his fifth letter to the editors of the Times of London, as he reviews and condemns the British opium trade and its disastrous consequences for China. -TW]

Japan’s new births fall to record low as demographic woes worsen 

[ABC Australia, via Naked Capitalism 02-28-2024]

Power in the shadows

CIA, Ukraine Exchange Pre-Divorce Propaganda 

Matt Taibbi, via Naked Capitalism 02-28-2024] Important

The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour 

[ScheerPost, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2024] 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 25, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 25, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation 

[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 02-22-2024]

Global power shift

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-19-2024]

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SCOTT RITTER: Mike Turner’s Folly 

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2024]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

You paid more in income taxes last year than a corporation with billions in profits

[Popular Information, via The Big Picture 02-18-2024]

On February 2, for example, General Electric (GE) reported about $7 billion in profits for 2023. GE CEO and Chairman H. Lawrence Culp Jr. was effusive. "In 2023, our teams delivered an excellent year, more than tripling earnings and generating almost 70 percent more free cash flow," Culp said in a statement. Culp noted the company was able to fatten the pockets of its shareholders by spending $7 billion on "dividends, buybacks, and retiring our preferred equity."

You might expect that, with such a profitable year, GE sent a giant check to the federal government. Instead, GE received a refund of $423 million.

Data from Americans for Tax Fairness shows that GE is not an anomaly. Earlier this month, T-Mobile reported over $10.9 billion in profits in 2023 but paid just $42 million in federal income taxes, an effective tax rate of just 0.4%. Meanwhile, Tesla recorded $3.2 billion in domestic profits in 2023 but paid just $48 million in federal income taxes, an effective tax rate of 1.5%.

The 2023 annual reports of public companies will be filed throughout the year. But in 2020, "55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes… despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States," according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). Those 55 companies collectively brought in over $40 billion in pre-tax domestic profit. But instead of paying federal income taxes, they received $3.5 billion in rebates from the federal government.

Another ITEP report found that 39 profitable companies paid no taxes over the three-year period from 2018 to 2020. This group included FedEx, Salesforce, Penske, and Advanced Micro Devices. And T-Mobile paid no taxes over that three-year period despite collecting $11.5 billion in profits. Another 79 profitable corporations paid less than half of the statutory rate of 21% between 2018 and 2020.  

Companies are able to pay little or no taxes in part due to "long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act," the signature tax policy of former President Trump. Companies can continue to take advantage of tax loopholes, including huge write-offs for giving executives stock options, shifting profits off-shore, and accelerated depreciation of equipment purchases. But the statutory tax rate was also reduced from 35% to 21%. So, companies are taking these deductions off of a much smaller base.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was supposed to "broaden the base" by eliminating loopholes and lowering the rate. It ended up just lowering the rate and keeping most of the loopholes. As a result, many companies are paying little to nothing.