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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Chile rejects new “progressive” constitution

Chile votes overwhelmingly to reject new, progressive constitution 

Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 9-6-2022]

Chilean voters resoundingly reject a new ‘ecological’ constitution 

[Science, via Naked Capitalism 9-8-2022]

Lambert Strether: Here is the very first sentence from WaPo’s Editorial Board, urging rejection. “Lithium is a key input in batteries that run millions of laptops and upon which the United States is basing its electrified automotive future.” Clarifying!

The Egalitarian Rift Which Doomed The New Chilean Constitution

Ian Welsh, September 6, 2022

….Let’s bring this back to Chile: indigenous people’s have been badly treated and deserve restitution, but to give them permanent rights that others in Chile don’t have based on their ancestry means that some people have rights that they didn’t earn legitimately from an egalitarian point of view….

For this to work it would have to be a legitimate way for people without the ancestry to gain the status, and a legitimate way for people wit the status to lose it.

If it was based on ancestry combined with “you’ve been treated badly”, then the harm would have to be quantified, and the status lost when the harm has been rectified. “The harm has been made substantially whole.” People could join the status by proving similar harm had been done to their ancestors and/or them and was still effecting them.

If, on the other hand, the status is justified by “indigenous people are better stewards of the land” then a duty would have to be set up to take better care of the land, and those who did not do so would lose the status, while those who are willing to do so (and to learn indigenous methods) would be allowed to gain the status.

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

US Life Expectancy Continues To Plunge Below China's

[ZeroHedge, 9-1-2022]

Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second consecutive year as Covid-19 and overdoses increased mortality rates. An empire's death may start with its people, and as the world shifts, China, an emerging power, has a life expectancy that is above the US and widening.

According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans' life expectancy fell .9 years to 76.1 years in 2021 - the lowest since 1996.

The year prior, life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years. The combined figures were the largest two-year decline since the 1920s.

EU can’t let Putin set energy costs – Austria

[azerbaycan24.com, via Mike Norman Economics 8-28-2022]

"Electricity prices across Europe are tied to the price of gas, which now costs around ten times what it did last year. However, while some EU countries are heavily dependent on Russian gas for heating and industry, they use alternate fuels to generate electricity. Austria, for example, generates more than three quarters of its electricity from renewables, per 2020 figures from the International Energy Agency. [Austrian Chancellor Karl] Nehammer argued that decoupling electricity and gas prices would result in a fairer bill for consumers that more accurately reflects electricity production costs."

The Real Student Debt Debate 

Zachary D. Carter [In The Long Run, via Naked Capitalism 9-1-2022]

In the United States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage. People without college degrees aren't just excluded from a lot of jobs that pay well. They're more likely to be laid off and less likely to be hired during recessions. They're less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have a disability (the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even have shorter life expectancies than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting activities. A college degree confers respect and prestige.

In a better world, the simple fact of being human would command equal respect for everyone. That is not our world, but we can imagine such a place and work toward realizing it. Prestige, by contrast, is inherently exclusive….

After World War II, millions of new college students arrived on campuses around the country to receive an education funded by the G.I. Bill. Suddenly, an experience that had once been restricted almost exclusively to the very rich became open to infantrymen. And though the vast majority of colleges and universities continued to exclude Black students, millions of white people who had never dreamed of going to college eventually earned degrees. For many prior graduates, this step toward democratization was threatening. Their credential was being diluted….

Student debt allows a certain kind of prestige-hoarder to pay lip service to the ideal of universal education, while also looking down on some graduates as, well, not quite the real thing. "Technically, you have a degree, but we all know you don't truly belong up here, dear." Erase that debt, and this distinction disappears. College graduates are all just college graduates again. A little bit more equality has entered the picture, and a little bit of prestige has departed.

I suspect this is what most people really mean when they say student debt relief is "unfair."

[TW: As I excerpted last week from Forrest A. Nabors’ book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, quoting West Virginia Senator during the Civil War, Waltman Willey, explaining why the South had no system of free public education: “Sir, the true reason of this hostility to popular education is hostility to democratic institutions.” ]

[YouTube,

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Historian Nicole Hemmer’s latest book "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s" focuses on the conservatives who remade U.S. politics in the 1990s. Hemmer speaks with Walter Isaacson about how that decade's politics paved the way for Donald Trump’s presidency.

From the transcript:

You grow up believing … the thing that everyone believes… Democracy as a form of government. What you begin to see over the course of the 1990s is a real questioning of that... Not just of whether democracy is the best form of government,  but whether everyone in the U.S is actually fit for democracy…. In the 1960s, when the United States really opened up in terms of voting rights, in terms of immigration, and by the 1990s you have books like The Bell Curve, that argue for genetic differences in intelligence based on race; books like Alien Nation that say that only white people should be allowed to immigrate to the United States because only they are fit for democracy...

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 28, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 28, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

The pandemic

”Individual freedoms versus collective responsibility: immunization decision-making in the face of occasionally competing values”

[Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]

From 2006, still germane: “There are situations where there can be a real or perceived divergence between individual and community benefits of vaccination. This divergence may occasionally be based upon current scientific evidence and may exemplify the need for overriding individual autonomy. Use of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the US in the early 1990s is such an example. The sustained use of OPV led to the elimination of polio in the US, with the last cases of wild polio reported in 1979. While OPV is extremely safe and effective, the vaccine very rarely caused vaccine associated paralytic polio (VAPP) resulting in 5–7 cases of VAPP annually with near universal use of OPV in the US. Once polio had been effectively controlled in the US, preventing the indigenous transmission of polio, the risks of the vaccine (VAPP) may have been greater than the risk of disease. Assuming the individual does not travel to a region where polio is still endemic, a roughly one in a million risk of VAPP is highly unlikely, but still greater than the risk of wild polio. Yet, if a substantial number of individuals were not vaccinated because of this individual risk/benefit analysis, polio would likely have been reintroduced into the US, as the disease is only a plane ride away, leading to a tragedy of the commons [7]. While this divergence in individual versus community benefits was short-lived (the US switched to the inactivated polio vaccine that can not cause VAPP), such a situation can cause a dilemma for parents, health care providers and policy makers.”

"Barriers to Air Purifiers in Schools Rebuttal Matrix"

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-22-2022]

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”How a $100 box is changing the way people protect themselves against coronavirus”

[Dallas Morning News, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]

“Enter the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, a do-it-yourself air filtration system with North Texas ties that has taken the internet by storm. Each box typically costs under $100 to make and is more effective than other, pricier options like High Efficiency Particulate Air filters. The simple contraption consists of a box fan, four MERV13 furnace filters that can be purchased online or in store, some cardboard and strips of tape. It’s the brainchild of air quality researcher Richard Corsi, dean of engineering at the University of California, Davis, and Jim Rosenthal, CEO of Texas-based company Tex-Air Filters. …. The White House recognized the need for better ventilation and launched the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge in March to call on building operators, like schools and companies, to up their inside air quality. But interest in such investments has been weak, even with billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 funding for schools that can be used to upgrade ventilation systems. Portable air filters can make up for outdated ventilation systems, although they tend to come with hefty price tags. Standalone devices that use HEPA filters can cost upwards of $300 to $400, and that doesn’t include the price of filter replacements. So when the DIY air filter prototype – designed by Corsi and first constructed by Rosenthal in the summer of 2020 – worked, the two were elated. With MERV13 filters making up each side of the cube, the box fan on top pulls air through the filters and blows clean air out of the top. In a 700-square-foot classroom with nine-foot ceilings, a Corsi-Rosenthal Box on the highest fan setting can add the equivalent of about seven-and-a-half to eight air changes per hour, Corsi said. ‘If we started at two air changes per hour and we added eight air changes per hour, we’re roughly getting about an 80% reduction in inhalation dose with that single Corsi-Rosenthal Box,’ he said. ‘That’s a huge reduction. That’s like everybody wearing pretty decent masks in the classroom.'”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 21, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 21, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Kenneth Mack | The 14th amendment: its radical past (Yo

uTube)

[Harvard Law School, Nov. 16, 2016, via YouTube]

[TW: Law Professor Kenneth Mack chronologically summarizes the terrorizing events that prompted the writing and passage of the 14th Amendment, and the reactions against it, including:

• the Memphis riot of May 1-3, 1866, in which black Union troops being demobilized were confronted by a white mob that killed 46 local
  
• the New Orleans riot of July 30, 1866, in which 34 African Americans were killed and another 119 wounded, by a white mob composed largely of former Confederate soldiers
  
• the horrifying ax murder of a black family in rural Kentucky in the summer of 1868, by two white men, John Blyew and George Kennard. When officials in Kentucky refused to prosecute the two white murderers, federal officials tried and convicted them in the U.S. Court for the District of Kentucky. The state of Kentucky then appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, arguing Kentucky’s laws prohibiting African Americans from testifying against whites invalidated the convictions. The Supreme Court rejected the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and ruled that victims were not entitled to protection from violations of their rights perpetrated under the laws of the “sovereign” states. 
  
• The massacre of over 100 black militia men by a group of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan in Colfax, Louisiana, April 13, 1873. ]
  

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Eric Foner: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (YouTube)

[National Constitution Center, November 19, 2019, via YouTube]

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31:11
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” What are the privileges or immunities of citizens?  Nobody knows… Bingham [US Representative from Ohio John A. Bingham, who drafted the 14th Amendment] had a clear idea — he said those are the liberties protected in the Bill of Rights. Bingham said what this clause will do is require the states to respect the Bill of Rights. Before the Civil War the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights only apply to the federal government. What are the first words of the First Amendment? “Congress shall make no law…” Look at freedom of speech: try to give a speech against slavery in South Carolina — you can't, there's a law against it. Doesn't that violate the First Amendment? No, because the First Amendment is about the federal government. But now Bingham says the now the states are going to have to abide by it.

33:18
There was a tradition of sharp distinctions among different kinds of rights: political rights, the right to vote, but you can be a citizen and not have that  — women were citizens but they couldn't vote. That's up to the states to determine who votes, at least before the Civil War. Civil rights, you mentioned a lot of them a minute ago those are the rights that really make it possible to compete in the labor market: the rights of signed contracts, to sue and be sued, to testify in court, have basic equality before the law…. Republicans by this time thought blacks orught to have all of those civil rights that  — that's what the Civil Rights Act of 1866 says….

33:57 — The language is interesting… citizens have to enjoy these civil rights the same as enjoyed by white persons. That's a very interesting way of putting it. Before the Civil War, the word “white” in law was a boundary, a barrier: only white people can vote... Now they use whiteness as a baseline: if white people enjoy this right, than everybody else has to enjoy it. So it's amazing... what's going on here is a complete rewriting of the legal structure of the United States in terms of race. One of the things I used a tell my students, “you know what they are trying to here,  if you wonder what their original intent is, it’s what we would call today “regime change.” They are trying to change a regime based on slavery into a regime based on freedom.” That's what they are trying to do in reconstruction, with these laws and these amendments.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 14, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 14, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

The Inflation Reduction Act is Not Designed to Reduce Inflation 

Benjamin Studebaker [via Naked Capitalism 8-8-2022, also Water Cooler 8-8-2022]

“If you actually look at this thing, this legislation only raises $739 billion over the next decade. This means that on average, each year, it only raises around $73.9 billion. This is not as much money as you might think. The US spends around $782 billion on defense each year. Last year alone, the federal government spent $6.8 trillion. We’re looking at less than 10% of the defense budget, 1% of the federal budget, and about 0.3% of GDP. How is the federal government meant to combat inflation with a new tax that is smaller than a third of a percentage point of the economy? The purpose of the bill is to be seen to be doing something. The Biden administration needs something to run on in the midterms…. [T]he United States suffers from a chronic lack of state capacity. It struggles to pass all but the most paltry legislation. It cannot get out in front of its problems and it cannot even solve crises as they arise. So, it papers over its dysfunction by measuring spending in decades rather than in years, by sticking that extra zero on the end of every number. Seven hundred billion sounds much better than seventy billion. It almost sounds like somebody’s doing something. But it’s the sound of silence.”

“A Complete Breakdown of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Inflation Reduction Act” 

[Slate, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-11-2022]

“The Inflation Reduction Act is the Walt Whitman of federal legislation: like the great American poet, the bill contradicts itself; it is large and contains multitudes. It represents the most significant climate investment in U.S. history, but it also paves the way for a massive expansion of oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters. It includes a new minimum tax designed to ensure that large corporations pay at least 15 percent of their profits to the federal government, but it also showers corporations in tax subsidies that will push many more firms’ tax rates below 15 percent (and in some cases below zero). It is disappointingly modest in its aspirations, but it will arguably be—along with the Affordable Care Act—the most ambitious piece of legislation signed by a Democratic president in more than a half century.” 

Digging Into the Inflation Reduction Act (podcast)

[The American Prospect, August 12, 2022]

In this episode, the hosts interview David Dayen about just what is in the monster Inflation Reduction Act: gobs of tax credits, new regulations, tax hikes, and so on. Then they discuss what its passage reveals about the state of the Democratic coalition and what it might bode for the future.

Climate and environmental crises

Bad News for Earth: Rainwater Is No Longer Safe to Drink, Study Says

[Popular Mechanics, via Ian Welsh 8-12-2022]

Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 7, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 7, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Restoring balance to the economy

Becoming the Workers’ Party Again

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), August 5, 2022 [The American Prospect]

...A toxic combination of shareholder capitalism and pliant politicians gutted our middle class, hollowed out our towns, and dried up opportunity for people outside big coastal cities and people without college degrees or inherited wealth.

And it upended our politics…. The “blue wall” was crumbling. Between 2012 and 2020, Democrats lost nearly 2.6 million votes in small and midsized towns in Ohio and the Midwest. A recent report sheds light on how it happened—and what progressives can do to fix it….

The people I grew up with knew that Republicans would sell them out to corporations—Bush negotiating NAFTA, Gingrich fighting to bring China into the WTO, Trump granting corporate tax breaks. That surprised no one.

But many Democrats’ active encouragement of the corporate outsourcing agenda came as a shocking betrayal. Those decisions stung much worse coming from the party of Roosevelt—the party that for generations these workers had trusted to be on their side.

Stealing America Back From the Right

The American Prospect, August 1, 2022]

In this excerpt of the latest bonus episode, the hosts interview New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie about reclaiming American traditions and institutions from conservative Republicans who want to destroy them. 

BY PROSPECT STAFF AUGUST 1, 2022

The new pandemic

Monkeypox vaccinations in Africa would have spared the whole world from this emergency
[Quartz, August 3, 2022]

[TW: Back in the mid-1980s, a number of times I joined a small and forlorn groups of activists  protesting in front of the World Bank building in DC. One of our points was that if the IMF and the World Bank were not stopped from imposing “conditionalities” (austerity) on developing countries, the resulting economic carnage would literally turn those countries into petri dishes for the evolution and emergence of new and ever more deadly pandemic diseases. 

We also warned that the consequences of Henry Kissinger's December 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200 “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth. For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” (pdf) would be deadly for USA and Europe, not just the developing countries targeted by Kissinger for destablization and depopulation. ]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 31, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 31, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Will elites be allowed to “cull the herd”?

Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-27-2022]

We’re engaged in a massive social experiment to see whether an elite (ruling + governing classes) can “cull the herd” in six-figure quantities, and still retain hegemony (TINA); the Covid pandemic is only the latest and most obvious example. So far, the answer seems to be yes, or even “Hell, yeah!” Viewed in that light, is “the system” “at risk” at all?

Global power shift as USA and west commit “suicide by neoliberalism”

Is this or is this not a recession? It doesn't matter, there are much bigger changes afoot — Philip Pilkington

Philip Pilkington [Macrocosm, via Mike Norman Economics 7-29-2022]

What is going on? Simply put, the West is getting poorer. We are seeing two things at once. First of all, policymakers have lost the plot and started intervening heavily into the economy with lockdowns and various other policies that destroy the supply-side of the economy. Secondly, we are seeing an enormous geopolitical shift centered around the war in Ukraine. The old model where the rich West runs large trade deficits with the poorer developing countries in exchange for worthless paper is coming to an end. We are exacerbating this transition by engaging in self-destructive sanctions policies that interfere with markets in everything from energy to fertiliser.

In a few words: the West is in decline and our leaders are greatly accelerating and exacerbating this decline. They can cover this up with redundant arguments about what is and isn’t a recession for so long. But at some point either the inflation will get worse — perhaps by gas shortages in Europe this winter — and/or the unmeployment rate will spike. At that point, the underlying dynamics will become too obvious to ignore. For politicians and the general public anyway. Economists will likely find some other redundant nuance to debate and distract.

Russia’s Vostok 2022 has big messages 

M. K. Bhadrakumar [India Punchline, via Mike Norman Economics 7-27-2022]

[Bhadrakumar is a diplomat and former ambassador, retired from the Foreign Service of India.]

Vostok 2018, held exactly four years ago, was the first time such a massive military exercise was held after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (At the height of the Cold War in 1981 under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union held its last Vostok exercise). In the event, Vostok 2018 turned into a Russia-China gun show. 

The Russian Federation put more than 300,000 troops in the field—alongside tens of thousands of tanks, helicopters, and weapons of every sort—for a huge war game in Russia’s far-eastern reaches, and invited the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to play along, which it did.

And a whole new groove in international affairs began appearing, signifying that the interests of Russia and China have once again begun to align — this time around, in response to US military power under a pugnacious president, Donald Trump.  

On the sidelines of the exercise, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping had a breakfast of blinis together in Vladivostok. It was a powerful signal that Russia no longer saw China as an adversary but as a potential military ally. It was widely noted internationally as heralding a major shift in the co-relation of forces in world politics. 

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Michael Hudson — Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Nature

Global power shift as USA self-destructs

Alfons Mais: “Russia has resources that are almost inexhaustible” 

[Handelsblatt, via Naked Capitalism 7-20-2022] Original here.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 7-21-2022]

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Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 7-23-2022]

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Record-breaking Chinese bridge clears hurdle to faster transport in border province 

South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 7-19-2022]

PHOTO Luzhijiang Bridge in the southwestern province of Yunnan

China has built the world's longest single-tower suspension bridge

[Interesting Engineering, July 17, 2022]

The 800-meter-long (2,625 feet) bridge is being built to improve the connection between China and Southeast Asia. It will drastically cut the travel time between the cities of Yuxi and Chuxiong from an hour and a half to only two minutes….

The Luzhijiang Bridge is also impressive because of the incredibly steep valley cliffs it rises out of. Drivers sticking to a 100 mph speed limit will come straight out of tunnels onto the 300-meter-tall bridge from either side. The steel cables used for the suspension bridge had to be secured by drilling a 100-meter tunnel for an anchor.

The bridge will also form part of a new 200 km (124 miles) expressway through Yunnan that will improve the passage to countries including Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos. The expressway is part of the country's Belt and Road Initiative, which is designed to improve connections with 140 other countries.

China Maritime Report No. 22: Logistics Support for a Cross-Strait Invasion: The View from Beijing (PDF)

[China Maritime Studies Institute, U.S. Naval War College, via Naked Capitalism 7-17-2022]

Charles Sumner speech on civic republicanism, February 1866

The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, For the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government.  

Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts

Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution fixing the Basis of Representation, February 5 and 6, 1866. 

II.

And this brings me to the next form of this necessity and duty, as they appear in the guaranty clause of the Constitution. It is expressly declared that “the United States shall guaranty to every State in this Union a republican form of government.” These words, when properly understood, leave no alternative. They speak to us with no uncertain voice. But they must be understood. The Rebel States, while providing constitutional safeguards for property in man, and, according[Pg 137] to the vaunt of their Vice-President, making Slavery the corner-stone of the new Government, yet follow our Constitution in the
formal guaranty of a republican form of government.[46] Defiantly they assume that Slavery is not inconsistent with such a government. To this degrading assumption we must reply, not only for the national cause, but that republican governments may not suffer.

The caning of Sumner on the Senate floor,
by South Carolina representative
Preston Brooks, May 22, 1856

 

[Pg 138]

Believe me, Sir, this is no question of theory or abstraction. It is a practical question, which you are summoned to decide. Here is the positive text of the Constitution, and you must affix its meaning. You cannot evade it, you cannot forget it, without abandonment of duty. Others in vision or aspiration have dwelt on the idea of a Republic, and they have been lifted in soul. You must consider it not merely in vision or aspiration, but practically, as legislators, seeking a precise definition, to the end that the constitutional “guaranty” may be performed. Your powers and duties are involved in this definition. The character of the Government founded by our fathers is also involved in it.

There is another consideration not to be forgotten. In affixing the proper meaning to the text, and determining what is a “republican form of government,” you act as a court in the last resort, from which there is no appeal. 

Thee magnitude of the question before us is seen in the postulate with which I begin. Assuming that there has been a lapse of government in any State, so as to impose upon the United States the duty of executing this guaranty, then do I insist that it is a bounden duty to see that such State has a “republican form of government,” and, in the discharge of this bounden duty, we must declare that a State, which, in the foundation of its government, sets aside “the consent of the governed,” which imposes taxation without representation, which discards the principle of Equal Rights, and lodges power exclusively with an Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Caste, or Monopoly, cannot be recognized as a “republican form of government,” according to the requirement of American institutions. Even if it may satisfy some definition handed down from antiquity or invented in monarchical Europe, it cannot satisfy the solemn injunction of our Constitution. For this question I now ask a hearing. Nothing in the present debate can equal it in importance. Its correct determination will be an epoch for our country and for mankind.

You are sole and exclusive judges. You may decide as you please. Rarely in history has such an opportunity been offered to the statesman. You may raise the name of Republic to majestic heights of justice and truth, or you may let it drag low down in the depths of wrong and falsehood. You may make it fulfil the idea of John Milton, when he said that “a commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body”;[47] or you may let it shrink into the ignoble form of a pretender, with the name of Republic, but without its soul.

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Stunning new Webb images: baby stars, colliding galaxies and hot exoplanets 

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 7-13-2022]

Strategic Political Economy

The Power Game 

W. J. Astore (Lieutenant Colonel USAF ret.), [Bracing Views, via Mike Norman Economics 7-10-2022]

A book that shook my world was journalist Hedrick Smith’s “The Power Game,” published 35 years ago in 1987. It was about “How Washington really works,” and what I remember about it is how it made me feel, as in discouraged and outraged. I learned about the power of lobbyists, the power of money, and what money gains you, which is access. More-or-less legal forms of corruption in 1987 are now most definitely legal, with the Supreme Court decreeing that corporations are citizens and that money is speech….

One thing I really liked about Hedrick Smith is his honesty. He gave a talk on his book, link here:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?3754-1/power-game-washington-works

Where he explained that, if you’re a politician and you accept certain campaign donations, it’s understood between both parties that when the donor needs you to vote a certain way, you will vote that way, no questions asked. Everyone in Congress understands this. It’s why every effort by real citizens to get big money out of politics fails. It fails because the big donors won’t have it. They like to be able to buy politicians, thank you very much. That’s how democracy works, so says the Supreme Court. If you don’t like it, start your own corporation, make a few billion, then you too can buy your own politician.

A revival of democracy in America starts with campaign finance reform, which most politicians say they’re for even as they vote against it. Sounds like a conundrum to me. Can we solve it by explaining to our esteemed justices (John Roberts, can you hear me?) that money is not the same as speech and that corporations really aren’t the same as citizens?

Finally, a rather obvious point, but it bears repeating. Justices like Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett weren’t just selected because they were reliable votes against abortion. They were really vetted and selected because they will always rule with the powerful against the powerless. They are, in a word, pro-corporate.

“Pushed To The Brink”

Jesse & Tyrel Ventura [Die First Then Quit, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-15-2022]

“From the Police, to the Supreme Court, to Congress, across the board U.S. citizens are losing faith in our vital institutions in record numbers. Notably, the biggest drops in citizen confidence from last year to this year were found in the institutions of the Presidency and the U.S. Supreme Court. They both fell 15 and 11 percent, respectively. This doesn’t come as a surprise given how feckless the Biden Administration has been when faced with the major political, economical, and social challenges we’ve seen over the last year. Rising inflation, Roe v. Wade, Climate Change… just vote harder…. This nose dive cuts across all party lines as well…. How much farther can we fall or maybe the better question is what happens to a populace that loses all faith in its institutions? The answer to that maybe found in a recent polling data collected by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which discovered that a majority of American’s believe their government is corrupt and rigged against them. Pigging backing on that, the data also revealed that ‘more than one in four Americans are so alienated from their government that they believe it may ‘soon be necessary to take up arms’ against it.’ One in four Americans. That’s a truly frightening statistic. That should make anyone’s blood run cold after reading it. Violent revolution is not the answer. Any student of history will tell you that a political revolution based on violence hardly ever brings actual freedom to a country.”

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

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

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Our Entire Civilization Is Structured Around Keeping Us From Realizing We Can Do This

Caitlin Johnstone [via Mike Norman Economics 7-9-2022]

Thousands of protesters outraged by the deteriorating material conditions of the nation’s economic meltdown have stormed the presidential palace of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and I guarantee you the aerial footage as they poured into the building en masse has made every government leader and plutocrat a little uncomfortable today….

If you’ve ever wondered why so much energy goes into keeping everyone propagandized in our society, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why our rulers work so hard to keep us divided against each other, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why we’re always being instructed to take our grievances to the voting booth even though we learn in election after election that it never changes the things that most desperately need to change, this is why.

Our entire civilization is structured around preventing scenes like the one we’re seeing in Sri Lanka today. Our education systems, our political systems, our media, our online information. Religions that have been around for thousands of years because the powerful endorsed and promulgated them are full of passages extolling the virtues of obedience, poverty, meekness, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. From the moment we are born our heads are filled with stories about why it’s good and right to consent to the status quo and why it would be wrong to take back what has been stolen from us by a predatory ruling class.

This is why we’re always inundated with messaging about the importance of civility and politeness any time people realize that they can simply confront corrupt officials in restaurants or at their homes to push for what they want. The managers of the oligarchic empire which rules over us are terrified that we will one day notice that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that there’s really nothing they could do to stop us if we decided to replace them with a system which benefits ordinary people instead of an elite few.

Introduction. THE POPULIST MOMENT: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America 

by Lawrence Goodwyn, Oxford University Press, 1978.  

This consisted of a new way of looking at society, a way of thinking that represented a shaking off of inherited forms of deference. The achievement was not an easy one. The farmers of the Alliance had spent much of their lives in humiliating circumstances; repeated dealings with Southern merchants had inculcated insecurity in generations of farming people. They were ridiculed for their poverty, and they knew it….

In 1884-85, the Alliance began developing its own rhythm of internal "education" and its own broadening political consciousness among leaders and followers. The movement culture would develop its own mechanism of recruitment (the large-scale credit cooperative), its own theoretical analysis (the greenback interpretation of the American version of finance capitalism), its own solution (the sub-treasury land and loan system), its own symbols of politics (the Alliance "Demands" and the Omaha Platform), and its own political institution (the People's Party). (pp  33-34)

Michael Hudson: From Junk Economics to a False View of History – Where Western Civilization Took a Wrong Turn

[Naked Capitalism 7-8-2022]

Today’s neoliberal economic mainstream has created a fairy tale about civilization existing without any regulatory oversight or productive role for government, and without any need to levy taxes to provide basic social services such as public construction or even service in the military. There is no need to prevent fraud, or violent seizure of property – or the forfeiture of land tenure rights to creditors as a result of debts. But as Balzac noted, most great family fortunes have been the result of some great theft, lost in the mists of time and legitimized over the centuries, as if it were all natural.

These blind spots are necessary to defend the idea of “free markets” controlled by the wealthy, above all by creditors. This is claimed to be for the best, and how society should be run. That is why today’s New Cold War is being fought by neoliberals against socialism – fought with violence, and by excluding the study of history from the academic economics curriculum and hence from the consciousness of the public at large. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the fight is between socialism and barbarism.

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

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

by Tony Wikrent 

Strategic Political Economy

“America Is Sliding Into the Long Pandemic Defeat”

Ed Yong [The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-28-2022]

“In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or ‘Figure it out yourself.’ It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic.” We call it “personal risk assessment.” ….

“Across the country, almost all government efforts to curtail the coronavirus have evaporated….. I have interviewed dozens of other local officials, community organizers, and grassroots groups who are also swimming furiously against the tide of governmental apathy to push some pandemic response forward, even if incrementally. This is an endeavor that all of American society would benefit from; it is currently concentrated among a network of exhausted individuals who are trying to figure out this pandemic, while living up to public health’s central tenet: Protect the health of all people, and the most vulnerable especially…. Building a stronger public-health system demands an unfettering of the moral imagination: Americans need to believe that their government should invest in systems that keep everyone safer from disease—and to trust that such systems are even possible.

But throughout his decades-long career, [AIDS activist and Yale epidemiologist Greg] Gonsalves has witnessed social safety nets being repeatedly shredded, leading to ‘a collapse of any faith in the state to do good,’ he told me. That faith eroded further when public institutions buckled during the pandemic, and when two successive administrations failed to control the coronavirus. The resulting ‘pandemic fatigue’ is not just a craving for the status quo, but a deep cynicism over the possibility of something better. In one study, most Americans preferred a better, fairer post-pandemic future, but mistakenly thought a ‘back-to-normal’ one was more popular [a Keynesian beauty contest, but one where the minimizers were given the megaphone by the 1%] —and so more likely>. ‘People can imagine a world with crypto-banking and the metaverse, so why is it so hard to imagine a world with less disease and death?’ Céline Gounder of Kaiser Health News said.”

How Japan Achieved One of The World’s Lowest Covid Death Rates 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-2022] 

“If the US had Japan’s death rate, only 82,000 people would have died. Not 1 million+.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 26, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 26, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling Puts States in Spotlight”

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-24-2022]

“By eliminating a constitutional right to an abortion, the high court’s ruling returns the issue to the states, and about half of them, mostly led by Republicans, have been poised to ban many or most abortions if Roe was wiped away. Other Democrat-led states are moving to protect access to the procedure, in some cases preparing for visitors from states where abortion will be unavailable. And in politically diverse states with divided government, clashes over the path forward on abortion policy could continue for years. ‘This is going to put abortion toward the center of our politics for the foreseeable future,’ said Steven Greene, a political-science professor at North Carolina State University. Advocates on both sides of the issue said that the ruling would place additional focus on state and local elections, because governors, state lawmakers and attorneys general will hold new power to enact and enforce a broader array of abortion policies. That means those contests could see additional funding and support from national groups and donors.”

TW: “This is going to put abortion toward the center of our politics for the foreseeable future.” That, I believe, is the actual intent of the puppet-masters and rich funders of movement conservatism: prevent or forestall people from focusing on climate change driven depopulation, ongoing economic collapse as the elites grasp whatever remains, and the transition of USA into a surveillance state of plutocratic despotism. 

Thomas, in his concurring opinion, says the quiet part out loud. “Substantive due process” is next:

[Lambert Strether, Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-24-2022]

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-24-2022]

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Will This Week’s Events Rouse the Electorate?

Robert Kuttner, June 24, 2022 [The American Prospect]

As a number of critics have pointed out, the Court’s ruling today does a lot more than criminalize abortion. It turns states into inquisitors, compelling women to prove that a miscarriage or stillbirth was not an abortion. It puts doctors on the defensive and makes it far harder for women to get routine care where reproductive health is concerned. It allows individual vigilantes to claim bounties for tracking down women who might have used abortion pills, and their enablers. As Jia Tolentino writes in The New Yorker, the closest analogy is the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act.

Dark Money Led To This Moment

Andrew Perez and Aditi Ramaswami, June 24, 2022 [The Lever]

The decision, which is part of a barrage of devastating, precedent-setting Supreme Court rulings this term, surely has many Americans wondering how we arrived at such a dark moment. The answer is simple, even if it is rarely discussed in corporate media: It lies in a giant pile of anonymous cash that was deployed to buy Supreme Court seats, help determine justices’ caseload, and shape their decisions.

A secretive, well-financed dark money network has spent years working to build the Supreme Court’s radical conservative supermajority and bankrolling many of the politicians and organizations involved in the most controversial cases now before the court, including the abortion rights case decided Friday.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 19, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 19, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

From 2010: The Unvarnished Truth About the US

Ian Welsh, June 15, 2022

Twelve years ago I wrote this post. I don’t see anything since then has made it wrong and I think it’s worth reading still, especially for those who weren’t with me 12 years ago:

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are avaiable anywhere else….

Add to this the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology or anything else and I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around. The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, and ologopolistic markets and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed”.

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington. This will put their influence on steroids. Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money. And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 6-15-2022]

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China demands US Navy stay out of Taiwan Strait international waters: report 

Ryan Morgan [American Military News, via Mike Norman Economics 6-15-2022]

The West Doesn’t Want The World To Know That Russia Just Saved Brazil’s Crop This Year
Andrew Korybko [One World, via Mike Norman Economics 6-14-2022]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 12, 2022

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 12, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Oligarchs' war on the experiment of republican self-government

The Money Trail to the January 6 Attack on the Capitol Is Ignored in Last Night’s Public Hearing

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, June 10, 2022 [Wall Street on Parade]

As we watched the two-hour public hearing on the critical facts uncovered by the House Select Committee on the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, we kept waiting to hear a discussion of the money trail that facilitated this attack. That discussion never came. And yet, big expenses were involved: dozens of buses were rented; signs advertising “Stop the Steal” were on the sides of some of those buses; food and lodging had to be paid for, in or around expensive Washington, D.C.; and, now, lawyers have to be paid to represent those indicted for brutalizing police on January 6 or destroying and/or stealing government property….

But the question that any good investigator of an unsolved crime scene must ask is this: who benefits from this crime? And to understand who, besides Donald Trump, would be the chief beneficiaries of a coup that installed Trump for an illegitimate second term as President, one has to follow the money trail. That money trail leads to Charles Koch, the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world….

One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House in the first place was Freedom Partners. (It quietly shut down in 2019 after the press started reporting on its role.) When the group was still active in 2018, we had taken a hard look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration….

To handle any legal pushback, Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal….

According to the TrumpMarch.com website, which was sponsored by Women for America First, its “Coalition Partners” for the January 6 event at the Capitol included the Rule of Law Defense Fund; the Tea Party Patriots; and Turning Point Action, among others. The TrumpMarch.com website has since been taken down but it was captured on January 2, 2021 (give the page a little time to load) by the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.

Rule of Law Defense Fund is the dark money arm of Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a group that was raising millions of dollars from corporate felons in order to elect the highest law enforcement officers at the state level. (See our in-depth report of January 14, 2021.) According to IRS filings made by RAGA, it has received $511,400 from Koch Industries and a subsidiary since 2014….

Another of the Coalition Partners, Turning Point Action, Tweeted that it was “honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” The Tweet was first reported by DailyDot.com.

Turning Point Action is a dark money group that does not report its donors to the Federal Election Commission. However, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, its sister group, Turning Point USA, has received $610,000 from Donors Trust since 2017. Charles Koch’s footprints are all over Donors Trust, another dark money group, as we exclusively reported in 2010. (See Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)

#1 charge: “Illegal parading

Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-9-2022]

“Here is the chart of the charges under which they were convicted (there’s no legend, but orange seems to sentenced, and grey not yet sentenced:”

Graph

“The #1 charge: “Illegal parading.” Illegal parading?”

Did I experience aghastitude on “1/6″™? No.

Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-10-2022]

TW: I don’t agree with Strether’s argument that the events of January 6 2021 are not as terrible as Democrats, liberals, and the anti-Trumpers argue they are, but I think Strether is absolutely correct in his conclusion that what is driving these three groups of people is their sense of entitlement. 

Did I experience aghastitude on “1/6″™? No. The Winter Palace in 1917 this was not. And what if that guy, instead of being a right-winger in a Trump hat, had been a union guy with a giant inflatable rat? I would have been cheering him on! Finally somebody stood up! What’s really driving the liberal Democrats — and, I suppose, Never Trump Republicans — is that deep down they think Capitol Hill is their space, democracy is “our” democracy, norms are their their norms, and that they will be comfortable again when the “insurrectionists” are rooted out and purged. But it’s not, it’s not, they’re not, and they won’t be. They lost their minds in 2016 for the same reasons, and never did manage to find them again, party leadership and PMC base together.

Insurrection is a crime (18 U.S. Code § 2383). So how come Merrick Garland charged the vast majority of the “insurrectionists” with illegal parading?

TW: The assault on the Capitol and attempt to stop the certification of Biden was a serious, seditious assault on the rule of law, posing a dire threat to republican self government. But a serious investigation of this threat would focus, as Pam and Russ Martens assert, on the funders. But that would be a threat to the powers that have transformed USA from a republic to a plutocratic oligarchy, and which own both the Republican and Democratic parties.