Joe Biden, December 16, 2024 [The American Prospect]
...When I took office, the economy wasn’t working for most Americans…. economic policy was in the grip of a failed approach called trickle-down economics. Trickle-down tried to grow the economy from the top down. It slashed taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and tried to get government “out of the way,” instead of delivering for working people, investing in infrastructure, and ensuring America stays at the leading edge of innovation.
But this approach failed. Too many Americans saw an economy that was stacked against them with failing infrastructure, communities that had been hollowed out, manufacturing jobs that were offshored to China, prescription drugs that cost more than in any other developed country, and workers who had been left behind.
[TW: I was surprised BIden’s writing in The American Prospect did not attract much interest. Probably because after the electoral victory by Trump, everything Democrats do seems anticlimactic. There were many more articles on why Bidenomics failed, such as James Galbraith’s article in The Nation on December 9, Why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust. But I think even these pulled back from fully exploring the anger and rage most working people have towards elites, which was fully revealed by the murder of a health insurance CEO in Manhattan. It is exactly that anger and rage that Trump is able to manipulate — “I am your retribution” — but which Democrats are too cowardly to acknowledge and condone. As I posted in April 2008, Euthanize Wall Street to save the economy.]
[Phenomenal World, via [Institute for New Economic Thinking 12-17-2024]
As the nation prepares for a second Trump administration, the mood among many Democratic Party officials has been one of bafflement and astonishment. How could voters have failed to rise to the defense of the democracy and “institutions” that Democrats spent eight years lionizing as bulwarks against an incipient Republican Party fascism?
Among the electorate, however, disappointment is just as likely to be at the choices on offer as at the outcome itself. The Pew Research Center in exit polling found 64 percent of respondents thought the campaign “was not focused on important policy debates.” In pre-election polling, it found 63 percent of Trump supporters and 62 percent of Harris supporters sharing such sentiments.1 Given how diminished the scope for change appeared to most voters, it is perhaps unsurprising that turnout fell by 2.6 million voters below the level of 2020—while the voting-eligible population increased by 3.5 million….
What explains the American party system’s continued rightward drift? On this question few analysts have offered insights as trenchant and consistently significant as Thomas Ferguson, currently Director of Research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. For the past four decades, he has argued that American politics is best explained by an “investment theory of politics.” According to that theory, electoral outcomes are shaped by competition between the parties not over the preferences of voters—as argued by the “median voter theorem” popularized by postwar social science—but rather by a different set of preferences altogether: that of donors….
Thomas Ferguson…. I like to start the discussion of recent American politics with the 2014 midterm elections, which I analyzed in a piece with Walter Dean Burnham. The big story in 2014 was the stupendous decline in voting turnout compared to the presidential election in 2012. The turnout drop off was the second largest ever in percentage terms. Only the 1942 decline was greater, because millions of voters were shipping out across the globe to serve in World War II. But in many states turnout in 2014 collapsed to astonishingly low levels… Burnham and I concluded that this signaled voters were sick of the establishments of both parties—that real upheaval impended….
What we got were challenges from outside the normal political spectrum. Trump challenged from the right, Sanders from the left. The dramatic entrance of candidates who did not stand for business as usual started a process in which turnouts rose sharply with these outsiders pulling in lots of people on both sides.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership would not deal with Sanders. They famously cut the Sanders movement out of everything. In 2020, with Trump in the White House, Sanders ran again and lost, but he did quite well and the rest of the party consolidated around Biden. Sanders was undeniably a major force in the party and his movement could not be ignored. Elizabeth Warren represented a somewhat similar force….
Tf: The inflation was principally a supply-side story. Covid-19 happens. You can’t get anything or go anywhere. There’s nobody able to work in many places. You’ve got hundreds of ships sitting off ports that can’t land. Almost everything grinds to a halt. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any government spending. When Servaas Storm and I worked through the spending statistics very carefully in the first of three papers we wrote on this, we showed that, in fact, the federal spending had trickled off to almost nothing by October 2021, while inflation went higher and higher, surging principally in response to the Ukraine war, but also to problems related to climate: droughts, wildfires, and intense storms hitting crop patterns and infrastructure. These interact with oil prices which also drive up food prices. That last point is shown beautifully in a separate paper by Carlotta Bremen and Servaas Storm.
In my opinion, the Biden people should have moved to quickly choke off general financial speculation in commodities…
Ae: Can you say more about how the regulation of commodity futures contributed to inflation?
Tf: In the old, pre-deregulation days, you couldn’t get into those markets on the financial side, except with very severe limits. You had to be somebody who actually used the commodities in their products, or you had to be a primary producer trying to hedge. The Bush-era regulatory changes made a huge difference.
...The administration’s slow response to inflation turned into an ostrich policy. In 2024, this was politically disastrous. They just kept proclaiming themselves as the most labor friendly administration….
What was happening to people’s wages and incomes would have been much clearer if analysts would have stopped confusing people with statistics about hourly wages and simply focused on household median real income, where the numbers have been obviously disastrous….
[TW: There is much, much more worth reading in this interview of Thomas Ferguson]
[TW: This is true for most measures of real economic physical production. If these numbers were routinely posted and discussed in per capita terms, it would be crystal clear and undeniable just how badly Wall Street and financialization have damaged the economy.]
For the better part of the last thirty years, telecom giants and “free market” libertarian think tanks have told anybody who’d listen that gutting regulatory oversight of the U.S. wireless and broadband markets would result in near-Utopian outcomes across innovation and competition.
Instead, the reduction in both competition and real oversight resulted in regional telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast doubling down on all their worst behaviors. Americans now pay some of the highest prices in the world for spotty, sluggish broadband access and abysmal customer service.
But this mindless deregulatory mindset also harms public safety, national security, and consumer privacy. Case in point: the Congressional and regulatory failure to hold telecoms accountable for lax security and lax privacy standards keeps resulting in ugly hacking and privacy scandals that only seem to get worse.
Case in point, eight major U.S. telecoms were recently the victim of a massive intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders (as of last week) were still rooting around the ISP networks. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers:
The Israeli Defense Forces are preparing to place dozens of weapons systems across the West Bank that can be operated automatically or remotely. According to a report from Israeli Army Radio, the Samson Remote Controlled Weapon Station will be deployed to dozens of checkpoints, settlement entrances, and key control points. It will be the first deployment of the system that is capable of firing lethal rounds without human intervention. The IDF previously used the Samson system, which can fire 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm, and 12.7 mm rounds, .50 BMG machine guns, 40 mm automatic grenade launchers, and anti-tank missiles on the Israeli border with Gaza.
Of all the horrible things Israel and its western backers do to Palestinians, among the most evil is the way it uses them as lab rats to field test new weapons systems so the rest of the empire can learn how effective they are.
[The New Republic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-18-2024]
“It’s unclear how exactly Mangione’s alleged crime was intended to ‘influence the policy of a unit of government,’ which companies such as UnitedHealthcare are not, or ‘intimidate’ the civilian population. Rather, Mangione’s alleged act appeared to have been planned to target a specific class of individuals who profit exorbitantly off the suffering of the civilian population. ‘The ruling class is treating killing one of their own, with the motive being related to the evils of our health care system, as a fundamentally different act than if you or I were to be murdered,’ wrote journalist J.P. Hill on X Tuesday.”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-16-2024]
[1] Is a health insurance company a “civilian population”? If not, who or what is the civilian population intimidated or coerced? The class of all health insurance CEOs? The class of all CEOs? The ruling class? (NOTE: I do not know the meaning of the word “population” in law, and suspect it’s different from the concept of “class” as a political economist would be it.)
[2], [3] Or is a health insurance company a “unit of government”? Surely not, unless “unit” is a term of art. But if not, what is? Congress, in passing health insurance reform? More ingeniously, the organs of state security, who will now be “intimidated” into devising measures to deal with the menance?
[Lambert Strether: “America, being a gun-humpingloving country, has a rich tradition and body of law centering on self-defense via firearms. Without lining up my speculation with the facts of the case (for example, it’s hard to see how shooting someone in the back fits in to “stand your ground), what would self-defense against social murder look like, if it were to be reduced to legal doctrine? Let me propose a thought experiment. Case A: Suppose (legal) person HI (for health insurance) has a machine gun, and (natural person) p has a handgun. If HI fires its machine gun at p, is p justified in firing back in self-defense? Surely so. (I assume the analogy between denying care and firing a machine gun is clear.) Case B: Let us suppose we interpose a sheet of paper between HI and p. HI again fires their machine gun at p but through the paper. Is p justified in firing back? Surely so. Case C: Suppose that we leave the paper in place, and introduce a complex Rube Goldberg device between HI’s trigger finger, and the trigger of the machine gun. HI’s finger twitches, the Rube Goldberg device pulls the trigger, the machine gun fires, and again the bullets go through the paper. Again, is p justified in firing back? This case seems not so clear, but why exactly? (I assume the analogy between the health insurance industry’s claims denial process and a Rube Goldberg device is clear.) What is it about the level of indirection in Case C that separates it from Cases A and B? Comments from lawyers welcome!” ]
Failure to block the insurance giant’s market consolidation, including by a judge with a potential conflict of interest, has led to worse care, higher prices, and a mounting human toll.
The state’s most powerful figure, Tim Dunn, isn’t an elected official. But behind the scenes, the West Texas oilman is lavishly financing what he regards as a holy war against public education, renewable energy, and non-Christians.
Michael Conahan took $2,800,000 in bribes from a private prison in exchange for locking up 2300 kids, one of whom committed suicide. Biden commuted his sentence. Steven Donziger won a $9 bn lawsuit against Chevron & got locked up for 3.5 in retaliation. He was not pardoned.
[Lambert Strether: “Important. If you are pressed for time, read the Table of Contents. On top of refusing to remedy harmful workplace conditions, Amazon discourages injured workers from getting more medical care than first aid even when they clearly need it, and makes it exceedingly difficult for them to obtain required accommodations when recovering.”]
Workers are warned that union dues will go to “old white guys,” a native land acknowledgement before an anti-union lecture, and much more….
In the new environment, businesses facing worker uprisings are attempting to co-opt the language of social justice movements and embrace trends around self-growth and positive lifestyles to counter demands for unionization — a far cry from the old days of union prevention, a history that featured employers routinely threatening workers with private guards and violent clashes on the picket lines
Leny Riebli, the vice president of human resources at Ross Stores, noted that given “what’s happening at Amazon and Starbucks,” her company had retooled its training to remain union-free. “We really had to redouble our efforts,” said Riebli. The company, said Riebli, closely monitors employee concerns that might spill over into support for unionization, so managers have been trained not only to spot potential “card check” organizing, but also listen for issues around safety, scheduling, and respect in the workplace….
In an interview set to be released by labor advocacy group A More Perfect Union, Biden reportedly said, “Nobody in Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they’re serving the United States.”
This marks one of the clearest public stances Biden has taken on an issue that has simmered in Washington for years. While proposed stock trading bans have enjoyed bipartisan support across several congressional sessions, the president has largely remained silent on the topic—until now.
Pressure to address stock trading in Congress has gained traction since the 2020 pandemic, when unusual trading activity among lawmakers sparked public outcry. In July, both House and Senate lawmakers endorsed a proposal prohibiting the president, vice president, and members of Congress from trading or selling “securities, commodities, futures, options, trusts, and other comparable holdings.”
While stocks have been the central focus, the proposed restrictions could also cover cryptocurrencies. Under the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, members of Congress are already required to disclose their financial holdings, including crypto assets. Some legislators, such as Senator Cynthia Lummis and Representative Mike Collins, have previously reported Bitcoin and Ethereum investments, raising questions about impartiality when shaping financial regulations.
Mark Glick, Gabriel Lozada, and Darren Bush, December 16, 2024 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
Industrial organization economists play multiple roles in antitrust law enforcement, from economic consultants and providers of expert testimony to policy advocates. In each instance, economists rely on both positive and normative economic theory. Economists in these roles might believe their theories are exclusively positive. But positive economic models implicitly incorporate normative theory. For example, an economist might study the impact of vertical integration on output. Implicit is the assumption that output is the variable that best captures welfare. The latter is an assumption based on normative economics. In this INET Working Paper paper, we detail the flaws of antitrust’s current normative theory, which is known as the Consumer Welfare Standard (“CWS”). We explain how welfare economics has long ago abandoned such measurement of welfare for good reasons: the theory is flawed, inconsistent, and ethically unsustainable. It is regrettable that this old normative theory survives in some sub-fields of economics such as industrial organization. New Brandeisians, seeking a replacement for CWS, have advanced an alternative, the competitive process standard, which is an improvement but is not flawless. We argue the way forward for antitrust is to follow the way of modern welfare economics, which in telling coincidence, adopts matters of import consistent with Congressional goals behind the antitrust laws.
Ed Zitron [via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-16-2024]
Every app we use is intentionally built to “growth hack” — a term that means “moving things around in such a way that a user does things that we want them to do” so they spend more money or time on the platform — which is why dating apps gate your best matches behind $1.99 microtransactions, or why Uber puts “suggestions” and massive banners throughout their apps to try and convince you to use one of its other apps (or accidentally hit them, which gives Uber a chance to get you to try them), or whyOutlook puts advertisements in your email inbox that are near-indistinguishable from new emails (they’re at the top of your inbox too), or why Meta’s video carousels intentionally only play the first few seconds of a clip as a means of making you click.
Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics.
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane….
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years….
Why wouldn’t people feel insane? Why wouldn’t the internet, where we’re mostly forced to live, drive most people crazy? How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident? Is it because there are too many people at fault? Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?….
Again, this is how most people are experiencing modern computing, and it isn’t because this is big business — it’s because laptop sales have been falling for over a decade, and manufacturers (and Microsoft) need as many ways to grow revenue as possible, even if the choices they make are actively harmful to consumers.…
I, however, believe the wider problem is bigger, and the costs are far greater. It isn’t that “everything is enshittified.” It’s that everybody’s pursuit of growth has changed the incentive behind how we generate value in the world, and software enables a specific kind of growth-lust by creating virtual nation states with their own digital despots. While laws may stop Meta from tearing up people’s houses surrounding its offices on 1 Hacker Way, it can happily reroute traffic and engagement on Facebook and Instagram to make things an iota more profitable….
I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?
How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?
You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.
Today Drop Site News is publishing a landmark investigation about the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza by British journalist Owen Jones. His report is based on interviews with 13 journalists and other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures within the BBC’s news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel’s narratives and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of staffers who, throughout the past 14 months, demanded that the network uphold its commitment to impartiality and fairness. Jones’s investigation of the BBC has three main components: a deeply reported look into the internal complaints from BBC journalists, a quantitative assessment of how the BBC characterizes the year-long siege on Gaza, and a review of the histories of the people behind the coverage—and, in particular, one editor, Raffi Berg.
Historic hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague have drawn to a close after more than 100 countries and international organisations presented arguments over two weeks on who should bear legal responsibility for the worsening climate crisis.
Spearheading the effort was Vanuatu which, alongside other Pacific island nations, says the climate crisis poses a threat to its very existence….
Kate Aronoff, December 17, 2024 [The New Republic]
In sabotaging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid for leadership of the Oversight Committee, party elders have doubled down on a failed strategy….
House Democrats on Tuesday afternoon decided that 74-year-old Gerry Connolly—who announced his throat cancer diagnosis in November—will serve as ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, besting 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a closed-door caucus vote….
Connolly will join fellow septuagenarians in top committee spots next year. Richard Neal, 75, will lead Democrats on Ways and Means while Frank Pallone, 73, will be the party’s top representative on Energy and Commerce. Eighty-six-year-old Maxine Waters will be the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, and Rose DeLauro, 81, will helm the Democrats’ presence in Appropriations….
In other democracies, the leaderships of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward….
these elections are just a sad reflection on how committed the party’s top brass are to maintaining their cozy patronage system. If the Democrats have a future, its inspiration will come from outside the bounds of its own fiefdoms and sclerotic internal processes. It will come, for example, from unions that cultivate leaders who can genuinely speak to working-class voters. It will come from social movements that build momentum for populist ideas that haven’t been poll-tested into bland, business-friendly mush. At the very least, those things can outlive Pelosi and the old guard. Ideally, it can build an electoral force that aspires to more than meaningless loyalties and bigger checks from donors.
Malcolm Ferguson, December 20, 2024 [The New Republic]
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a simple fix for the current government shutdown battle.
“How about the House add campaign finance reform to the CR so Republicans and Democrats alike can stop being so scared about what a billionaire man-child thinks before they vote on anything around here,” AOC wrote on X Friday.
[The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-18-2024]
Dislodging the consultant class—and draining the cesspool of dark money that guarantees its continuing influence over Democratic politics—isn’t going to be easy. But it is essential if there is ever going to be an effective opposition to the plutocracy-disguised-as-populism on offer from the Republicans. At the same time, as Tarence Ray argues in this issue, it is just as important to resist the fatalist temptation to simply cede large portions of the electoral map to Republican reaction.
David Dayen, December 18, 2024 [The American Prospect]
...And from behind the throne, while convalescing in Luxembourg, Nancy Pelosi thought this was an opportune time, amid bedlam in the Democratic ranks, to engage in a bitter factional fight over who should be the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
There’s a lot to say here about Democrats’ adherence to internal institutional power over the fate of the nation, their inability to carry a consistent message, and more. But I think the biggest thing is this: This is what happens when a political party doesn’t have any leaders who command anything approaching respect.
It breeds freelancing among backbenchers, a run for cover where they revert to relying on their political instincts, ensuring that the overall approach is incoherent. It breeds opportunism from party factions seeking to pull things in their direction, ignoring the near-term stakes of the early days of Trump’s second term.
“Despite appearances, this at times bruising argument isn’t really about the past at all. What it’s really about is the future, and whether the Democratic Party needs the kind of root-and-branch reform that would allow it to ignore the siren song of the consultant class, which has now led the party to two disastrous defeats. Or whether, to borrow a term from British politics, all that is required for victory is ‘one more heave’—running the same campaign, but with a bit more vigor than last time. That, in essence, was the message a shockingly unrepentant David Plouffe and his colleagues offered as guests on Pod Save America: Give us the chance to do it all over again in 2028 and we will. Anyone even tempted to credit these grifters should listen to Plouffe’s October episode, ‘Why You Shouldn’t Panic About the Polls.'”
...While he never embraced the full suite of “Green New Deal” initiatives urged by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and the Left, his three major pieces of legislation — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 — all aimed to use public power to spur private investment and manufacturing that would not only support the green energy transition but also stimulate good jobs for working people. Despite this embrace of industrial policy, the devil, particularly when it came to winning working-class support, was in the policy details. Rather than include public initiatives that could quickly put people to work or provide other immediate social benefits, the administration maintained the Democratic Party’s half-century commitment to highly technocratic, market-dependent approaches to governing. The result has been a series of important but narrow and complex policies whose immediate effects are removed from the lives of working-class people….
Simon Lazarus, December 16, 2024 [The New Republic]
Democrats should stop scapegoating the system for their shrunken popular clout, and instead make the hard strategic shifts necessary to win it back.
That Donald Trump managed to win both the electoral vote and the popular vote has finally provided Democrats and liberals with the chance to correct a deeply ingrained misconception: the reflexive meme that the Electoral College is a structural barrier that systematically stacks the national electoral playing field against them. Factually, that grievance may have seemed correct in 2016, but historically, it is very wrong. Functionally, the Electoral College bugaboo serves as a self-serving excuse for liberals to avoid facing up to their real problem—resistance by increasingly dominant, comparatively well-heeled, college-educated culture warriors to piercing their bubbles, empathetically recognizing flyover working- and middle-class constituencies’ concerns and interests, and accommodating them enough to win back a meaningful slice of those constituencies.
...Distinguished attorney and outspoken defender of democracy Marc Elias has spent years bringing the fight to Trump in the courts. He recently wrote an excellent piece on Democracy Docket arguing that resistance to Trump’s first administration was squandered when what was needed was an organized opposition.…
For a short time, The Indivisible Guide provided a grassroots way for people to organize but it never amounted to more than a PDF and a name. As their national HQ collected money and a very short-lived notoriety, the people, who wanted guidance and direction never received much more direction than the guide book which essentially said “Start an Indivisible group!” My Indivisible NY-19 group was very effective locally but it was self-starting and aimless. None of the effective tactics they developed locally was ever shared nationally….
MAGA focused on what they wanted; an embrace of an authoritarian, white supremacy, and economic favoritism oriented to MAGA. They wanted to rule over America and focused, laser-like, on that goal. Everything else was a distraction.
On the other side Democrats, progressives, and never-Trumpers focused on flipping out over the latest outrage or astonishment at Trump’s never-ending lies. Karl Rove once characterized their policy of Distract, Rule, and Rewrite History when he said:
Ed Kilgore [New York Magazine, via downwithtyranny.com 12-16-2024]
“The key to implementing Trump’s legislative agenda will be the budget-reconciliation process that enables Congress to bypass the Senate filibuster and enact a big package of new laws on an up-or-down party-line vote. This is how Trump got his tax cuts in 2017 and how he tried to repeal Obamacare. Items in a budget-reconciliation bill must be focused on fiscal matters, but it’s still a huge asset to a party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. It’s beginning to look like Team Trump wants two budget-reconciliation bills, one focused on authorizing the huge buildup in border-security resources necessary for Trump’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and another aimed at extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts. There’s increasing talk of a very quick start on the first bill. Since the 119th Congress will be sworn in on January 3, Congress could get moving on a budget resolution setting up this bill even before Trump takes office.” ….
On his first day in office there’s some stuff Trump can do unilaterally with executive orders. It’ll take over a month to get his cabinet and other appointments that need Senate confirmation in place. But he “can take action on a wide variety of promises without any help from Congress. This includes pardoning at least some of the January 6 insurrectionists, imposing “emergency tariffs,” and canceling or reversing executive orders issued by Biden. When Trump declared that he would be a dictator on day one, he said he’d prioritize reversing Biden’s policies on border security and fossil-fuel use… Several of Trump’s proposed day-one actions will undoubtedly face immediate legal challenges, as they raise major constitutional questions. These include his desire to revive the Nixonesque practices of presidential impoundment of appropriations and to eliminate birthright citizenship via executive order. You can expect the upcoming regime to churn out as many new policies as possible, then determine which to prioritize in the courts or by way of congressional authorizations.”
Howie Klein, December 16, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
I want to focus on Trump’s mass deportation plans— likely to get extremely gnarly very fast— and his jihad against birthright citizenship. Let me remind you that when Pete Wilson beat Dianne Feinstein for governor in 1990, California was a swing state. From 1968 until 1992, Republicans Nixon (both times), Ford, Reagan (both times) and George H.W. Bush beat their Democratic opponents in presidential elections. After that, it was all over for the GOP. What happened, you may wonder, to make Bill Clinton (both times), Gore, Kerry, Obama (both times), Hillary, Biden and Kamala win every race after that.
Republican Gov. Pete Wilson strongly supported something called Proposition 187 (1994), which alienated Latino voters and reshaped the state’s political landscape for— well so far 3 decades. It was a ballot initiative designed to deny undocumented immigrants access to public services, including education and healthcare. It also required state employees to report individuals suspected of being undocumented to immigration authorities. And the campaign was UGLY, using inflammatory rhetoric and imagery, portraying undocumented immigrants as a threat to California’s economy and public safety. It passed overwhelmingly but was blocked by federal courts. The damage to the Republican Party's reputation among Latino voters was incalculable, galvanizing Latinos, who began registering and voting in higher numbers, against Republicans.
...Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is in charge of her chamber’s DOGE caucus, is finally having her moment after years of publishing a report about spending she considers unnecessary. The often-mentioned $2 trillion in potential savings is a figure that comes from that report.
Howie Klein, December 17, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...for those who think getting rich people into government is a good idea because they are already rich and less likely to steal, I have some bad news: the rich are rich because they are the most greedy and avaricious people on earth. Lesson one: Their wealth isn’t a sign of virtue or wisdom (or even talent)— it’s proof that they’ve honed the art of taking more than they give, whether from their workers, their customers or the planet itself and the idea that wealth insulates someone from corruption is laughable; in reality, wealth is its own form of corruption. It skews priorities, consolidates power, and erodes the common good.
At the time, I was struck by how different their priorities were from the world I knew. They weren’t just driven by money— they were consumed by a sense of entitlement, a need to dominate and control. I remember the moment when I made the very conscious decision that would never be me. I wasn’t even rich yet; just doing well, but making more money than anyone in my working class family had ever dreamed of. My direct boss (a kind of supervisor) was one of them— exactly like Trump in fact; at one point, he had even hired Roy Cohn as an advisor. The company was paying me well and I was grateful and they also gave me a generous expense account. I went with my supervisor to a “trade show” in Europe. He tried to show me how I could buy expensive finely-tailored clothes for myself and disguise the expense as a client dinner; I was horrified. Someone else, another junior vice president like myself, couldn’t wait to try it. I felt sick to my stomach for not turning them in to the company’s CFO.
The increasingly rich people I began encountering as I rose through the corporate ranks were, for the most part (there were, thank God, exceptions) all about preserving and enhancing their status. That supervisor I met. He was worth tens of millions of dollars at the time but he was bitter and angry because other people were wealthier than he was. He could never enjoy his wealth because he was always pissed off that this guy or that guy had more than he did. He even regularly stole money. Not just from the company but even from the artists.
[TW: Klein is pounding on a central point of the political philosophy of civic republicanism. a point which was well and widely known but has been obscured by the rise of Lockean liberalism and its veneration of private property.
[Ecclesiastes 5:10 “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase...”
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
Another interesting aspect of Harington's theory of mixed government is the moralistic elements in his thinking. The reason that monargchy, aristocracy, and democracy degenerate into tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy, he tells us, is that they contain no counter-balance to the natural tendency in man for passion to usurp the rule of reason. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that when the one, the few, or the many rule by reason, we have the three simple pure forms of government, and that when passion creeps in we have their corruptions.47 From this position, it followed that the whole art of constitution making was so to contrive the state that the institutions of government would compensate for and overcome the natural evil in man.48 Harrington thought that this could be done by mixed government…
The citizen may be sinful, he wrote, "and yet the common-wealth bee perfect," and "the Citizen, where the common Wealth is perfect can never commit any such crime, as can render it imperfect or bring it unto a natural dissolution.” 49 Harrington did not believe, as did Richard Baxter,50 that governments stood or fell because they were in the hands of good or evil men. He had no faith in the adequacy of the rectitude of even good men for the task of government. Hence we have his insistence on the Machiavellian principle that government is by law and not by men. "Give us good men and they will make us good Lawes," he declared, "is the Maxime of a Demogogue. .. . But give us good orders, and they will make us good men, is the Maxime of a Legislator, and the most infallible in the Politickes."51
[Harrington warns that “modern prudence” enables government that becomes] "an Art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a City or Nation, and rule it according unto his or their private interest.” 52 Law being the very basis of government, two consequences followed. The first of these was the importance of the state resting upon a fundamental law or constitution which could not be changed.53 The whole Oceana is in essence little more 62 Than such a fundamental law….
63 Harrington's preoccupation with the perpetual state serves to call attention to another striking aspect of his thought—his contention that a commonwealth should not only be equal in its institution but should have certain devices to .keep it in balance once the equilibrium was established. He was not one of those who believed that the mere division of power between the three elements of a state was sufficient to provide stability, for "an equal! Commonwealth is such an one as is equall both in the balance or foundation, and in the superstructures."59 Like the Venetians, he would supplement the basic division of power with other devices and an elaborate system of checks and balances. Of these the most important, suggested to him by Roman precedents, was an agrarian law, or what he called an "equal Agrarian," established as a part of the fundamental law of the state. It is only when we see his agrarian proposals as a device for the maintenance of the balance of a mixed government that we are able to see their proper place in his thought. The necessity for an agrarian law he found, as he found most other fundamentals, in nature. Emerging as an exponent of the importance of economic factors in determining the course of history, he declared it to be a law of nature that wealth in the form of riches in a commercial state or of land in all extensive states is the source of power. Whoever holds the land will in the end hold the power.60 Hence, in the creation of a state the land must be so divided that the 64 distribution will accord with the division of power. An "equal Agrarian" he defined as "a perpetual Law establishing and preserving the ballance of dominion, by such a distribution, that no one man or number of men within the compasse of the Few or Aristocracy, can come to over-power the whole people by their posessions in Lands."61 The Roman commonwealth fell through a neglect of its agrarian laws, as a result of which the nobility by stealth got into their own hands the conquered lands that should have been divided among the people. Power followed land, with the result that the Gracchi were unable to restore the situation, and the nobility overthrew both the people and the commonwealth. 62 It is, in short, fatal to a commonwealth for the ownership of land to shift predominantly into the hands of an aristocracy, or to any state for such ownership to pass into the hands of a class different From that which holds political power.
The second of the devices by which Harrington sought to maintain mixed government was the secret ballot… The necessity for secret voting he saw to arise from the fact that "the election or suffrage Df the people, is freest, where it is made or given in such a manner, that it can neither oblige (qui beneficium accepit libertatem vendidit) nor disoblige another; or through fear of an enemy, or bashfulnesse towards a friend, impair a mans liberty." 64 Secret voting, then, is essential in the interest of a free suffrage… P 65
P153 A second fundamental thing which makes no less clear Sydney's rejection of monarchy is his remarks on the nature of man. "Man" he wrote, "is of an aspiring nature, and apt to put too high a value on himself. They who are raised above their brethren, though but a little, desire to go farther; and if they gain the name of king, they think themselves wronged and degraded, when they are not suffered to do what they please. In these things they never want masters; and the nearer they come to a power that is not easily restrained by law, the more passionately they desire to abolish all that opposes it.”25 Even when a prince was virtuous and began by desiring nothing more than the power allowed him by law, he was subject to greater temptations to invade the liberty of his subjects than human nature could be expected to withstand. "The strength of his own affections," Sydney declared, "will ever be against him. Wives, children, and servants will always join with those enemies that arise in his own breast to pervert him; if he has any weak side, any lust unsubdued, they will gain the victory. He has not searched into the nature of man, who thinks that anyone can resist when he is thus on all sides assaulted."26 Monarchy, in short, by the very constitution of human nature, tended always to degenerate into tyranny. It was a defective form of government because in the most important place of all it was lacking in those adequate restraints on the defects of human nature which all the classical republicans saw as an essential of any well-contrived government. ]
...Conrad Black would not have it. At my and Wilentz’s interpretation, he was livid.
Out of respect for the life peerage which he forfeited his Canadian citizenship to receive in 2001, I suppose I ought to refer to him by his formal title: the Right Honorable Lord Baron Black of Crossharbour. Born in 1944 to an industrial magnate and the granddaughter of the co-owner of the London Telegraph, after an academic career that included two expulsions (for selling stolen exams and for insubordination) and one flunking-out, Black took control of his father’s holding company in 1978, sold off all its non-newspaper holdings, and fashioned himself a press baron….
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024]
An aggregation of quotes from experts in the field. Here’s the most optimistic one: Even the best neural networks struggle with low-quality photos that lack information-rich pixels of the human face, especially when matching against a large list of potential identities. Thus the first step is to deny the algorithm those pixels by occluding the face. Cover the face in cases where that isn’t suspicious, e.g., wear a scarf in the wintertime, sun glasses on a bright day. Hats with wide brims are also a confound, as they can hide the forehead and hair, and cast a shadow on the face. Holding a hand over the face is also good for this. The second step is to look down while in motion so any camera in the vicinity will not capture a good frontal image of the face. Third, if one can move quickly, that might cause motion blur in the captured photo—consider jogging or riding a bike. My best practical advice for evasion: know where facial recognition is being deployed and simply avoid those areas. How long this advice remains useful though depends on how widespread the technology becomes in the coming years.”
Strategic Political Economy
The early American rejection of John Locke
[TW: I want to begin with this, because you will see echoes of the argument over masses versus elites in almost all the subsequent stories. USA is stumbling and faltering because so much of what we are taught and believe is based on lies. One of the biggest lies is that the founding of the republic was based on the ideas of John Locke. It is true that Locke’s ideas later came to predominate American political economy, but it was after a period of ideological combat. Unfortunately, the opponents of Locke lost.
[In the 1820s and 1830s, the Transcendentalist movement in USA, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman quite explicitly rejected the ideas of John Locke. Universalist minister Orestes Brownson, wrote in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839,
Locke was a great and good man, but his philosophy was defective… Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.
[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….
The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s soul, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive the storms of human passions.
But the disciple of Locke denies the reality of this light, he denies the teachings and the authority of the universal Reason…. It is folly, therefore, to repose confidence in the people, to entertain any respect for popular decisions. The disciple of Locke may compassionate the people, but he cannot trust them; he may patronize the masses, but he must scout universal suffrage, and labor to concentrate all power in the hands of those he looks upon as the enlightened and respectable few.
[Merriam-Webster offers this definition of “scout”: “to reject scornfully.”]
[ — The Transcendentalists – An Anthology, edited by Perry Miller. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1950, pp. 207-208. ]
...If you are one of the many analysts seduced by the idea that the Trump administration would be in some way friendly towards the “working class” or would in some way advance the concept of antitrust enforcement in the public good, you are a god damn idiot. Please stop analyzing politics for the general public. Horseshoe theory has poisoned your brains and blinded you to reality. The total melding of the federal government with the interests of the ultrarich and a strongman leader who conducts federal policy in service of only those who bow to him is not “populism.” It is fascism. I would love to stop entertaining this charade so that I do not have to periodically rewrite this for the next four years. “Hey, Lina Khan’s replacement has vowed to focus antitrust enforcement against big tech monopolies!” Yes and his motivations are not “economic equality” or “the public good” but the fact that he and other right wingers are pissed that their accounts got censored and that big tech companies are too “woke” and so the tech companies will take exaggerated steps to cancel their DEI programs and what not in order to placate the right wing and we will ultimately get neither true antimonopoly enforcement or trivial social progress….
Yelling at pundits, unfortunately, is not going to fix the downward spiral that we are in. This is not just some minor issue of policy preference. America’s grand situation is this: Fifty years of rising economic inequality has sapped the public trust (for good reason!) and destroyed faith in our institutions and consolidated political and economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer rich people. Turning around this long-term trend of inequality will require A) the strengthening of organized labor, in order to pull more of the nation’s wealth into the pockets of workers, and balance out the ability of the rich to purchase political influence, and B) aggressive work by the federal government and the courts to restrict corporate power and break up monopolies and create a friendly atmosphere for the large scale labor organizing that will be necessary. As demonstrated by the handful of items above, and by common sense, the Trump administration is going to the opposite of those things.
The problem with this is not just an “aw shucks I would prefer if we went the other way” type of thing. The problem is that the long-term trends—inequality, concentration of wealth and power, and the resulting inability of the political system to reflect the interests of regular people—is destroying America. It means the nation is not, in a very straightforward sense, working. If democracy is a machine meant to ensure that the government serves the will and the interests of the people, ours is broken, and instead of fixing it, it is being further stripped for parts. The fact that people across the political spectrum reacted with glee to the murder of an evil health insurance CEO is a big tell. If there is great inequality, and great unfairness, and power is too concentrated, and instead of opening the system up to regular people so that they can reverse those things, you come in and make the system operate more towards the interests of the rich and well-connected, the people will, inevitably, get more angry. Crazy things happen when many people get very angry and have no legitimate political outlets for their legitimate rage. If we, collectively, do not want more crazy things to happen, we must reform the system. The Trump administration is not going to do that.
The Democratic Party is such a dispiriting collection of careerists that it can be frustrating to continually speak about what they should be doing, while watching them always choose to instead continue the things that serve the careerists. But let us speak rationally here, regardless. We have a two-party system and the Democratic Party is the opposition. We know what needs to be done and we know that the Republicans are going to do the opposite. The only move for the Democratic Party—the rational move, the reasonable move—is to get more radical. Pundits will call this “going further left” but really what we are talking about is pulling harder in the direction of where the nation needs to go, in response to a Republican Party that is pulling harder towards plutocracy. If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs….
When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today. Radicalism is only getting more and more correct. Recognize it or get run over.
James Galbraith [The Nation, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2024]
...It is no help to argue, as Paul Krugman did, that voters are not competent to judge their own interests and well-being. Krugman faults the voters, in effect, for failing to accept the superior wisdom of a columnist at The New York Times. But it is a precept of democracy (and of free market economics) that voters (and consumers) do know their interests. To refuse this precept is to deny the point of democracy, in which case there is no good reason to go on having elections. Or markets, either.
If voters are unhappy with the good readings on standard indicators—unemployment, the monthly inflation rate, economic growth—it must be because those indicators no longer connect to their sense of well-being. I have written on this before. In particular, low unemployment rates may reflect widespread disaffection with bad jobs; a low inflation rate does not reverse past price increases; and the incomes from growth may flow to profits and capital gains….
What did happen under Biden was a decline in real incomes—in household purchasing power. Prices had risen sharply in 2021–22, and even though the inflation rate was transient—contrary to screams from economists—the change in price levels was not. Wages struggled to catch up. Many people living on savings and pensions never did….
...Pressure from voices like Summers led to an early curtailment of direct Covid relief, which fell just as prices rose. It is a shocking fact that while during Covid child poverty rates and food insecurity declined, those rates returned to pre-Covid levels when the benefits ended. Should we really be surprised that the affected families, having briefly tasted a better life for their children, were unhappy?….
Eric Levitz [Vox, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-13-2024]
“In light of deindustrialization’s most pernicious effects, Democrats should make American workers’ access to remunerative employment and collective bargaining rights less contingent on the market’s whims, while rebuilding the party’s reputation for sound economic management.”
“The problem is simple, from a 30,000-foot level (where indeed most things are simple). The Democrats are the party of the PMC. As the governing class, they are in the business of operating the many and varied rental extraction schemes that dominate our financialized economy, and which enrich the (propertied) ruling class at the expense of the (enwaged) working class (health insurance being one such). Therefore, the class interests of the Democrats and the working class are diametrically opposed. The Democrat Party founders on this contradiction. “A house divided against itself cannot stand…. I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” –Abraham Lincoln.” ]
Leonard C. Goodman [ScheerPost, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2024]
… The party’s corporate consultants have put the blame on the party’s excessive focus on identity politics. But the issues for the Democrats run much deeper than bad messaging. The real problem is that the party takes direction from plutocrats whose interests are antagonistic to the needs of the working people it pretends to represent. Both Democrats and Republicans are financed by the same corporate interests. Thus, there is general agreement and support for policies that guarantee high rates of return on investment capital, policies like continuous war, for-profit health care, and outsourcing jobs. This leaves few issues for the parties to fight about other than abortion and identity politics.
Fifty years ago, American capitalists still relied on American workers to build everything from cars and televisions to sneakers and light bulbs. These titans of industry had to care about things such as functioning schools, decent wages, cities and public transportation. But the times have changed. Today’s plutocrats support outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and have little concern for the condition of American workers. And while ordinary Americans want the country’s resources to be spent at home, plutocrats are heavily invested in foreign wars, and they shun diplomacy….
Simplicius the Thinker, via Naked Capitalism 12-08-2024]
One can hardly believe it anymore. The West has dropped all pretense of their sacred cow of ‘democracy’, used for generations as an instrument of moral superiority with which to browbeat the rest of the world….
The short-term obsessed West considers the various CIA-sponsored subversions of the democratic processes as “winning”: but have these people given any thought to what precedent they’re setting? They are burning their foundations, lighting their entire house on fire. In the hopes of smoking out a few ostensible ‘wasps’ they now stand to destroy their entire order within a generation….
A new method for making iron is not only faster and cheaper, but also better for the environment, according to Chinese researchers
After more than a decade of intensive research in China, a new ironmaking technology is poised to revolutionise the global steel manufacturing industry.
The method involves injecting finely ground iron ore powder into an extremely hot furnace, triggering an "explosive chemical reaction", according to the engineers involved in the project.
The result is a display of bright red, glowing liquid iron droplets that rain down and collect at the bottom of the furnace, forming a stream of high-purity iron that can be directly used for casting or "one-step steelmaking".
[TW: For this, I considered creating a new category entitled “Just good, damn funny writing”.]
Canada's hipster PM is about to talk Canada back into its historical role as the Washington Generals of international relations….
Canada is a net-funny country that’s produced some of the world’s best comics, but Trudeau is uniquely toolless in a troll war. He’s a man who in a previous life surely had a name like Prince Microballs and in the present seems to think humor was outlawed with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A key to winning any troll battle is forfeiting all pretensions to dignity, and he’s up against a man, Donald Trump, who used a picture of himself sitting next to Joe Biden’s wife to sell cologne using the tagline, “A fragrance your enemies can’t resist!” Trump is capable of anything, including firing an ICBM filled with cat shit at Parliament Hill….
Trudeau was a product of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program, which markets itself as a “dynamic community of exceptional people” who learn to “foster collaboration in the global public interest” with an aim to “scale-up, amplify and accelerate” their collective “impact.” This is bullshit-ese for “hive-minding the half-wit offspring of the 1% to pilot global institutions in unearned positions of influence.” ….
"In my view," said Sanders, "this issue of oligarchy is the most important issue facing our country and world because it touches on everything else." He said the climate crisis, healthcare, worker protections, and the fight against poverty are all adversely effected by the power of the wealthy elites who control the economy and the political sphere.
”My friends, you don’t have to be a PhD in political science to understand that this is not democracy. This is not one person, one vote. This is not all of us coming together to decide our future. This is oligarchy."
... a report released by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) on Thursday shows how "billionaire nepo babies" don't just waste their families' fortunes. They also benefit from "a rigged system" that allows them to "pass that wealth down over generations without being properly taxed–often without being taxed at all."
In addition, the heirs of the country's biggest fortunes spend vast sums "to elect politicians who protect their unearned wealth and manipulate the country's economy in their favor," said ATF.
Along with Mellon and Koch, the report profiles Samuel Logan of the Scripps media dynasty; Nicola Peltz-Beckham, daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz; Gabrielle Rubenstein, whose family has made its fortune in private equity; and President-elect Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump….
A previous analysis by ATF found that as of late October, just 150 billionaire families had spent $1.9 billion on the 2024 elections….
[SFGATE, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-11-2024]
“Thursday afternoon in San Francisco: On one side of Mission Street, hotel workers chanted and banged on a drum outside the Marriott Marquis, part of a monthslong strike for higher wages and more jobs. On the other, a tech company’s billboard proclaimed, ‘Stop hiring humans.’ Various versions of the provocative advertisements are emblazoned across the city on rotating screen displays on bus shelters and on classic vinyl billboards on poles and buildings, plugging the San Francisco startup Artisan. SFGATE spoke with Artisan’s CEO about the campaign. The company has just 30 employees and is less than 2 years old; its only existing product is an artificial intelligence ‘sales agent’ called Artisan, built to automate the work of finding and messaging potential customers. It’s a classic AI-age idea, one of many such tools flooding the tech world. But the billboards in San Francisco are less routine. Bleak might be a better word, or mean-spirited. And in a city laden with jargony advertisements, these are easy to understand. Most feature a dark-haired, purple-eyed persona and a few rows of text. Some critique humans and remote work: ‘Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance’ and ‘Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today.’ Others are more direct: ‘Hire Artisans, not humans.’ Several include the line, ‘The era of AI employees is here.’ The gist is crystal clear: Artisan is selling automation to employers. In a video spot about the ‘sales agent’ tool online, Artisan says it works with ‘no human input’ and ‘costs 96% less than hiring someone to do her job..'” “Artisan.” Of all the names to choose.
[University of Massachusetts, Amherst, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-13-2024]
“We estimate that globally, net income in publicly listed oil and gas companies reached US$916 billion in 2022. The United States was the biggest beneficiary receiving US$301 billion in fossil fuel profits both from domestic extraction and through global shareholding, more than U.S. investments of US$267 billion in the low carbon economy that year. Analyzing the U.S. distribution including privately held US companies, 51% of profits went to the wealthiest 1%, predominantly through direct shareholdings and private company ownership. In contrast the bottom 50% only received 1%. The incremental fossil-fuel profits in 2022 over those in 2021 were enough to increase the disposable income of the wealthiest Americans several percent and compensate a substantial part of their purchasing power loss from inflation that year, thereby exacerbating inflation inequality. Record fossil-fuel profits also reinforce existing racial and ethnic inequalities and inequalities between groups with different educational attainments. Our results also show that only a small share of overall profits benefits institutions that serve the wider public such as pension funds.”
[The Honest Broker, via The Big Picture 12-08-2024]
What’s happening in athletics is tragic—but don’t expect to hear about on ESPN. I was shocked when I learned that private equity firms plan to take over college football. How is that even possible?
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-13-2024]
“Diplomatic and depressed as they have been in public, a small group of Democratic governors are deep into behind-the-scenes preparations and deliberations over how to balance the politics of pushing back on what they are expecting from President-elect Donald Trump’s next turn in the White House. Since long before the election, they’ve been poring through Project 2025 — it’s helpful, several Democratic governors told CNN, to have a blueprint in public. They’ve been studying their own executive powers and state laws…. They’ve been stockpiling the abortion medication mifepristone [(!!)] in secret warehouses and rehearsing their answers for if and when the incoming White House tries to nationalize their state police or National Guard units for use in deportation raids; some are planning to flat out refuse, while others intend to argue that the officers are busy with other work keeping the people in their states safe. (None have fully wrapped their heads around how it would work if units from other states are sent in and set themselves up for showdowns on the state borders.)” And: “Several have been running tabletop exercises behind closed doors for months, often with state attorneys general and other relevant officials involved. Officials in multiple governors’ offices told CNN the circles have been tight to keep the incoming White House from being able to prepare for their own responses, or for the proactive innovations they’re looking into.”
Howie Klein, December 14, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
This week, writing for the Wall Street Journal, Gina Heeb reported that in interviews with potential nominees to lead bank regulatory agencies, Musk’s team “asked whether the president-elect could abolish the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp… Advisers have asked the nominees under consideration for the FDIC, as well as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, if deposit insurance could then be absorbed into the Treasury Department….
“President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Trade Commission vowed in his job pitch to end current chair Lina Khan’s ‘war on mergers,’ a signal to an eager corporate America that the incoming administration intends to be far more lax on antitrust enforcement. Andrew Ferguson was initially nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as a Republican commissioner on the bipartisan FTC, and his elevation to chair of the commission will not require Senate confirmation. In a one-page document obtained by Punchbowl, Ferguson—who previously worked as chief counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—pitched himself to Trump’s team as the ‘pro-innovation choice’ with ‘impeccable legal credentials’ and ‘proven loyalty’ to the president-elect. Ferguson’s top agenda priority, according to the document, is to ‘reverse Lina Khan’s anti-business agenda’ by rolling back ‘burdensome regulations,’ stopping her ‘war on mergers,’ halting the agency’s ‘attempt to become an AI regulator,’ and ditching ‘novel and legally dubious consumer protection cases.’ Trump announced Ferguson as the incoming administration’s FTC chair as judges in Oregon and Washington state blocked the proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons, decisions that one antitrust advocate called a ‘fantastic culmination of the FTC’s work to protect consumers and workers.'”
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2024]
...Donald Trump’s antitrust agenda came into focus this week, and while it won’t be like Joe Biden’s, it seems he is going to continue some significant parts of the anti-monopoly revival. Specifically, it’s likely the second Trump administration will keep Google and the rest of big tech on the hot seat, and address pharmaceutical middlemen….
So what does the Slater appointment, and these comments, mean? Whoever took over at the Antitrust Division would have inherited monopolization cases against Google, Apple, Ticketmaster, Visa, and RealPage, as well as an unusually aggressive merger program, and broad investigations into UnitedHealth Group, seed monopolists, Nvidia, and a whole set of other corporations.
The risk was that these cases would be settled on the cheap and the investigations shut down. The Slater pick makes that less likely; she’s a competent, creative, and enforcement minded lawyer, with a background at Fox, Roku, and in the Federal Trade Commission. Right now, she’s on the staff of Senator J.D. Vance, and likely shares his economically populist views, most notably his belief that big tech is too powerful and needs to be broken up. I’m guessing that tech lobbyists are pretty unhappy….
I guess I’d say the news here is mixed. At an important level, we’ve won the ideological argument over antitrust, which is not how to bring cases, but whether to do so. Trump could have sought to reverse the Biden antitrust agenda, instead he’ll adopt and accelerate parts of it. There are important adjacent enforcers, like Republican state attorneys general, who are bringing cases to break up Blackrock and Vanguard, so it’s pretty obvious the Bork era is over.
[Washington Monthly, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024]
DOGE, whatever it is, is not a “department” in the constitutional sense. The Constitution uses the word “department” to mean either a branch of government, such as the “judicial department,” or a “freestanding component of the executive branch, not subordinate to or contained within any other such component,” to which the law assigns duties, such as the Department of the Treasury or the Environmental Protection Agency. DOGE’s fabulists presumably chose the name to fit the Musk-preferred acronym but also to confuse the public as to their position and authority. As far as the government is concerned, DOGE has neither. Journalists should stop calling it ‘the department.’ Call it a ‘project’ or an ‘initiative.’ Don’t treat it as weightier than it is.” Importantly: “Contrary to the DOGE Manifesto, it is doubtful that Musk and Ramaswamy can operate indefinitely in secrecy as freelance advisors. The duo called themselves ‘outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees’ and asserted that Trump personally named them to head the DOGE. They anticipate advising the initiative ‘at every step’ and working with a team of government officials embedded within government agencies. These arrangements will make DOGE, once Trump is inaugurated, a ‘federal advisory committee’ under the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). FACA covers ‘any . . . task force, or other similar group, or any subcommittee or other subgroup thereof (hereafter in this paragraph referred to as ‘committee’), which is . . .established or utilized by the President. . . . in the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government.’ Each such committee must develop a public charter, conduct meetings in public, and keep minutes of its meetings.”
[RealClearPolitics], via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024]
TAIBBI: “Trust is a human thing. You can’t mechanize it. And in the journalism business when you make mistakes you have to stand in front of the camera and own up to it or else audiences will never again trust you. And there are years and years of errors about major consequential news cycle-dominating stories like Russiagate and COVID where the networks and major dailies have simply not come forward and said ‘Yeah, we screwed up” and they have to do that if they’re going to get audience back. But they refuse to and I just don’t think that’s — they’re ever going to learn.'”
Nuclear fusion will not be “cracked” in a single breakthrough. Instead, there is a fixed checklist of requirements that it must work through. This guide will walk through the checklist. I call it “The Fusion Ladder”. By the end, you will understand the important milestones in taking fusion from kid to grid.
The two probes have left the solar system and are still collecting data from the interstellar environment—but their atomic hearts are growing weaker and weaker.
As Common Dreamsreported last week, Pelosi (D-Calif.) has publicly indicated that she is supporting Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) to succeed Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) as ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability when the 119th Congress begins in January.
But Punchbowl Newsreported Thursday that Pelosi—well-known for her relentless and often successful efforts to whip votes within the Democratic caucus—is also "making calls" to other Democratic lawmakers on behalf of Connolly.
The outlet reported that the former House speaker is "actively working to tank" the candidacy of Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), with whom she has had a rocky relationship at times as the progressive Democrat has pushed the party to embrace far-reaching reforms on climate, immigration, and other issues.
It is being reported that Nancy Pelosi is actively working to defeat AOC’s bid to lead democrats on the powerful House Oversight Committee. Salon reports that Nancy is lobbying democrats to support 74 year old Gerry Connolly instead. Pelosi has clashed with AOC in the past over the direction of the democratic party and the two obviously have differing views of how the party should be run in the House.
The House Oversight Committee has a powerful and important role as it has broad investigative powers including over one very important branch in our government: the executive branch.
If ever there was a time for the old guard within the democratic party to sit down and shut up it is now. Nancy needs to stand down and get out of the way. Pelosi confidently declared that the dems would take over the House on election day. Yeah. Uh. WRONG. It should be obvious from the disastrous results of the previous election that the party needs new blood to take over. We need fighters with the fire in their bellies to take it straight to the fascists on the other side. We need new leaders who are smart enough to realize the old world of the old guard is dead and that doing things the same way over and over and over (and continuing to lose) is not only stupid, but makes it appear as though maybe you kind of like the system as it is. When a large swath of the voting populace holds a view that there is no difference between the two parties then it is high time for radical change.
Howie Klein, December 08, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Dan Osborn ran as an independent on a platform that most Democrats would recognize economically to the left of a garden variety red state Democratic candidate— very pro-union, very pro-Choice, very anti-corporate. He didn’t win… but he clobbered Kamala. He did significantly better than her statewide and in around 30 counties, almost all of which were rural counties. She drew 369,995 votes (39.1%) while Osborn won 436,493 (46.7%),…
Southeast of Nebraska, sits Missouri, another red state that rejected Harris. She drew 40.1% of the vote. The independent-minded Democratic Senate candidate, Lucas Kunce, who also ran on a platform more appealing to the working class than hers, beat her by nearly 2 points (41.8%)….
Yesterday, on his substack Kunce wondered out loud why people “keep voting against their own self-interest... [but] even if asked entirely in earnest— [it] doesn’t come off as a question. They don’t believe they are voting against their self-interest, so it comes off as a statement: that they are stupid, and that the questioner knows more about what’s good for them than they do. Which is unfortunate, because that’s the mentality that working people, independent voters, and persuadable people are told Democrats have, and it’s one of the things they really don’t like. Even if the presumption in this question is true, that someone would have a better life if they voted for a certain candidate, there’s no way forward from this question that comes to a mutual understanding. Because it comes from a place of superiority... Are people who are rejecting Democrats actually voting against their own self-interest?”
”If you go back to the messages I got from Trump voters describing, in their own words, why they didn’t vote for me even though they liked me more than my opponent, it’s because they think Democrats are ruining the country and have jacked up the economy.
“We obsess over policy a lot, but most people don’t pay that much attention to policy, to what’s happening in DC, or what long term infrastructure bill passed. They do, however, notice that they can’t afford groceries anymore and that the President is a Democrat. Frankly, I’m getting killed by groceries every month, so I get it.
”And when you look back over the last few years, being a normal person has not always been easy when Democrats were in charge nationally, so claiming that voting for a Democrat is in someone else’s own self-interest goes against a lot of people’s lived experience.
”Here are a few examples from my own life.
”When I got back from Iraq in 2009, I spent a large part of 2010 and 2011 trying to keep Marines in their homes who were illegally foreclosed upon by the same big banks that the government had just bailed out. Banks and bankers at the time were knowingly violating the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) left and right, breaking the law kicking servicemembers out of their homes— many of whom had the money to stay but hadn’t gotten proper notice due to deployments. And it all happened under a Democratic President who had a Democratic majority in the House and 60 Democratic votes in the Senate.
”I specifically remember these Marines and their families asking me how the bankers could get away with it. Didn’t we all just bail these banks out? They would ask. I signed up after 9/11 when these guys were attacked in New York, they would say, how could they forget that and treat us like this? Who is the government supposed to be looking out for, anyway? Why isn’t it us?
“I didn’t have a good answer for them, I just did my best to keep them in their homes. And in every single case where they came to me before the foreclosure was complete, I was able to keep them in their homes, because the law was on our side and the banks were egregiously violating it.
”By the way, knowingly violating the SCRA is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment. Can you guess how many people went to jail for illegally kicking Marines out on the street?
”You instinctively knew that the answer was zero. Before you even read it. Because it didn’t matter that the President was a Democrat or that Democrats controlled Congress— there is no accountability for the rich and famous in our system no matter who is in charge. And Joe Biden pardoning his son Hunter just solidified every skeptic’s view on Democrats for a generation.
”Try telling those Marines or anyone else who struggled through the foreclosure crisis that the system is fair or that it works.
”So many powerful people actively destroyed, actually ruined, the lives of everyday people in this country during that time and not a single one of those who caused the damage suffered or lost anything. Does that feel like an administration that was in a normal person’s “self-interest?” “
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024.
“Campaign organizers in Philadelphia said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with local leaders and calling voters. Instead, they said, they were instructed to spend most of their days phoning the same small pool of volunteers and asking them to knock on voters’ doors and help run field offices. The strategy essentially turned experienced organizers into glorified telemarketers making hundreds of calls daily, with some harried volunteers begging to be taken off call lists.”…
On election night, Ms. Harris drastically underperformed in Philadelphia. Although she picked up support in white precincts near downtown, she lost votes in some Latino and Black neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. In interviews, many Democrats expressed little surprise, saying that the Harris campaign had devoted much of its energy to winning over moderate white voters in wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs, both in Philadelphia and around the nation. In an October memo, her campaign wrote that the ‘path to win Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs.’ As a result, many staff members felt that Philadelphia’s racially diverse neighborhoods were ignored. Even though the campaign raised $1.5 billion, many of its field offices in the city were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers, staff members said. Several recounted being forced to raid the campaign’s better-stocked suburban offices or to raise money independently.
Zach Shrewsbury, December 10, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Earlier this year, I ran for the U.S. Senate in the Democratic Party primary. While my senatorial campaign won half of the counties in West Virginia— the southern, forgotten part of the state— the voter turnout was low and insufficient to help us secure the nomination. The general election was then lost substantially to West Virginia’s Republican Governor Jim Justice.
West Virginians ended up voting for candidates that projected anti-establishment values even though their actual policy agenda is nothing less than more corporate handouts and commodification of our entire existence fueled by an AI algorithm….
Howie Klein, December 09, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
A week from tomorrow Democrats in north Austin will be deciding who will represent their deep blue district on the city council… although these days, even in the deepest blue districts, GOP billionaires think they should decide and spread around immense amounts of money to recruit and support Republican-lite “Democraps” for every office that could impact them. They got scared when Bernie-grade progressive Mike Siegel came in a very strong first in the 6-man first round last month, more than double his closest competitor,…
It pays to not take anything for granted. Last month, 3 Democratic state legislative districts in California flipped red. One, AD-36, a Latino-majority district with a 14-point Democratic voters registration advantage, is in the Imperial and Coachella valleys, where the new assemblyman is Republican Jeff Gonzalez. It was an open seat and he beat Democrat Joey Acuña, president of the Coachella Valley Unified School District board, by 3.6% of the vote. One of Gonzalez’s backers was Tony Gallegos, a former chair of the Imperial County Democratic Central Committee. ‘We didn’t change,’ he told the L.A. Times. ‘We just supported the better candidate.’”
Howie Klein, December 8, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...On Friday, Dan Rather wrote that when Musk appropriated the title “first buddy” it was anything but innocuous. The richest man in the world, whose wealth is largely dependent on government contracts “now has unchecked access” to Señor Trumpanzee. He’s a regular fixture at Mar-a-Lago, sats in on calls with world leaders and has met with the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump has given Musk and junior partner, Vivek Ramaswamy, also a billionaire, the green light to implement “drastic” reforms in the federal government. All that access is what Musk bought for at least $277 million, “more than any individual has ever spent on a single election,” including notorious robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie. J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon (whose largely untaxed fortune was employed to help elect Trump this year), Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Henry Frick and E.H. Harriman. (It’s very much worth keeping in mind that the political manipulation from those bums spurred angry calls for campaign finance reform and fueled public outrage that eventually led to progressive-era reforms like the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. Many of the practices by the worst of the robber barons mirror modern concerns about the influence of criminal billionaires like Musk, Timothy Mellon, Charles Koch, Israeli operative Miriam Adelson, Ken Griffin, Peter Thiel, Harold Hamm, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the Walton family and neo-Nazis Dick and Liz Uihlein.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Dr. Merritt Roe Smith [Tsongas Industrial History Center, via YouTube, Nov 12, 2013]
[TW: This may be one of the most important videos you ever watch, because it discusses the actual history of how the USA industrialized, including the fact that the national government played a crucial role. Just like you should forget John Locke, you should forget Eli Whitney, Henry Ford, and unlearn Adam Smith and the entire myth of heroic, visionary entrepreneurs. The basis of modern industrial society was the development of modern machine tools that made it possible to produce interchangeable parts. In other words, mass production. And it was the policies of the national government that made it happen.
[Note also that this actual history does not conform to Marxist belief that the social superstructure is produced by the means of production. What actually happened was that the means of production were developed and nurtured by government, part of the social superstructure. The great historical irony, of course, is that what we’re grappling with today is exactly the result of what Marx described, of the people who seized control of the means of production also seizing control of politics, and altering the superstructure. This is the great problem any philosophy of government must solve: how do you nurture and create the creation of new wealth, but at the same time prevent that new wealth from corrupting the economy and the society?]
Smith begins by recommending Daniel Walker Howe’s 2007 book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 [which won the Pulitzer Prize for History]. Howe describes the communications revolution that
[10:52] took place in these years after the war of 1812… first of all, the introduction of steam powered rotary printing presses were capable of spewing out printed materials by the thousands, compared to one single press page at a time that had been used back in Benjamin Franklin's era. The new technology completely changed printing so much… you begin to see the emergence of cheap newspapers cheap pamphlets, cheap books… really it had an impact on reading in America … so much was available now that had not been available during the late Colonial or early National period. [This ability to mass produce leaflets and newspapers made possible the rise of movements like abolitionism and women’s suffrage.]
[13:15]
… the second part of this Communications Revolution that he talks about has to do with the reorganization of the postal system – not just reorganizing how letters were sorted and distributed… the Postmaster General ... began to give contracts out for the building of roads, the improvement of canals, anything that help to speed the delivery of the mails... that means here's the US government getting involved in the building of transportation systems directly through these postal contracts.… and then finally comes the electric Telegraph...
[Smith then discusses the actual process of industrialization, noting it is a myth that it began with Eli Whitney]:
...he never made a gun with interchangeable parts and the reason I can say that is that when I was young I had the good fortune to have a fellowship at the National Museum of American History, then called the Museum of History and Technology, at the Smithsonian and the curator who was overseeing me when I was working on my dissertation, was an expert in machine tools, the most knowledgeable person about machine tools that I've ever met. And one day he had been writing about Whitney and proving that indeed Whitney had not been making guns with interchangeable parts. He got out from the collection... five or six of these old Whitney military muskets that [Whitney] had contracted for in the late 1790s … he took these guns apart and tried to switch their parts. That's the best test you can have. They weren't even approximately interchangeable because each part was numbered with the Roman numeral especially the working mechanism, where the trigger and the lock are located the interior of that lock area is made up of all these little pieces that have to work like clockwork in order for the gun to fire. And these parts were all numbered which meant one thing was that they were not interchangeable. Each one was individually filed and fitted so the Roman numeral sixes would fit Roman numeral six but they would not fit Roman numeral four. So if you start to fit Roman numeral 3 with number six … they just don't come together. End of story.
[Smith then discusses the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held at the London Crystal Palace in 1851, and how the British were stunned to find that the American products looked to be simple and backwards, but actually performed better than all other products in actual competitions to test their use. The British were particularly alarmed to discover that the Americans had achieved the production of firearms with interchangeable parts. The British government organized several groups British officials and experts to travel to the United States and study the factories in which these products were being made, compare the methods and equipment being used by the Americans with that in use in Britain, and acquire all the American equipment found to be superior or unknown in Britain.]
[Smith next discusses the two leading designers and makers of USA machine tools, John H. Hall, from near Portland Maine, and Simeon North, from Middletown Connecticut. When Hall was given a contract in 1819 to produce firearms for the Army, he was required to do so at the government’s Harpers Ferry Armory, located 55 miles west of Washington DC.]
[34:49] Now, the interesting thing is is that rather than sending him to Springfield, which was the closest National Armory to Portland, Maine, the government army officers in charge of this contract are Army Ordinance officers -- all West Point graduates by the way, all basically engineering types -- sent him down to Harper's Ferry. Why did they do that? Because they considered Hall's contract for 1,000 guns an experiment. This was an experiment to see if this guy could actually produce a thousand guns with interchangeable parts, and they wanted him close so they could keep an eye on him and over the course of next six years…. And the story of that is very well documented, because when he finished that thousand gun contract, the Ordinance Department immediately set up an investigatory commission to walk there and see what was going on [and write a report].
[38:27] The important point there is the role that the government played in all this… Is big government bad for business? Well, if you look at it in the 19th century, the answer is “hell, no!” It was very good for business….
[39:07] The General Survey Act of 1824 … allowed the Army Corps of Engineers to send their army officers out to privately owned railroads to survey and initiate construction on railroads. That's a big deal; that means that people like George Washington Whistler, he's the father of the famous artist father, he was an army engineer and he was sent] to work on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, to build the first 30 miles of the railroad. And then eventually the railroad took over and built the rest of it. But [army engineers] tutored these private corporations in the building of railroads Over 50 railroads prior to the Civil War were built using that process. Army Engineers working for private corporations being paid by the federal government and taking all the government books and papers planning papers and putting them to work for the private corporations. So again an important example of how one of the most important technologies of the 19th century, railroads, had a big input of government support to say nothing of the land grants later….
Drawing on this new technology that came out of the arms industry in the 19th century [what] emerges around Springfield and Hartford is the first really serious machine tool industry in the United States. These are companies capable of making machines that make other machines.... How did this happen? How was it possible for this to to happen if all of these new technologies were coming from private contractors who supposedly had proprietary rights to the new technologies that they were inventing? … How did this proprietary information that Hall and North had … move out and become public information? …. basically the machine tool industry arises because private proprietary knowledge somehow became public knowledge. How did that happen? When they contracted with the US Army Ordinance Department they were required to share their knowledge with other contractors. … the Ordinance Department would go back and report to the superintendent at Springfield saying you know Simeon's got this interesting little ratchet machine down here that has a rotating head on it can perform about six different functions simply by moving a lever. We need to get this up at Springfield. And immediately the Springfield superintendent would write to Simon North and say Simon we want to get a copy of that can you lend us your patterns and drawings of the machine and without hesitation he did it. No royalty charged. No patent. Simeon North never patented a thing that he invented… Hall patented his machines but he made them readily available for public use. Why? That's the key question. And the answer is very simple -- the Ordinance Department told these inventors that if they wanted to continue in public service as as public contractors they had to share their inventions with either the Springfield Armory or the Harper Ferry Armory or both and that those armories were not going to be constrained about who came and saw this machinery... The Springfield Army became the great clearing house [for production machinery] technical information prior to the Civil War because it was the big National Armory that really started just glomming onto all this new technology and information and bringing it into this one institution….
Today if you try to write a history of machine tools in the United States and think that you can get that information out of patent records, you're wrong. You will not find a patent on the earliest machine tools. They just don't exist because the machines weren't patented
So this is a very interesting story about how an Open Door policy maintained by the government through this insistence that government contractors share information, had a big impact on the larger economy…. At the center of all this, is this government that's insisting that certain things happen certain ways. That doesn't happen today... It's a totally different system we're operating on under today and what I'm saying is we ought to relook at what happened during the 19th century and [ask] are we doing this the right way today?
[Another large factor, at the time, which Smith does not mention is the role of civic republicanism as guiding philosophy. Promoting the General Welfare is a part of the reason why the inventors of modern machine tools did not attempt to lock up their inventions behind the legal wall of patents. ]
[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-13-2024]
“Clearly, brain structure can tell us a lot about reading skills. Importantly, though, the brain is malleable — it changes when we learn a new skill or practice an already acquired one. For instance, young adults who studied language intensively increased their cortical thickness in language areas. Similarly, reading is likely to shape the structure of the left Heschl’s gyrus and temporal pole. So, if you want to keep your Heschl’s thick and thriving, pick up a good book and start reading. Finally, it’s worth considering what might happen to us as a species if skills like reading become less prioritised. Our capacity to interpret the world around us and understand the minds of others would surely diminish. In other words, that cozy moment with a book in your armchair isn’t just personal – it’s a service to humanity.”
