Retired military leaders tell SCOTUS Trump immunity will destroy civilian control of the military

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday April 09, 2024 · 7:12 AM PDT

2024/04/09 · 07:12

19 retired four-star admirals and generals, and former secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, who have served under each President from John F. Kennedy to Donald J. Trump, have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court (pdf), warning of disastrous results should the Court agree with Trump’s theory of presidential immunity. Excerpts below; I have bolded some text for emphasis.

Petitioner’s theory that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution, if accepted, has the potential to severely undermine the Commander-in-Chief’s legal and moral authority to lead the military forces, as it would signal that they but not he must obey the rule of law. Under this theory, the President could, with impunity, direct his national security appointees to, in turn, direct members of the military to execute plainly unlawful orders, placing those in the chain of command in an untenable position and irreparably harming the trust fundamental to civil-military relations….

...the rule of law is critical to the military’s mission and to the people’s trust in the armed forces. The military service members’ duty to disobey unlawful orders plainly illustrates this point. This duty requires service members, who are bound to obey all lawful orders, to disregard patently unlawful orders from their superiors and prohibits service members from using such orders as a defense to criminal prosecution. Immunizing the Commander-in-Chief from criminal prosecution, as Petitioner argues for here, would fly in the face of that duty, creating the likelihood that service members will be placed in the impossible position of having to choose between following their Commander-in-Chief and obeying the laws enacted by Congress… Not only does Petitioner’s approach threaten to inject chaos into military operations, it also threatens to damage—potentially irreparably—the public’s trust in the military and the willingness of recruits to join the armed forces.

….the notion that predicted defiance of the Commander-in-Chief’s orders is the backstop against criminal behavior by a President is not what the Constitution provides for. It would inexorably lead to deep divisions between the armed forces’ political and military leaders and would place servicemen and women in the impossible position of either ignoring presidential orders they are sworn to obey or committing crimes at the President’s behest in violation of their oath—for which they may be prosecuted.

I. Petitioner’s claimed immunity would undermine our nation’s foundational commitment to civilian control of the military….

Civilian control of the U.S. military ensures that the armed forces are subordinate to the direction and control of a President who is accountable to the people…. Ensuring that this system works, however, requires more than just laws. It also requires deep trust between the civilian and military leaders that they fundamentally share common goals: to defend the nation and uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Indeed, at its core, civilian control of the military requires mutual trust and respect for the different roles that civilian and military leaders are called to fill in our Constitutional order. In particular, our system requires trust in the Commander-in-Chief as a source of legal and moral authority to lead the men and women of the armed forces, as at his orders they place their lives in peril to serve their country.

Allowing the Commander-in-Chief to weaponize the powers of the U.S. military to criminal ends with impunity would also confront the President’s civilian appointees and military officers with an impossible choice: whether to obey the orders of the Commander-in-Chief or the laws of the United States. Some political appointees might prioritize their loyalty to the President above their oaths and transmit the orders to violate the law, thus passing on to senior military leaders the dilemma of whether to obey the President or the law….

II. Petitioner’s claimed immunity would undermine the military’s adherence to the rule of law and thus its orderly functioning and public trust….

Granting the President absolute immunity from criminal prosecution would threaten the good order and discipline that allow the armed forces to maintain a fighting force capable of protecting the safety of all Americans. Allowing for such immunity also would undermine our nation’s trust in the military as a revered institution situated above and apart from the political fray….

Petitioner’s [Trump’s] amici claim that the My Lai Massacre serves as evidence that the military would not carry out the President’s hypothetical order to murder or assassinate a political rival. Officers’ Br. 12. That is wrong: the very fact that Calley felt emboldened to kill civilians on the basis of “superior orders”—in that case, from a captain—demonstrates that our system remains vulnerable to the risk that servicemen or women may commit crimes when ordered to do so. That risk is all the graver if the person giving the orders is the President, particularly one protected by absolute immunity. Amici are also incorrect in assessing the consequences of My Lai. Among other things, the hero of the incident, Hugh Thompson—who disobeyed Calley’s orders and testified against him—became a target for death threats and harassment fordoing so. The fallout from disobeying a presidential order would no doubt be far more severe….

...our legal system does and should continue to subject the President to criminal laws—just like every other individual in the chain of command—thereby lessening the likelihood that unlawful orders are issued in the first instance and reducing the risk that service members would be required to engage the precarious safety valve of the duty to disobey. Otherwise, our nation risks splintering the chain of command essential to training, organizing, and deploying service members efficiently and effectively across the globe, thereby jeopardizing the orderly functioning of our military….

… Petitioner’s theory would also remove specific checks on presidential authority over the military. For example, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (“PCA”) criminalizes the use of the armed forces to enforce civilian laws, subject to exceptions “expressly authorized” by Congress. 18 U.S.C.§ 1385.5 The PCA thus prevents Presidents from deploying the military within the United States to police civilian “compliance” with laws such as voting regulations. But, absent the availability of criminal prosecution for a President’s violation of the PCA, this important check on military power would be weakened if not eliminated….

III. Petitioner’s claimed immunity, by implicating the peaceful transition of power in particular, threatens national security….

A stable, orderly presidential transition is essential to our national security. Military leaders abroad closely watch the United States as administrations transfer responsibility from one to another so that they can accurately advise political leaders on appropriate security measures. Unstable transitions of power—not to mention any attendant constitutional crises—risk catastrophic misperceptions abroad, emboldening our adversaries, demoralizing our allies, and causing chaos at home….

Retracted

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday February 20, 2024 · 8:46 AM PST

2024/02/20 · 08:46

Admin note: this story, titled “Week-end Wrap — Political Economy — February 18, 2024,” has been removed on account of multiple links to disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 11, 2024

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday February 13, 2024 · 7:17 AM PST

2024/02/13 · 07:17

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 11, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel’s Relentless Bombing Erases Gaza’s Heritage Sites

[Wide Walls, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]

The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]

In the past four months, all or parts of Gaza’s 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed.

Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors.

Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.

Oligarchs' war on the experiment of republican self-government

The Republican Party and Their Billionaire Backers’ Plot Against America

Thom Hartmann, February 8, 2024 [Common Dreams]

...The most appealing thing about a dictator is that he can “get things done.”

Dictators don’t have to worry about bureaucracies hindering them, or pesky laws and regulations. They don’t care about local opposition to their projects, or their impact on the environment.

From making the trains run on time to building an autobahn and a car company to go with it, dictators famously “get things done.”

The corollary to that old nostrum is that when things are going well, when things are working smoothly, when the people are getting what they want from their government, there is little interest in putting a dictator into office.

You have to break government pretty badly before people are willing to trade in a normal democracy for a dictatorship, but it’s sure happened before.

Germany wouldn’t have embraced Hitler if it weren’t for the depression the country had slid into because they lost World War I and were hit with fierce sanctions in the Treaty of Versailles.…

One of the most successful ways the forces of autocracy and authoritarianism have risen to power throughout history is by creating or stepping into a crisis and promising to be the “strongman” who will fix things and fix them now.

Which, of course, is why right-wing billionaires and the Republicans they own have been working so hard in the decades since the Reagan Revolution to break our government.

They want a series of terrible crises. And if they don’t happen organically, right wingers are more than happy to create them, as we saw this week when Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to do anything about our southern border or to fund aid to Ukraine and the Palestinians….

Warn Voters About the Radicalism Beyond Trump

Nancy MacLean, February 8, 2024 [The New Republic]

...Promoters have been methodically lining up authorizations from the states since the 2012 election showed them that most Americans reject the kind of society they seek, even Mitt Romney’s mild version. So strategists concluded that the only way to permanently entrench minority rule by plutocrats and theocrats is to encase it in a dramatically altered Constitution….

If Republicans control Congress, they won’t have to bother with litigation, because it would be up to the majority in control to determine the validity of the applications—and Article V lacks the guardrails to prevent this manipulation.

Seriously? Yes, alas. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who would be in a position to call it, is a longtime ally of COS….

So how exactly would a convention nullify the Democratic agenda, past and current? The six amendments adopted by the Simulated Convention held in Williamsburg, Virginia, on August 4, 2023, would dismantle reforms We the People have won over generations. The centerpiece amendment, entitled “Fiscal Restraints,” is a one-two punch to knock out popular programs such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. By mandating that two-thirds of both houses of Congress would have to agree to any tax increase, it would force annually balanced budgets, while making it all but impossible to raise revenue from the wealth-hoarding ultrarich who back this radical agenda.

Another amendment takes dead aim at all federal regulation since 1937 and civil rights and environmental policies since then. It would obliterate the “administrative state,” the bugbear of the hard-right coalition. The measure would in short order end fair labor standards, antitrust enforcement, environmental protections, safeguards for workers who choose to unionize, civil rights on the job and in public accommodations, and the Affordable Care Act, among other hard-won reforms that ease hardship and protect us from corporate domination.

Still another amendment would allow a simple majority of state legislatures “to abrogate any action of Congress, President, or administrative agencies.” That could stop federal intervention to ensure the equal citizenship rights established in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments….

But this is madness, you will say. These reactionaries could never get away with rewriting the Constitution!

Except they could. First, because the instigators have already adopted a representation scheme for the convention based on one-vote-per-state, chosen by the legislatures; it gives near-empty states like Alaska and Wyoming the same power as California and New York. Second, because by crooked counting (“aggregating”) of ancient authorizations with those recently obtained, planners claim that the threshold needed to call a convention under Article V has already been met: two-thirds of the states. Third, because most of us aren’t even aware that this is happening….

For the American people to realize how much is at stake will require vast and to-the-point popular education. While the right has been tutoring its base in its version of the Constitution for years, the left has dropped this ball badly, particularly on such vital but wonky matters as how interpretation of the Commerce Clause after 1937 enabled all the federal regulations demanded by voters….

If Trump Decides On A National Divorce, How Much Of The Republican Party Will Follow Along?

Howie Klein, February 9, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

A few days ago I saw an interesting substack by Thomas Zimmer about the far right secession fantasy, which he worries is more serious than “just silly, pathetic cosplay from a bunch of grifters, buffoons, and lost souls…The trucker convoy fiasco also doesn’t change the fact that the border standoff is acting as a catalyst for the pervasive lusting for civil war and ubiquitous fantasizing about secession on the Right. This isn’t confined to extremist online fringes either. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, for instance, fabulated we would ‘have a war on our hands were president Biden to federalize National Guard troops. Kevin Stitt, the Republican Governor of Oklahoma, argued that the Texas National Guard was merely ‘protecting their homeland’ from the federal government. And Representative Clay Higgins posted on Ex-Twitter that ‘the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.’ These aren’t just outlier voices. Texas, with the explicit support from 25 .…

:[A]ll this secessionist fantasizing has been flanked by an increasingly violent political rhetoric— and open endorsement of political violence. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene campaigned on the idea that “Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings.” If someone were to truly believe that the president of the United States, the party in power, and the forces dominating a sinister “deep state” are engaged in a campaign to murder all members of the opposition party— what are they supposed to do? Just last week, Greene’s fellow Georgia Representative Mike Collins casually called for an extrajudicial killing styled after a foreign authoritarian regime’s terror campaign: “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride,” Collins posted on Ex-Twitter, referring to a man who had allegedly been involved in an attack on New York City police officers. This was a reference to the authoritarian military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. After overthrowing the democratically elected Allende government in September 1973, the Pinochet regime persecuted dissidents and “disappeared” them. One way of doing that was to throw them out of aircraft, usually into the ocean. The practice of “disappearing” people had been a key tactic of the military dictatorship in Argentina; it was the focus of an international human rights campaign against Chile in the 1970s. “Make Leftists Disappear Again” has been a meme on the Far Right for several years— you’ll see it on t-shirts that sport the slogan plus the silhouette of a helicopter. That’s what this translates to: Let’s kill those “leftist” enemies here in America, like Pinochet did in Chile.

”The line between far-right extremism and the power center of conservative politics was always, at best, a permeable membrane. Now it has been completely eviscerated, to the point where no one should be surprised that a GOP congressman is openly propagating such ideas. The Republican Party doesn’t just tolerate such extremist figures in an attempt to appease the fringe— this isn’t simply a matter of acquiescence out of cowardice. This sort of radicalism is widely seen as justified on the Right. The GOP has abandoned and is now actively assaulting the foundations of democratic political culture. Accepting the legitimacy of the political opponent and denouncing the use of political violence: Republicans are delighting in crossing those essential lines.”

The Supreme Court’s Big Chevron Case Could Hamstring Federal Government. Here’s How It Got Started

Kate Aronoff, February 9, 2024 [The New Republic]

...Bright, Reichle, and Axelsson’s case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, as well as a companion case before the court called Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, ostensibly challenges a requirement that fishing boat owners pay for the federal observers who ensure companies aren’t overfishing. The government abandoned that requirement last year and reimbursed fisherman who had paid observer fees. The Supreme Court took these two cases anyway, so as to rule on a much broader question: whether to overturn a long-standing legal precedent known as the Chevron deference, wherein courts defer to the expertise of federal agencies to interpret congressional statutes. If they succeed in killing Chevron, this will be a massive victory for corporations looking to evade regulation….

The group is being represented pro bono by lawyers at the Cause of Action Institute, as well as by Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general and conservative legal activist. Ryan Mulvey—part of the plaintiffs’ legal team—serves as both counsel for Cause of Action Institute and policy counsel for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the education and research arm of the Koch brothers–backed lobby group Americans for Prosperity. Two other attorneys representing the plaintiffs, Eric Bolinder and James Valvo, who serve as counsel and executive director, respectively, at the Cause of Action Institute, also work for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. According to the foundation’s most recently published Form 990 tax filing, it granted $200,000 to the Cause of Action Institute in 2022.

Global power shift

The Competition Between West And The Rest Is Already Over

Ian Welsh, February 10, 2024

This is what people refuse to get: the West has already lost. It’s over. It’s done. There’ll be some shooting, but it doesn’t matter.

China has the world’s largest economy by all statistics that matter. It has by far and away the most manufacturing. It has way more shipbuilding capacity than the entire West.

China is the premier trade power. Most of the global “South” would rather trade with it: it gives better deals and it interferes less with internal politics. This will continue….

It’s over. We lost without most of us even realizing we’d lost. When we decided to send our industry to China in exchange for some of our elites getting richer faster for three decades, we decided to give up our centuries old hegemony.

This isn’t to say all is woe, or that Western countries who are smart can’t maintain good standards of living. But we can only do so if we stop pretending we’re #1, the hegemonic civilization and everyone else has to kiss our asses or else….

...decay always begins at home. We gave our lead away, deliberately and as policy…. our elites need to be defenestrated as a class if the rest of us are to have any chance at decent lives.

The Newer World Order

Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2024]

...We therefore face a problem which is, I think, unique in western history. It can be summarised as follows. A shallow and incapable ruling class and its parasites are confronted with a series of subtle changes in the way the international political and economic system works, some linked, some not, that require the sort of careful analysis and thoughtful reactions of which they are inherently incapable. At the same time, the machinery of politics and economics in their own countries is breaking down, and they have no idea why, or what to do about it. These two points—the inability to imagine alternatives and the incapacity to understand even what is going on in front of their eyes—are the two themes I want to develop in the essay….

...Likewise, the conviction of “unipolarity” or “hegemony” replacing the “bloc-to-bloc” logic of the Cold War seems to be very deeply ingrained now in the strategic mind. This hegemony is sometimes attributed to the West, sometimes to the United States alone, by critics as much as by proponents, and is assumed now to be the natural order of things. It is indirectly derived from the (dominant) Realist and Neo-realist schools of international relations theory, which postulate an anarchic international system with endless conflict of different sorts among states, and, naturally enough, strong states controlling weaker ones. And if you believe that the US now “rules the world,” in a system like this, and that the structure of the system itself is natural and will endure, then the only alternative you can imagine is another global hegemon….

In turn this is because the US is an extreme case of a political reality found everywhere: it is better to be wrong with the majority than right on your own. After all, given western control of media discourses (reducing markedly in fact) who is going to remember who was right and who was wrong in five years time, or even necessarily what the question was? More than any other major capital, Washington resembles a closed box made of mirrors where people talk entirely to each other, and where what matters is whether you have the right opinions, and can win battles against your peers. The rest of the world, I sometimes think, is just another lobby group, and reality just another factor to be taken into account. After all, you can have a Doctorate in Political Science theory with a brilliant reinterpretation of Leo Strauss, decide to specialise in Iran, and go on to a distinguished and lucrative career in think-tanks and universities with stints in government and NGOs, all without having visited Iran or speaking Farsi, because the public you can appeal to in your own country is so large.

Most countries suffer from at least a diluted version of this problem. But the West, and within the West the United States particularly, seems these days to be incapable of long-term thinking, or of sustaining any memory of even the relatively recent past. This means that almost any unexpected event is destabilising and inexplicable, because nobody has been studying long-term trends. Such disparate examples as the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or the rebuilding of the Russian defence industry over the last fifteen years, were prepared and undertaken in plain sight: it’s just that nobody was paying attention to them until their irruption into the news cycle made them unmissable. Likewise, nobody in the West can really analyse their long-term consequences properly, because we no longer have the capability or the inclination to do long-term thinking.

The result is panic and confusion, and the search for simple explanations, because the myopic western system cannot accommodate the almost infinite complexity of the real world….

What we have seen in the West over that period, and to some extent in other areas of the world as well, is not a conspiracy or a centrally directed programme, but the result of a common purpose, itself drawn from strong similarities in education, and interactions, and shared life experiences and social and economic circumstances, among a small but powerful group of people. The widespread trend towards highly educated professional politicians from comfortable backgrounds, with economically and socially liberal ideas, has created what I usually refer to as the Party, which has effective power in most of the world today. Through privatisation of public assets, the movement of capital and jobs around the world, the consolidation of media empires and many other factors, the Party’s members are just as likely to be found in business, the media or NGOs as in political life: indeed, it would not be inappropriate to describe them as a Communist Party-style nomenklatura. Highly educated, travelling and living internationally, they see only each other, and imbibe the same ideas. Reading the same newspapers and internet sites, attending the same conferences and workshops, lunching, dining and of course working together, they hear only the same opinions they themselves hold.

Less obvious is the impact of the small “pro-western” class found in many countries of the Global South today. These are people who have often been educated in the West, work for western-funded organisations, speak western languages and have assimilated dominant western Liberal ideas, either because they genuinely believe them, or because it is expedient for them to do so. In many cases they occupy important positions in politics, government, the media and business. The West fools itself into the belief that such people are representative of their societies, and is serially confused and disappointed when this proves not to be the case….

The Russians and Chinese, along with many other nations, are not looking to dominate the world, but rather to a world where different sorts of power are diffused in different ways, and decisions are taken by discussion and bargaining between groups that are much more equal. We do not have to assume that the leaders of such countries are animated by the highest moral sentiments: they see national advantage in moving towards a world where power is more dispersed, that’s all. But the process as a whole is likely to be uncomfortable for the West, stuck as it is with rigid and often unsophisticated assumptions about how the system works now, let alone what it is likely to evolve into. Dealing with that change is going to be a massive challenge for the political systems of the West. I’m not sure they are necessarily up to it.

Will the Hegemon Ever Accept a New Westphalian World Order?

Pepe Escobar, February 1, 2024 [Strategic Culture Foundation, via Mike Norman Economics, January 17, 2024]

Pepe Escobar reviews Prof. Glenn Diesen's new book, The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order….

Poviding context, Diesen needs to engage in an obligatory detour to the basics of the Great Game between the Russian and British empires. What stands out is how Moscow already was pivoting to Asia all the way to the late 19^th century, when Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte started to develop a groundbreaking road map for a Eurasia political economy, “borrowing from Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List.”

Witte “wanted to end Russia’s role as an exporter of natural resources to Europe as it resembled ‘the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises’”.

And that implies going back to Dostoyevsky, who argued that “Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans (…) It will be better for us to seek alliances with the Asiatics.” Dostoyevsky meets Putin-Xi.

Diesen also needs to go through the obligatory references to Mackinder’s “heartland” obsession – which is the basis of all Anglo-American geopolitics for the past hundred and twenty years.

Mackinder was spooked by railway development – especially the Trans-Siberian by the Russians – as it enabled Moscow to “emulate the nomadic skills of the Scythians, Huns and Mongols” that were essential to control most of Eurasia.

Mackinder was particularly focused on railways acting “chiefly as feeders to ocean-going commerce”. Ergo, being a thalassocratic power was not enough: “The heartland is the region to which under modern conditions, sea power can be refused access.”

And that’s what leads to the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American geopolitics: to “prevent the emergence of a hegemon or a group of states capable of dominating Europe and Eurasia that could threaten the dominant maritime power.”

The Carlson/Putin Interview

Ian Welsh, February 9, 2024

Whatever you think of Putin, at least he’s educated and speak in complete sentences and has a historical understanding (whether you agree with it or not.) He makes Trump and Biden look like the idiots they are.

In fact, Putin makes almost every Western leader look like an ill-educated moron….

Tucker Carlson interview with Putin: what went wrong?

Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2024] A marked contrast from the fawning over Tucker on some sites. Some very astute observations.

In The Middle East The U.S. Has Reached The End Of Its Abilities

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2024]

America’s displacement anxiety and the decade of living dangerously

[Warwick Powell, Pearls & Irritations, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024]

Ukraine SitRep: A Hated New Commander – Critical Lack Of Infantry

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2024]

Democrats Are Demented Genocidal War Sluts

Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024]

US Trade Deficit in 2023 Dropped 19%, as Goods Deficit with China Plunged 29%: Imports & Exports of Goods & Services

Wolf Richter [via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2024]

COVID

Mass Disabling Event Denial

Nate Bear [Do Not Panic!, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-09-2024]

“In 2022 scientists said covid was likely to be a mass disabling event. Mass media articles covered this forecast widely at the time…. Four years later, these forecasts are becoming our reality. The number of long-term sick in the UK was revised upwards this week to a record high of more than 2.8 million after falling consistently until 2020…. In the US the numbers are skyrocketing. On current trends the number of Americans registered as having a disability will top 10 million sometime next year. In Canada 27% of people now have a registered disability. The same thing is being seen in countries around the world. All since 2020. The mass disabling event we were warned of is here. But instead of headlines warning us that yes, indeed, those forecasts we wrote about are becoming reality, something strange is happening. The very same media and politicians who warned about the threat of covid as a mass disabling event are now blaming everything other than the virus for the mass disability.”

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-06-2024]

Covid prevention is 100% a class struggle. Respirators, HEPA filters, nose sprays, tests, single dwelling homes… they all cost money. We need to acknowledge this & push for free respirators for everyone who wants/needs one & clean air in all public places. https://t.co/3ngCmWvpyj
— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto) February 6, 2024

What Works and For Whom? Effectiveness and Efficiency of School Capital Investments Across The U.S.

National Bureau of Economic Research, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024]

From the abstract: “Spending on basic infrastructure (such as HVAC) or on the removal of pollutants raises test scores but not house prices; conversely, spending on athletic facilities raises house prices but not test scores.”

Clean Air Delivery Rate Is All That Matters!

Joey Fox [Medium, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-05-2024] :

A clean air delivery rate (CADR) is the measurement of how quickly air that is free of a pollutant is supplied to a space. It is specified as a volume of air per unit of time. For example, it can be measured as cubic feet of clean air per minute (CFM), or liters of clean air per second (lps), or cubic meters of clean air per hour (m³/h). Because the amount of air supplied and removed from the space are the same, the CADR can also be thought of as the dirty air removal rate. Despite many marketing claims, the CADR is the only relevant measurement of air cleaner effectiveness. Unfortunately, not just air cleaner salespeople, but even academics and health experts are often mistaken on this issue. It needs to be addressed once and for all….. ‘The dose makes the poison.’ It’s a simple enough concept. Anything in quantities too low is harmless. Anything in quantities too high can be lethal. The same is true for air pollutants…. Reduce the dose by reducing the concentration. Reduce the concentration by increasing the removal rate. It’s that simple. When assessing the risk of the space from an air quality perspective, all that matters is the CADR.”

Oligarchy

Decabillionaire Dynasties: These Are The Richest Families In America

[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-08-2024]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-08-2024]

Firefighters and MBA students were asked how they'd feel if they bought a new car, showed their friend, and next day the friend buys the same kind of car

% who report they'd feel:

Upset

Firefighters: 3%
MBAs: 47%

Betrayed

Firefighters: 13%
MBAs: 47% https://t.co/nbiuOgLlfd pic.twitter.com/zirExILK0u
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) February 7, 2024

Choice as an act of meaning: The case of social class.

Could a Rogue Billionaire Make a Nuclear Weapon?

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-05-2024]

“It would take as little as a billion dollars’ investment and five years to produce the first bomb, the [Office of Net Assessment] study concluded [in 2018]

Predatory Finance

Jamie Dimon Has Spent $117 Billion Propping Up JPMorgan’s Share Price with Buybacks in 10 Years; He’s Counting on Trump’s MAGA Crowd to Rescue Him

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, February 5, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

...Running to the aid of Dimon in his battle to stop the proposed new capital rules by federal regulators – which would impact just the 37 banks (out of 4,600) in the U.S. that hold $100 billion or more in assets – is the MAGA-controlled House Financial Services Committee. Its website is so brazenly pro-Trump that yesterday it featured under a heading of “Latest on Twitter” a 2020 Tweet heaping praise on Trump along with a photo of Trump in the Oval Office. (See screenshot to the right.)

On January 31, the MAGA-dominated House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the proposed new capital rules under the biased title: “Rules Without Analysis: Federal Banking Proposals Under the Biden Administration.”

Bank Fraud Enters a New Era: Bank-to-Bank Wire Transfers Loot Customers

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, February 2, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything

Cory Doctorow, FT, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2024]

Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist. The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023….

So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it….

But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die….

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honourable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty. There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses….

Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

[The Fifth Estate, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2024]

Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” – the Big Tech companies – who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved – what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” – and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”….

Does Techno = Fascist? How Much Of It Does And How Inevitable Is That?

Howie Klein, February 4, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

I’ve been experimenting with Bard, Google’s AI interface, and I’ve come to the conclusion that between 70 and 80% of questions that require research, result in wrong answers. That’s a lot of wrong answers. I got into a discussion with it yesterday about why there are more wrong answers now than there were 6 months ago. The response was mostly more bullshit: “I deeply apologize for my repeated irrelevant responses and understand your frustration. There is something wrong with my ability to process this specific topic, and I am working on identifying the issue… It appears there is still an issue with my ability to properly process this specific topic and provide relevant information. I am currently undergoing evaluation and troubleshooting to identify and fix the root cause of these errors.” Later in the discussion, it added “I appreciate your offer to speak directly with my programmers, but unfortunately, I don't have direct access to them and wouldn't be able to facilitate a call. However, I'm taking your feedback very seriously and it will be relayed to the appropriate teams working on improving my abilities.”

I spoke with a Member of Congress today who told me several hours of his life were consumed by a tech company’s customer service department. “Growing up,” he told me, “who would have ever imagined in one day you’d speak to someone in the Philippines, two people in India and one in Uruguay? In just the course of a few hours?” He was very frustrated and his problem remains unsolved….

Adrienne LaFrance’s Atlantic feature The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism is not about a crazed club dj playing RazorMaid remixes all night. No, it’s about what LaFrance referred to as Facebook being a “digital imperialist superpower” and Zuckerberg’s mantra “Company over country.”

LaFrance wrote that “Facebook (now Meta) has become an avatar of all that is wrong with Silicon Valley. Its self-interested role in spreading global disinformation is an ongoing crisis. Recall, too, the company’s secret mood-manipulation experiment in 2012, which deliberately tinkered with what users saw in their News Feed in order to measure how Facebook could influence people’s emotional states without their knowledge. Or its participation in inciting genocide in Myanmar in 2017. Or its use as a clubhouse for planning and executing the January 6, 2021, insurrection. (In Facebook’s early days, Zuckerberg listed “revolutions” among his interests. This was around the time that he had a business card printed with ‘I’m ceo, bitch.’) And yet, to a remarkable degree, Facebook’s way of doing business remains the norm for the tech industry as a whole, even as other social platforms (TikTok) and technological developments (artificial intelligence) eclipse Facebook in cultural relevance.”….

The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values— reason, progress, freedom— but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. And above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they’ve built or are building— to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more— impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed. All this, and they still attempt to perpetuate the absurd myth that they are the swashbuckling underdogs.

No More Fairy Tales: Why the United States Needs a Whole New Operating System

[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2024]

“Because corporations have constitutional ”rights,” if a community makes a decision to stop a bad project that has been permitted by the state or federal government, a corporation has the ability to sue the community to force its project into the town. There’s no self-government at work here.”

The Dirty Business of Clean Blood

[BIG, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024] by Matt Stoller

Hungry for profits

[SOMO, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024]

“How monopoly power tripled the profits of global agricultural commodity traders in the last three years.”

Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

[ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024]

Health crises

How the nursing home lobby uses it’s political prowess to kill would-be regulations and line the industry’s pockets

Wendell Potter [via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2024]

Republicans Are Planning to Totally Privatize Medicare if Trump Wins

Andrew Perez [Rolling Stone, via downwithtyranny 02-06-2024]

Last year, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans eligible for Medicare were on privatized Medicare Advantage plans. If Republicans win the presidential race this year, the push to fully privatize Medicare, the government health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities, will only intensify. Conservative operatives have already sketched out what the GOP’s policy agenda would look like in the early days of a new Donald Trump presidency. As Rolling Stone has detailed, the proposed Project 2025 agenda is radically right-wing. One item buried in the 887-page blueprint has attracted little attention thus far, but would have a monumental impact on the health of America’s seniors and the future of one of America’s most popular social programs: a call to ‘make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option’ for people who are newly eligible for Medicare.…

Such a policy would hasten the end of the traditional Medicare program, as well as its foundational premise: that seniors can go to any doctor or provider they choose. The change would be a boon for private health insurers— which generate massive profits and growing portions of their revenues from Medicare Advantage plans— and further consolidate corporate control over the United States health care system. …

Under traditional Medicare, enrollees are free to visit any doctor who accepts Medicare (nearly all physicians do). Medicare Advantage plans, by contrast, often have limited networks of doctors that patients can choose from, and many providers have stopped accepting the private plans because they so often deny the prior authorization requests they require before patients can receive services.

Bernie Sanders Isn’t Thankful for High Drug Prices

David Dayen, February 8, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Sen. Sanders has a different view. He noted that Johnson & Johnson and Bristol Myers Squibb, two of the companies participating in today’s hearing, spent more on stock buybacks, dividends, and executive compensation in 2022 than on research and development. Moreover, their innovation often goes to “me-too drugs,” where, as Sanders said, “they are trying to make minor alterations to get another patent and maintain their monopoly.” Indeed, the HELP Committee report found that Merck put 168 different patents on Keytruda, 64 percent of them after it received FDA approval. These “patent thickets” are designed to extend the exclusivity period.

Two of the three drugs in the crosshairs of Sanders’s investigation—Johnson & Johnson’s Stelara and Bristol Myers Squibb’s Eliquis—are among the first ten drugs selected by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for price negotiation in Medicare. Both companies have filed suit against the U.S. to block the price negotiation, which is the crown jewel of the drug reforms in the Inflation Reduction Act. Other reforms for Medicare beneficiaries include a cap on out-of-pocket drug costs (down to $3,300 this year and $2,000 in 2025), a $35-per-month cap on insulin, and a rebate from drug companies on price increases that exceed the rate of inflation.

Restoring balance to the economy

AI Cannot Be Used To Deny Health Care Coverage, Feds Clarify To Insurers

[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2024]

Report: Arlington’s [Virginia] first guaranteed income pilot boosted quality of life for poorest residents

[ArlNow, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2024]

Parents with children under 18, earning less than $46,600 annually, reported that the additional $500 monthly helped them obtain better-paying jobs, address basic needs and improve their overall well-being, according to a new report by the Arlington Community Foundation (ACF), the local nonprofit that oversaw the pilot.

Moreover, the monthly payments enabled individuals to invest in certifications and educational advancement and tackle their medical bills, credit card debt and student loans.

Between September 2021 and last December, ACF provided the monthly stipend to families earning 30% of the area median income so they could continue living in Arlington, which is known for having some of the highest living costs in the nation.

The Corporate Crooks Who Got Caught Stealing Workers’ Wages

Jason Linkins, February 10, 2024 [The New Republic]

...Back in September, I highlighted a blockbuster report from ProPublica, who, working in a partnership with Documented New York, dug through federal and state databases and uncovered a staggering degree of wage theft: From 2017 to 2021, “more than $203 million in wages had been stolen from about 127,000 workers in New York.”

But the best thing about all that reporting is that it’s been put to very good use. As ProPublica reported this week, New York state lawmakers have proposed a battery of bills that will bring the hammer down on wage thieves by allowing state agencies to strip scofflaws of their ability to do business.

One bill, centered on the restaurant industry—where workers in New York had $52 million stolen from them between 2017 and 20201—would allow the “New York State Liquor Authority to suspend liquor licenses for bars and restaurants that the Department of Labor has determined owe more than $1,000 in back wages to their workers.” The second bill “would enable the Department of Labor to place a stop-work order on any business that has a wage theft claim of at least $1,000”; this has been an effective punishment in other cases. Finally, the third bill “allows the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to suspend a business’s certificate of authority—which allows it to collect sales tax and conduct business—in cases where wage theft exceeds $1,000.”

Judges Who Were Consumer or Worker Advocates? Not Many.

Ramenda Cyrus, February 6, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Indeed, according to an Alliance for Justice report, Biden’s nominations have been 75 percent women and more than 60 percent people of color. But even with the administration’s commitment to diversifying the bench, professional diversity remains scarce. Judges typically come from private law firms, or from a past profession of litigating corporate issues, or having worked as a prosecutor. Rarely have nominations come from what Alliance for Justice calls the “economic justice” side of the legal system, or from civil rights lawyers, or public defenders.

Biden’s record on professional diversity has been marginally better than his predecessors’, as he has nominated more public defenders and civil rights lawyers than the norm. Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom Biden nominated and saw confirmed as the first Black woman Supreme Court justice, came from a public defender background. As Alliance for Justice noted, Jackson had been one of five public defenders appointed to the appeals circuit under Biden.

This nearly doubled the number of former public defenders on the appeals courts, and marked the first Supreme Court Justice to have worked as a public defender,” the report stated. The report, “Economic Justice, Judges, and the Law,” found that while the bench has been diversifying, there is still a lack of judges with “economic justice” experience, which AFJ categorizes to include consumer protection and union-side labor law. Overall, the report found that just 6 percent of judges had economic justice experience, while more than 80 percent had experience representing corporations. In 2022, just 11 of 171 federal appellate judges had economic justice experience.

"A School Bought Solar Panels And Saved Enough To Give All Its Teachers Raises: '

[futurism.com, via Avedon's Sideshow, 01-28-2024]

The Sun Is Going To Be Shining Anyway, So Why Not Cash In On That?' A rural school district in Batesville, Arkansas generated enough solar energy to give every teacher a raise, CBS News reports. Salaries were only averaging around $45,000 at the Batesville School District, with many teachers leaving as a result. It was also proving difficult to attract new teachers to the town of just 10,000 people. But then the school district, which included a high school and five other education centers, turned an unused field into a solar energy farm back in 2017. It also covered the front of the high school in 1,500 panels. After installing the solar array and investing in other new energy infrastructure, Climatewire reports that the district turned a $250,000 annual budget deficit into a $1.8 million surplus — enough, according to CBS, to give every teacher a raise of up to $15,000."

Climate and environmental crises

Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1 million in defamation lawsuit

[Orlando Sentinel, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]

New Report Sheds Light on Rapid Expansion of Arctic Shipping

[gCaptain, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2024]

Creating new economic potential - science and technology

NASA’s JPL Lays Off Hundreds of Workers

[Universe Today, via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2024]

It’s Confirmed! Laser Fusion Experiment Hit a Critical Milestone in Power Generation

[ScienceAlert, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2024]

Scientists Have 3D Bioprinted Functioning Human Brain Tissue

[Popular Science, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2024]

Democrats' political malpractice

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-06-2024]

Watching Democrats in blue run cities/states give us policy and legislation they told us to be afraid Republicans would pass. This is a direct attack on protesters and creating more mass surveillance. https://t.co/PlpzZGQcKR
— AshleyStevens (@The_Acumen) February 6, 2024

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

Abbott’s Border Standoff Fueled by a Climate Crisis He Helped to Create

[Texas Observer, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024]

Ron DeSantis has been dreaming of complete military power for three years. Florida lawmakers may finally give it to him.

[Seeking Rents, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2024]

[TW: One thing that particularly stuck me in reading about the years leading to the Civil War, is how the slaveholding states quietly raised, armed, and prepared their state militias, while no such activity was occurring in the northern states. Not surprisingly, when the shooting actually began, the Confederate states were more effective on the field of battle. On the other hand, these pre-war preparations for war helped fuel the delusions of Confederate leaders that they could militarily defeat the north. As historian and World War 2 war correspondent Fletcher Pratt pointed out, eventually the socially stratified southern society was completely unable to replace its military leadership, while after some initial stumbling the north relentlessly turned out swarms of highly trained and capable combat leaders. ]

Feds 'All F—king Tied Up in Knots' Over How to Handle Election Threats

JESSICA CORBETT, February 09, 2024 [Common Dreams]

Just nine months away from the U.S. general election, reporting published Friday by CNN suggests the federal government is poorly prepared to respond to "nightmare scenarios," from violence at the polls to disinformation created with artificial intelligence.

One U.S. official familiar with a previously unreported meeting at the White House Situation Room in December told CNN's Sean Lyngaas that in terms of a coordinated federal response to an election-related threat, "we're all f—king tied up in knots."

Citing four unnamed sources, Lyngaas reported that leaders from the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and departments of Homeland Security and Justice gathered for a first-of-its-kind drill featuring two simulations: "What if Chinese operatives created a fake AI-generated video showing a Senate candidate destroying ballots? And how should federal agencies respond if violence erupts at polling stations on Election Day?"

14th Amendment

Disenfranchisement and Chaos’: The Supreme Court Hears Pivotal Case on Whether Trump Is Eligible to Run for President

[Pro Publica, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-06-2024]

“The 14th Amendment bans insurrectionists from serving as a ‘Senator or Representatives in Congress,’ ‘electors of President and Vice President,’ or in ‘any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State.’ There is no direct mention of the presidency. It applies to anyone who took the oath of office to defend the Constitution, including anyone who was “an officer of the United States.” One camp of legal scholars argues that it would be nonsensical and inconsistent with the intent of those who drafted the amendment to say that it excluded the presidency…. Other scholars say the omission of the presidency from the 14th Amendment is so glaring that it can be read as an intentional decision. ‘It’s very strange to name the Senate and House but not the president,’ said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, characterizing this position. ‘If you list a bunch of things and you omit one thing, you probably did it on purpose.'” And: “In an amicus brief in the Trump v. Anderson case, Hasen, Ohio State law professor Ned Foley and longtime Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg lay out a chilling scenario in which the court deferred to Congress [via Section Five] on the question of Trump’s eligibility. If Trump were to win the presidential election and Democrats were to win control of Congress, then those Democratic lawmakers could, in theory, vote to disqualify Trump in January 2025 if they believe he engaged in insurrection, as many Democrats have said they do. ‘What would it mean for a Democratic Congress to say, ‘Donald Trump can’t serve even though he won?” Hasen said. ‘To me, that’s a recipe for potential political violence.'”

Here’s how 2 sentences in the Constitution rose from obscurity to ensnare Donald Trump

[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-06-2024]

“In the summer of 2020, Gerard Magliocca, like many during the coronavirus pandemic, found himself stuck inside with time on his hands. A law professor at Indiana University, Magliocca emailed with another professor, who was writing a book about overlooked parts of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. He decided he would research the history of two long-neglected sentences in the post-Civil War addition that prohibit those who ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion’ from holding office. Magliocca posted a copy of his research — which he believed was the first law journal article ever written about Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — online in mid-December of 2020, then revised and re-posted it on Dec. 29. Eight days later, President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of his loss to Joe Biden. Magliocca watched as Republicans such as Sens. Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney described the attack as an ‘insurrection.’ That night, Magliocca composed a quick post on a legal blog: ‘Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,’ he wrote, ‘might apply to President Trump.’… Once she had dried her tears after watching rioters storm the Capitol, Norma Anderson sat down with one of the multiple copies of the Constitution she keeps around her house in the Denver suburbs and reread the 14th Amendment. ‘I made the connection,’ Anderson, now 91, said in an interview. Anderson is a former Republican leader of Colorado’s General Assembly and state Senate, and eventually would become the lead plaintiff in the case now before the Supreme Court… Anderson didn’t yet have the chance to spread the word beyond her own circle, but in the days after Jan. 6, thanks to scholars such as Magliocca and the University of Maryland law professor whose book project had inspired him, Mark Graber, Section 3 started its slow emergence from obscurity…. It took months before the first mention of Section 3 in a public document. Free Speech For People, a Massachusetts-based liberal nonprofit, sent letters to top election officials in all 50 states in June 2021, warning them not to place Trump on the ballot should he run again in 2024 because he had violated the provision.”

Who they gonna be? Robert E. Lee or George H. Thomas?

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday February 04, 2024 · 7:42 PM PST

2024/02/04 · 19:42

160811-trump-kkk-2339_26fb82d6e286551a2fc7575558128442.nbcnews-fp-1200-800.jpg

The most recent excretion of treasonous stunts is Texas governor Abbott’s attempt to resurrect states’ rights in a showdown with the national government over the border with Mexico.

What Asshat Abbot is doing, is, well, the same sort of stuff the leaders of the southern slave-holding states did in the 1850s, leading to secession and an actual hot war. Here are a few links explaining this point:

Texas’ Border Stunt Is Based on the Same Legal Theory Confederate States Used to Secede [The Daily Beast, 01-30-2024]
Governor Abbott’s Perilous Effort at Constitutional Realignment [Lawfare, 01-30-2024]
Texas Ignores the Constitution and the Rule of Law [Joyce Vance, 02-02-2024]
Election Countdown, 282 Days to Go: The “States’ Rights” Era Returns [James Fallows, Breaking the News, 01-31-2024]

I am not at all optimistic that there is any good ending to all this. I still think there are too many people who think that if we can defeat Trump in November, everything will go back to “normal.” I’m sorry, folks, but Trump is only a symptom of the rot and sedition that the conservative and libertarian movements, and the (anti)Republican Party have been cultivating and promoting for several decades now. Hatred of the national government and, even hatred of compassion or “appearing weak” has become a bedrock belief among almost a third of our fellow citizens.

When the shooting starts — and I feel it’s almost inevitable at this point — then one of the important questions becomes: what side will people in the military take? They, after all, are the ones who will do most of the shooting and killing.

Will they choose to follow the example of Robert E. Lee? Or will they follow the example of George H. Thomas?

Both Lee and Thomas had been born and raised in Virginia. Both were distinguished graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point. And both served with noticeable merit as junior officers in the War on Mexico.

But when the shooting started at Fort Sumpter, Robert E. Lee decided to fight to “defend” Virginia against the national government. Lee decided to commit treason, though he was never tried and convicted of it. That’s what he did, and everyone at the time knew it. And Lee remained wildly popular with the soldiers of the defeated Confederate armies, and generally with the people of the southern states. It’s one reason Article 3 of the 14 Amendment was written and passed.

George H. Thomas, despite being a slave owner, decided to fight for the United States and put down the Confederate rebellion led by Lee. In the army before the Civil War, Thomas stood out as one of the few officers who had led troops in all three combat arms—infantry, cavalry, and artillery.

When the Civil War began, Thomas was with the 2nd U.S. Cavalry in Utah. 19 of the 36 officers in the unit resigned to serve in the Confederate armies, including three of Thomas’s superior officers: Albert Sidney Johnston, William J. Hardee, and Robert E. Lee. His family in Virginia basically disowned him, and never spoke to Thomas again. His sisters fell into poverty during the war, and Thomas sent them money, but they refused to accept it, declaring they had no brother.

But despite the terrible pain of his family’s anger against him — and the cloud of suspicion that followed him everywhere for being a Virginian and having served with Lee, Johnston, and Hardee — Thomas was one of the most brilliant and militarily successful generals in the Union Army. He won one of the sole Union victories in the first months of the war, at Mill Springs, Kentucky.

In September 1863, when a misunderstood maneuver order opened a massive hole in the Union line during the Battle of Chickamauga, it was Thomas who rescued the Union Army, and the entire Western theater of war, with his quick organization of a defensive position, completely surrounded by the Confederate Army. His masterful leadership in this desperate situation, beating back one Confederate assault after another, earned Thomas the nickname The Rock of Chickamauga. Were it not for Thomas at Chickamauga, the entirety of Tennessee and Kentucky would have probably been occupied by the Confederates, and the war continued for two or three more years than it did.

Two months later, it was Thomas who led a decisive breakthrough on Missionary Ridge in the Battle of Chattanooga, finally dislodging the Confederates from the area and securing Union control of the crucial railroad junction as well as of Tennessee River

A year later. in December 1864, Thomas led the Union Army in another massive victory, at the Battle of Nashville. In fact, at Nashville, Thomas annihilated the army of Confederate General John Bell Hood — the one and only time in the Civil War that an entire Confederate army was destroyed on the field of battle.

So as our country once again grapples with the treasonous “states rights,” anti-federal government ideas and philosophies of the conservative and libertarian movements, I have to wonder. Who will they follow? When the time comes, who will they decide to be: Robert E. Lee or George H. Thomas?

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 28, 2024

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday January 29, 2024 · 8:50 PM PST

2024/01/29 · 20:50

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 28, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Global power shift

Maersk ships in US Navy convoy forced to retreat under Houthi missile attack

[Trade Winds, via Naked Capitalism 01-26-2024]

As Armchair Warlord noted on X(Twitter): “Lost amid all the other news breaking in the last 24 hours is one particularly disturbing story: the United States Navy lost a battle at sea yesterday.”

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-25-2024]

Suez Canal container ship volume pic.twitter.com/kIZ7imkMPj
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) January 24, 2024

The Reason China Can’t Stop Its Decline

Among specialists who follow China most closely, the two main causes cited for this new conventional wisdom have been known for years. The first is that China’s growth model has been overreliant on policies such as financial repression and extraordinary levels of investment. Here, repression has nothing to do with the usual political usage of the word. It means, rather, that the state controls domestic interest, exchange rates, and capital outflows in such a way that citizens receive little accrual or benefit from their high rates of savings. Instead, these are captured by the state and channeled into industries that are favored or prioritized by bureaucrats, including many that are state-owned.

Some of the problems that might arise from financial repression can seem apparent even to lay people. Bureaucrats tend to know little about business and are unlikely to be in the best position to make the smartest and nimblest economic bets about the industrial future. Some features of this setup may be less than obvious, though. When the state captures and invests the nation’s savings according to its own whims, capital becomes scarcer and more expensive for private investors. This also suppresses the domestic consumption that most mature economies depend on for growth. Finally, as the state channels more and more investment into industries of its choosing, average return on investment falls. China is now at the point where it must invest huge amounts of capital to produce each new dollar of economic growth, and everything points to this continuing to worsen….

[TW: I included this because of its use of the term “financial repression” in an example of clumsy and terribly inaccurate Western analysis of China. In fact, financial predators are the very reason the USA industrial base was “hollowed out” inevitably resulting in the inability to produce enough ammunition. or to build safe and cost-effective aircraft.]

Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy

[Politico, via The Big Picture 01-21-2024]

Ambassadors to Washington warn that the GOP-Democratic divide is endangering America’s national security.

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

It May be Genocide, But it Won’t Be Stopped

Chris Hedges, January 26, 2024 [Scheerpost]

...Translated into the vernacular, the court is saying Israel must feed and provide medical care for the victims, cease public statements advocating genocide, preserve evidence of genocide and stop killing Palestinian civilians. Come back and report in a month.

It is hard to see how these provisional measures can be achieved if the carnage in Gaza continues.

“Without a ceasefire, the order doesn’t actually work,” Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations, stated bluntly after the ruling.

Time is not on the side of the Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians will die within a month. Palestinians in Gaza make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the United Nations. The entire population of Gaza by early February is projected to lack sufficient food, with half a million people suffering from starvation, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, drawing on data from U.N. agencies and NGOs. The famine is engineered by Israel.

At best, the court — while it will not rule for a few years on whether Israel is committing genocide — has given legal license to use the word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza. This is very significant, but it is not enough, given the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza….

Why There Will Never Be a Two-State Solution

Yves Smith, January 23, 2024 [Naked Capitalism]

...Israel has created facts on the ground that make it impossible, namely settler balkanization of the West Bank. And now a devastated Gaza, even assuming Palestinians survive in meaningful numbers, will require state support to rebuild. That state will be Israel, perhaps with some financial support from the US and EU. It is not hard to foresee that any of what is left of Gaza that is allotted to the Palestinians will be kept at the barely habitable level, so as to encourage them to expatriate….

War on Gaza: Israel’s antiquities director displays stolen artefacts in parliament

[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 01-24-2024]

Genocide Is Very Serious-- And Democratic Voters Understand That, Even If Conservatives Don't Care

Howie Klein, January 27, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

...Democrats and left-leaning independents have had it with Israeli’s bad behavior and don’t want U.S. complicity in genocide, ethnic cleansing or apartheid. Between Likud and AIPAC, progressives are much less sympathetic to Israel than in the past and much more likely to see the Palestinians as human beings.

And it isn’t only the party base that’s evolving. A few days ago, Reuters reported that “Forty-nine of the 51 members of the Senate Democratic caucus backed an amendment supporting a negotiated solution to the conflict that results in Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side, ensuring Israel's survival as a secure, democratic, Jewish state and fulfilling the Palestinians' ‘legitimate aspirations’ for a state of their own.” This is not the Likud/AIPAC position.

...AIPAC is targeting some of these members for defeat this year, laundering as much as $100 million, they claim, from wealthy Republicans who want to defeat progressives in blue districts where Republicans have no chance. Let's not let that happen, the way it happened to Andy Levin, Marie Newman, Donna Edwards, Nina Turner and a dozen other progressives last cycle. Please consider contributing to people on AIPAC’s target list here. AIPAC is the enemy of the United States.

It can happen here — and is

Author and scholar John Ganz on how Europe’s interwar period informs the present

Rick Perlstein, January 24, 2024 [The American Prospect]

When Timothy Snyder’s slim volume On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century was rocketing up the best-seller charts in 2017, I noticed an interesting fact: The most illuminating analysts of America’s frightening recent political turn were turning out to be scholars specializing in Europe. When Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, or Richard Steigmann-Gall noticed phenomena in America’s past or present that resembled something in the right-wing movements they studied in Germany, Italy, or elsewhere, they just said so—blithely indifferent to what every graduate student in American history learns, and what New York Times reporters shout from the rooftops, that America is supposed to be “exceptional.”

...“We have this image in our heads—and this is really hard to get out of people’s heads—of the fascist rise to power that comes from fascist propaganda,” Ganz explains. The stereotype is thugs marching into the seat of government with truncheons, then marching out having seized state power. “It is much more political than that. It has much more to do with negotiations between established political factions and elites….

Ganz explained how Hitler and Mussolini used their more violent elements to destabilize and intimidate, while they took power through the more normal political channels of forming coalitions in parliament and ascending into leadership roles.

“The constitutional system in Italy always remained intact,” even when Mussolini became dictator, Ganz notes. “There was still the king, there was still a constitutional monarchy; he was prime minister. The fascist state kind of superimposed itself on that.” There was, for a time, even a robust parliamentary opposition: “Antonio Gramsci, head of the Italian Communist Party, famously was elected to parliament after Mussolini rose to power.”

At least as important to the story are the “responsible conservatives” who made their peace with the strongman, believing he could be controlled….

The conceit is similar to what Bill Clinton felt about allowing China into the World Trade Organization: If you bring a radical outlier within the political system, they will act rationally and moderate their worst impulses. Mainstream conservatives in Italy and Germany repeatedly claimed Mussolini and Hitler would turn out to be responsible actors, once they occupied positions of responsibility. American elites followed suit with the absurd refrain, on occasions when Trump managed to act normal for 15 seconds….

One surprise I took away from my conversation with Ganz is that, in a certain respect, Trump is plus fasciste que les fascistes: that is, more incautiously thugocratic than his European antecedents, at least in the beginning of their rises.

“The heads of these movements had to be very careful about how they would use the fascist paramilitaries, and make this implicit promise to the elite that they could be contained,” Ganz says. “It was always something they needed in their back pocket, right? But sometimes it felt like those people were giving [Hitler and Mussolini] more problems than they were worth.”

But Trump always thought differently. After Charlottesville, he called the thugs “fine people.” Asked about the Proud Boys in a 2020 presidential debate, he said: “Stand back and stand by.” I’d always worried that utterances like these were harbingers of things to come. I suspected that Trump never criticized supporters willing to commit violence on his behalf because that willingness might eventually become useful to him. I saw him as playing politics with something far more than votes: that thugs were valuable currency to keep in his back pocket, to send forth whenever that was what it took to keep power.

Then, on January 6th, he did.

Oligarchy

Is the Heart and Soul of Trump’s MAGA Base Really the White Working Class?

Les Leopold, January 16, 2024 [Wall Street's War on Workers Newsletter; Common Dreams]

The corporate media and all too many politicians are blaming working people for the rise of Trump and MAGA. Yet, if we open our (lying) eyes a bit more, we can’t miss the massive horde of lawyers and businesspeople who serve as Trump’s enthusiastic enablers….

Political scientists Noam Lupu (Vanderbilt) and Nicholas Carnes (Duke) definitively disproved the notion that most of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 were white working class. They showed that only 30 percent of the Trump voters could be considered a part of that group….

The 2018 Primaries Project, at the Brookings Institute, reported that those voting in congressional Republican primaries in 2018 were better educated and richer than the public at large. Again, the white working class formed no more than one-third of the Republican primary base.

What about the January 6th insurrection? Wasn’t that a white working-class riot? Not according to the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which analyzed the demographics of the 716 individuals who had been charged with various January 6th crimes, as of January 1, 2022. Fifty percent were either business owners or white-collar workers, and only 25 percent were blue-collar workers (defined as no college degree).

The research for my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, provides new data that confirms the white working class does not in any way pour into Hillary Clinton’s “basket full of deplorables.” In fact, most white working-class voters have become decidedly more liberal on divisive social issues over the last several decades, including LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, and racial discrimination….

Why Blame the White Working Class?

The attacks on working-class populism have been around for more than 140 years. Corporate owners and their newspapers viciously denounced the populist movement of the late 19th century, which aggressively challenged financial and corporate power. To counter that increasingly successful movement, newspapers, as well as pro-corporate politicians, depicted the populists as ignorant bomb-throwing radicals and worse….

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-21-2024]

There's something extremely important here that is not being recognized, but those who can read between the lines are realizing it and it's scaring the shit out of people:

Elements of the Davos class **are preparing to defect to the Trump/populist movement.**

A thread🧵: https://t.co/OOJdeY91Ua
— Smug Doomposting Publishing House (@Smug_editing) January 20, 2024

Greedflation’ caused more than half of last year’s inflation surge, study finds, as corporate profits remain at all-time highs

[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 01-21-2024]

TRACING THE OPPOSITION TO TAXES IN AMERICA

Daniel Levitas, November 29, 2001 [Intelligence Report i(SPLC)

...Long before the so-called "common-law courts" of the 1990s handed down their edicts threatening government officials, Porth drafted homespun "arrest warrants" to be used against bureaucrats who allegedly violated the Constitution. But it was his 1967 conviction and subsequent prison sentence that made Porth's battle with the IRS a cause célèbre on the radical right.

Among those who campaigned for Porth's freedom was William Potter Gale, who would become the founder of the Posse Comitatus in 1971. Gale used the newsletter of his California-based Ministry of Christ Church — a church espousing the racist and anti-Semitic theology of Christian Identity — to promote Porth and the early tax rebellion movement….

Attacks on the income tax were often couched in vague antigovernment, pro-Constitution rhetoric, but anti-Semitism always played a large role in the conspiracy theories and arguments that reinforced the anti-tax message.

And sometimes that message was explicitly racist: "The Negroes in the United States are increasing at a rate at least twice as great as the rest of the population," warned the American Mercury in 1967, asserting that the tax burden posed by blacks "unquestionably doomed ... the American way of life."

….Fifteen years after Kahl murdered the three lawmen, a bipartisan and overwhelming majority in Congress lent credibility to the claims of right-wing activists regarding IRS abuses. Repeating some of the same themes heard in Sen. Arlen Specter's 1995 probe into the events in Ruby Ridge and Waco, Republican-sponsored hearings in the House and Senate in 1997 and 1998 focused attention on supposed commando-style raids by armed tax inspectors wearing flak jackets.

No testimony was heard about the sharp decline in audit rates for wealthy Americans and large corporations as a result of deep cuts made to IRS spending by the same Congress in 1995, however.

Instead, lawmakers chose to emphasize the image of a menacing federal agency out of control — an image long cultivated by the patriarchs of tax protest and other ideologues of the radical right.

"The I.R.S. is too big and too mean," said then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas in November 1997. Swept up in heady antigovernment rhetoric, the House voted 426 to 4 to overhaul IRS collection practices and the Senate followed, 97 to 0….

Naming Names: Professor Exposes the Banking Cartel that Has Hijacked U.S. Democracy

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, January 23, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A book he has spent the past decade researching and writing comes out today from the University of California Press: Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us….

Other key members of the Bankers’ Club according to Epstein are the politicians (particularly on key committees in Congress) who have sold out to the Bankers’ Club in exchange for funding of their political campaigns; bank regulators who have one foot on government soil and the other foot heading toward the revolving door and a much bigger paycheck; Wall Street’s outside lawyers from Big Law who sneak language favoring the Bankers’ Club into legislation; a swarm of dozens of lobbying groups working on behalf of Wall Street banks in the corridors and offices of Congress; and even members of his own profession – economists – who promote unsound ideas purporting to show that Wall Street mega banks serve the interests of the public and that more regulation is inefficient and negatively impacts economic growth.

In each of the categories above, Epstein names names. A member of Big Law, the Senior Chair of Sullivan & Cromwell, H. Rodgin (Rodge) Cohen, makes the following appearance in Busting the Bankers’ Club:

“…The dean of Wall Street lawyers, H. Rodgin Cohen, chair of the Wall Street firm Sullivan & Cromwell, had his hand in virtually all the key legal and enforcement actions promoting financial deregulation during this period. The work of these lawyers dovetailed with the lawyers and economists who developed the field of ‘law and economics,’ which, in a powerful alliance with the economists I mentioned earlier, provided a theoretical legal-economic basis for deregulation and a less interventionist state….”

Uncommon wealth

[Times Literary Supplement, via Naked Capitalism 01-26-2024]

What Jesus did not say was “The rich ye will have always with you”. It was not simply that the rich had no more chance of getting to heaven than a camel had of getting through the eye of a needle; their presence on earth was an irksome embarrassment too. At most times in history plutocrats throwing their weight about have been perceived as a threat to the social order and an affront to our sense of fairness. Aristotle, in his Politics, records with approval how democratic societies ostracized those oligarchs who “seemed to predominate too much through their wealth”, for “the encroachments of the rich are more destructive to the state than those of the people”. Plato, in the Laws, says that the lawgiver shall allow a man to possess up to four times as much as the allotment to the poor (what we might call “the poverty line”), but that any surplus he acquires above that is to be forcibly handed over to the state – in effect the first super-tax.

The Rise of the American Oligarchy

Tim Murphy, January-February issue [Mother Jones]

When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces here.

Chasm of inequality: the future as seen from Davos

[Counterfire, via Naked Capitalism 01-22-2024]

MAGA Cultists Are Delighted To Turn Out For Their Cult Leader-- Others... Not So Much

Howie Klein, January 25, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

Yesterday, I noticed that the Financial Times had dug up the same photo that we had of robber baron/bankster, putative Democrat Jamie Dimon with Trump that I had. Ed Luce’s story, though, wasn’t about robber barons per se. It’s about Wall Street selling out America, once again, this time in a deal with Señor T. “The Financial Times,” wrote Luce, “had only nice things to say about Benito Mussolini in a June 1933 supplement entitled ‘The Renaissance of Italy: Fascism’s gift of order and progress’. Trains were running on time, investment was humming and friction between capital and labor was a thing of the past. Wrote the FT’s special correspondent: ‘The country has been remodeled, rather than remade, under the vigorous architecture of its illustrious prime minister, Signor Mussolini.’”

No one on Wall Street cared about the “pacification of Libya,” during which almost half of the non-Italian population was killed….

“The 1930s,” continued Luce, “ought to have buried the idea that business is a bulwark against autocracy. Today’s America offers a reminder. After Donald Trump’s attempted putsch on January 6 2021, U.S. business leaders lined up to condemn the storming of Capitol Hill. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, issued a statement calling for a peaceful transition of power. ‘This is not who we are as a people or a country,’ he said. In Davos last week, Dimon had changed his tune. Trump did many good things when he was in office, Dimon said. Business was ready for either Joe Biden or Trump: ‘My company will survive and thrive in both.’”

Yesterday, a team of NY Times reporters drilled down [an inch] into why some business executives are excited about Trump. “Many forecast a drastic pullback in regulation,” they wrote, “particularly in antitrust, and a swing in support from clean energy businesses back to fossil-fuel producers….

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

How Britain Invented Modern Torture

Kit Klarenberg [via Naked Capitalism 01-22-2024]

WORLD BANK GROUP INSTITUTION AGREES TO SETTLE CASE ALLEGING IT ABETTED MURDER

[CADTM, via Naked Capitalism 01-24-2024]

Reports Expose Deep Harms of Corporate Tax Cuts and ‘Trickle Down’ Ideology

[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 01-24-2024]

Two new reports published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute argue that robust corporate taxation is key to creating a strong economy and improving the well-being of families and children—objectives that have been undermined in the decades since the Reagan era by regressive tax cuts enacted on the false premise that benefits would "trickle down" to the rest of society.

The first report, A Mapping of the Full Potential of U.S. Corporate Taxation to Enhance Child and Family Well-Being, examines what the authors describe as the understudied notion that "increasing corporate taxation will necessarily help children and families by providing additional revenue for essential public services."….

The decades-long decline in corporate tax rates has severely undermined the federal government's ability to finance critical public goods, from education to childcare.

"Since regressive corporate tax cuts don't significantly increase earnings for working families (through either wage or employment increases), but they do reduce the government's ability to fund family income and care supports, childcare costs—which are already rising—can become a relatively more expensive line item in working parents' household budgets," reads the Roosevelt Institute's first report, authored by Emily DiVito and Niko Lusiani.

Massachusetts Wakes Up to a Hospital Nightmare

Maureen Tkacik, January 26, 2024 [American Prospect]

...For ten years, the hospital chain, which originated as an agglomeration of nun-operated Boston-area neighborhood hospitals known as Caritas Christi, was owned by the private equity firm Cerberus, which extracted more than $800 million in excess of its investment out of the hospitals, then left during the pandemic. Company founder de la Torre was left to “finish the job,” which took more than three years because de la Torre, despite his penchant for mega-yachts and private jets, kept getting new bailouts from an Alabama real estate investment trust called Medical Properties Trust. Last year, MPT finally started to run out of cash—in part because most of its other tenants were not a whole lot more solvent than Steward—and the Justice Department sued Steward for violating the Stark Law against physician kickbacks, the flouting of which appears in hindsight to have been the entire underlying premise of Steward’s business model, back when he pretended to have one. As it stands, the company hasn’t had so much as a chief financial officer in more than a year, though its president identified himself as the company’s CFO in a court filing in October.

Indeed, the mystery here is not “how Steward got in this situation” but what in God’s name took the state of Elizabeth Warren and Maura Healey so long to notice the brazenness at work in their proverbial backyard.

Did Stock Buybacks Knock the Bolts Out of Boeing?

Les Leopold [via Naked Capitalism 01-24-2024]

Finding the money for stock repurchases inevitably leads to cost-cutting. Most often, the first move is to lay off as many workers as possible. But other more subtle strategies include cutbacks in preventive maintenance and environmental controls, the outsourcing of work to lower-wage firms, skimping on health and safety protections, and underfunding quality-control. The goal is to become lean and mean, skating out to the very edge of cost reductions without jeopardizing the product. Or, well, at least not harming it too much.

You’d think that Boeing would not compromise on safety, given that one small production error or software glitch could down a plane worth hundreds of millions of dollars while killing hundreds of people in one blow. But you’d be wrong.

Boeing is a world leader in stock buybacks. Between 1998 and 2018, the plane manufacturer also manufactured a whopping $61.0 billion in stock buybacks, amounting to 81.8 percent of its profits. Add in dividends and Boeing’s shareholders received 121 percent of its profits. (Data compiled by William Lazonick and The Academic-Industry Research Network, from Boeing 10-K SEC filings.)

How much is that really? Well, according to Lazonick and Mustafa Erdem Sakniç, writing in The American Prospect in 2019, Boeing facing the obsolescence of its 737 planes, could have created an entirely new airplane from scratch with fully modern technology. Instead the company decided to re-engineer the older model, name it the 737 MAX, and save $7 billion dollars. Perhaps not coincidentally, the $7 billion dollars “saved” is the amount of the stock buybacks Boeing made each year between 2013 and 2019.

When It Comes To Billionaires, What Does "Pay Their Fair Share" Mean To A Democratic Candidate?

Howie Klein, January 24, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

I’m interviewing a lot of candidates this week, more than usual in just one week. They all agree that the super-rich should be “paying their fair share.” I don’t even have to bring it up most of the time. But when they do, I ask them how much “fair share” translates to. Everyone has tried to avoid answering and no matter how much I press no one has a response. In fact, sometimes I feel some negativity directed towards me for asking.

When they try to worm out of it by pretending I’m talking about a person from the upper-middle class, I’ll clarify by saying I’m talking about people who are billionaires or people with $100 million. Still no responses. I didn’t realize it was such an uncomfortable question. I’m getting the impression that none of them understand that the American glory days— from the late ‘40s into the mid-’60’s-- saw marginal income tax rates over 90% for people with incomes of $400,000 and above (the equivalent of today's millionaires)….

I just got off the phone with one candidate and I should have brought up the new Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act that Bernie introduced, along with Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey and Chris Van Hollen in the Senate and Barbara Lee and Rashida Tlaib in the House. I didn’t because I knew from what she had already said that she would never support anything like it. The legislation is meant to take on corporate greed by raising taxes on companies that pay their top executives at least 50 times more than the pay of a typical worker. Bernie: “The American people understand that today we are moving toward an oligarchic form of society where the very rich are doing phenomenally well, while working families continue to struggle to put a roof over their heads, feed their families, and pay for the basic necessities of life. The American people are sick and tired of CEOs making nearly 350 times more than their average employees while over 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the American people are demanding that large, profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes and treat their employees with the dignity and respect they deserve. That is what this legislation will begin to do.”

...

“The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would impose tax rate increases on companies with CEO to median worker ratios above 50 to 1. If the CEO did not receive the largest paycheck in the firm, the ratio will be based on the highest-paid employee. The tax penalties would begin at 0.5 percentage points for companies that pay their top executives between 50 and 100 times more than their typical workers. The highest penalty would kick in for companies that pay top executives over 500 times worker pay. These rates, if current corporate pay patterns continue, would raise around $150 billion over 10 years. If the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act had been in effect in 2022:

Walmart would have paid up to $754 million more in taxes.

Google would have paid up to $3.07 billion more in taxes.

Home Depot would have paid up to $840 million more in taxes.

JPMorgan Chase would have paid up to $1.04 billion more in taxes.

Nike would have paid up to $233 million more in taxes.

McDonald’s would have paid up to $92 million more in taxes.

The opposition to fair taxes, however you want to define "fair":

If companies increased annual median worker pay to just $60,000 and reduced their CEO compensation to $3 million, they would not owe any additional taxes under this plan.”

Original co-sponsors in the House include Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Chuy García (D-IL), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Cori Bush (D-MO), Jared Huffman (D-CA), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

Climate and environmental crises

China dominates renewable energy and coal power forecasts

Clyde Russell, January 11, 2024 [Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 01-22-2024]

China's status as the colossus of renewable energy is set to be cemented in the next five years, with the world's second-biggest economy adding more capacity than the rest of globe combined.

The International Energy Agency said in its Renewables 2023 report, released on Thursday, that China will account for 56% of renewable energy capacity additions in the 2023-28 period.

China is expected to increase renewable capacity by 2,060 gigawatts (GW) in the forecast period, while the rest of the world will add 1,574 GW, the IEA data showed.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine

[Vice, via Naked Capitalism 01-21-2024]

iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send You Notifications, Researchers Find

[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 01-26-2024]

In India, an algorithm declares them dead; they have to prove they’re alive

[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 01-25-2024]

HP CEO evokes James Bond-style hack via ink cartridges

[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-24-2024]

“Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription.”

Democrats' political malpractice

It’s Not Just Biden

Joe Klein [Sanity Clause, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-23-2024]

“the Republican base is about ideology and the Democratic base is about identity. The Republicans are coherent, even if the ideology is a repulsive right-wing populism. The Democrats are an amalgam of identity groups, with varying agendas and beliefs. You can aim a message at black activists—on say, reparations, as the ever-foolish Jamaal Bowman did this week—and a fair number of Latinos will be turned off. You can try to stroke Latino activists on immigration, and a fair number of blacks—to say nothing of middle-class Latinos (and the rest of us, for that matter)—will wonder why on earth you can’t act to shut down the southern border…. The Democrats’ ethnicity problems have multiplied in recent years as the identity groups have become more complicated. There is a black middle and professional class now; it holds different views from academic blackdom and from the black underclass. It was middle- and working-class blacks, angry about crime, who elected Eric Adams over the lawyerly MSNBC darling Maya Wiley for mayor of New York…. This has been a disaster for Democrats. They made a terrible mistake emphasizing identity over community fifty years ago. It was one of the great flubs in American political history. And now the coalition is fraying, for the very best of reasons. The “protected” groups are assimilating into the American mainstream (often to the dismay of the activists like Ibram X. Kendi, who would be forced to look for honest work absent his imagined apocalypse of grievance). There are multiple black and Latino agendas now; the most important have nothing to do with identity—but with education, crime and inflation.”

The Inside Story Of Barack Obama’s 2024 Campaign Calculations

Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen, January 22, 2024 [Talking Points Memo]

As we report in our new book, The Truce, which will be published on Tuesday, Obama left office stung by Hillary Clinton’s defeat and obsessed with how Democrats could rebuild the unity her long battle with Bernie Sanders had cost the party. He has been especially focused on youth engagement in the years since. Shortly after Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, Obama met with the Democrats’ incoming House freshmen at a donor’s mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C. to share his thoughts on the party’s direction and the ideal strategy for taking on Trump. While the meeting was previously reported, much of what Obama said behind closed doors was not known.

We obtained Obama’s remarks, and we learned that the former president offered a diagnosis of young voters’ role within the Democratic Party, and the party’s uneven success at keeping them engaged. “When we lose them, it’s because they don’t feel seen and they don’t feel heard,” Obama said of young voters and activists.

(anti)Republican Party

“‘Our System Needs to Be Broken, and He Is the Man to Do It'”

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-22-2024]

“‘They’re afraid as hell, because this time around he’s going to take the DOJ, he’s going to take the bureaucracy of the FBI, the CIA, all the stupid intel agencies that don’t do shit, and he’s going to upset the apple cart,’ he said. I referred to the argument Trump is now making over and over that he’s going to go after them because he says they’re going after him but really they’re going after you — his supporters. ‘That’s exactly the way I feel,’ Johnson said. ‘Did you feel like that before he said that,’ I said, ‘or did he say that and you said yes?’ ‘He said that, and I said yes,’ he said. ‘And trust me, the guy’s a pig, he’s a womanizer — arrogant a—–e,’ Johnson said of Trump. ‘But I need somebody that’s going to go in and lead, and I need somebody that’s going to take care of the average guy.’ ‘But is taking care of the average guy and breaking the system the same thing?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Because they’re all in it for themselves.’ ‘And if you break the system, what does that look like?’ ‘Accountability,’ he said.”

Saving MAGA Mike? Think Of What He Stands For-- Christian Nationalism, Homophobia, Anti-Choice…

Howie Klein, January 26, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

...Trump has reasserted control over Congress and he wants to call all the shots himself. Last night, Annie Karni reported how Trump torpedoed the border-Ukraine aid deal. She noted that Trump “is wielding a heavier hand than any time since leaving office over his party’s agenda in Congress. His vocal opposition to the emerging border compromise has all but killed the measure’s chances in a divided Congress as he puts his own hard-line immigration policies once again at the center of his presidential campaign… His ‘America First’ approach [that’s typical NY Times misnomer— it’s a Trump First approach, not an America First approach] to foreign policy already helped to sap GOP support for sending aid to Ukraine for its war against Russian aggression, placing the fate of that money in doubt. That led Republicans to demand a border crackdown in exchange for any further funding for Kyiv, a compromise that Trump has now repudiated. He frequently consults with the inexperienced Speaker Mike Johnson, weighing in on policy and politics. And his uncompromising approach has emboldened copycat politicians in Congress, like Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, who are helping to drive an ongoing impasse over government spending. For a Congress that has struggled for more than a year to do the bare minimum of legislating, Trump’s dominance among Republicans is yet another drag on the institution’s ability to function in an election year when his name is likely to be on the ballot.”

Republicans Turn on Their Impeachment Chairman: ‘Parade of Embarrassments’

Stephen Neukam [themessenger.com, via downwithtyranny 1-25-2024]

“House Republicans are increasingly disenchanted with Comer, saying his leadership of the Biden impeachment inquiry has become a ‘clueless investigation’ at best and— at worst— ‘a disaster.’ Less than 10 months away from the 2024 election, his impeachment investigation is barreling toward its conclusion, with no smoking gun to bring the president to his knees. Only one thing is clear: Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has lost the trust of some in his own party. ‘One would be hard pressed to find the best moment for James Comer in the Oversight Committee,’ one House Republican lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain internal relationships, told The Messenger. ‘It’s been a parade of embarrassments.’”

(anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

25 Republican governors back Texas in escalating border standoff with US government

[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 01-26-2024]

The Meaning of Invasion Under the Compact Clause of the U.S. Constitution (PDF)

[Texas Public Policy Foundation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-26-2024]

“It should first of all be highlighted that, as only entry plus enmity constitutes invasion, the unlawful entry of people into the United States cannot be construed as an invasion. Nor, for the same reason, can the prospect of further illegal entry in the imminent future be so construed…. The phrase ‘actually invaded’ in the Compact Clause refers to the presence of flesh-and-blood enemies on the soil of the invaded state. The phrase ‘imminent danger’ in the same clause refers to the possibility of such enemies coming to be present soon.” • The Texas Public Policy Foundation, if you look at the About page, isn’t exactly composed of bleeding heart liberals.

[TW: The State of the Union address is coming up. Biden needs to condemn Abbott as a treasonous nullifier.]

Eagle Pass is today’s Fort Sumter. Biden must federalize the Texas National Guard.

Will Bunch [Philadelphia Inquirer, via Naked Capitalism 01-26-2024]

Revealed: far-right figures try to create Christian nationalist ‘haven’ in Kentucky

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-22-2024]

“The move is the latest effort by the far-right to establish geographical enclaves, following in the footsteps of movements like the so-called ‘American Redoubt‘, which encourages rightwingers to engage in “political migration” to areas in the interior of the Pacific north-west. But the underlying finances of land offerings associated with the ‘Highland Rim Project’ (HRP) in Kentucky suggest that buyers will pay a steep premium for living in a remote ideological enclave, while the scheme’s promoters are set to collect tidy profits after making few apparent improvements to the land…. [Joshua] Abbotoy offered few details on how the community would be run beyond saying: ‘Most of the leadership is going to be led by Protestant christians.'”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 21, 2024

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday January 22, 2024 · 8:11 AM PST

2024/01/22 · 08:11

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 21, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Global power shift

China Is the World’s Sole Manufacturing Superpower

Richard Baldwin [VoxEU, via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2024]

...The US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined. China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. This column uses the recently released 2023 update of the OECD TiVA database to paint an eight-chart portrait of China’s journey to superpower status and the asymmetric impact that its dominance has had on global supply chains….

When it comes to gross production, China’s share is three times the US’ share, six times Japan’s, and nine times Germany’s. Taiwan, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil now have higher gross output than the UK. Canada is further down the ranking, in 15th place….

China’s dominance is less stark in exports (Figure 3), though the rise is equally amazing. In 1995 China had just 3% of world manufacturing exports, By 2020, its share had risen to 20%. The corresponding fall in the G7 share was less dramatic than for its share of production….

Figure 4, left panel, shows that the US relies far more on Chinese manufacturing production than vice versa.²While shocking at first sight, this should not be unexpected. It is natural that a country with 11% of the world output buys more from a country that produces 35% than vice versa, but the numbers are astounding. China was more exposed to US inputs before 2002, but the US has had greater exposure since then. In 2020, the US was about three times more exposed to Chinese manufacturing production than vice versa….

Robust growth in 2023: China maintains top position in global shipbuilding sector for 14 years

[news.cgtn.com, via Naked Capitalism comments 01-17-2024]

In the past 12 months, China's shipbuilding output reached 42.32 million deadweight tonnes (dwt), a year-on-year increase of 11.8 percent, accounting for 50.2 percent of the world's total.

The new orders rose 56.4 percent year on year to 71.2 million dwt during the period, taking up 66.6 percent of the world's total.

By the end of December, the volume of orders on hand was 139.39 million dwt, up 32 percent year on year, accounting for 55 percent of the world's total.

In 2023, five Chinese shipbuilding enterprises ranked in the global top 10 in output, seven in top 10 for new order volume, and six for holding orders, said the MIIT.

The US, Israel Have Lost Battlefield Control – Houthis Have Attacked US Destroyer, Hit Greek-US Owned Bulker; Iran Has Hit US Base in Kurdish Capital, Erbil

John Helmer [via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2024]

Oligarchy

Republicans are just servants, the root of our danger in America is the oligarchs

Peter Olandt, January 18, 2024 [Daily Kos]

Trump may have tapped into a large well-spring of racist, ignorant, rage but he neither created it nor is he essential to it. Getting rid of Trump does not rid ourselves of the people who are ultimately behind the January 6th, 2021 insurrection... Both Trump and corporate media are tools of American oligarchs. The Murdochs, Kochs, and Crows of the world are the real power, menace, and conspirators out to destroy America.

From the comments: GRAPH older but still relevant view of the Koch brothers’ extensive influence operations, by Hello1814

[TW: I flag this because I believe it — being DailyKos — reflects the awakening in public consciousness of the problem of oligarchy, and the ever lasting fight of oligarchy versus republicanism.]

Predators and Prey: Subverting Liberal and Populist Institutions: How the rich destroy populist movements from the inside

Thomas Neuburger, January 17, 2024

[This is a very important article that lays bare the fact that the political divisions in USA are largely artificial constructions aimed at preserving the institutional and social power of the reactionary rich. The issue of abortion, for example, was seized upon by Paul Weyrich — a full six years after the Roe v. Wade decision — as an effective means of driving religious conservatives to the polls to vote for (anti)Republicans. Another example of reactionary wealth creating then promoting a radicalized right wing agenda is the Second Amendment “gun rights” issue. In May 1977, after the leadership of the National Rifle Association had decided to retreat from politics by NRA headquarters from Washington DC to Colorado, radicals from the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms seized control of the NRA at its annual meeting. This is now known as the “Revolt at Cincinnati.” These groups were funded by Adolph Coors Foundation, the Koch brothers, and Richard Mellon Scaife and included on its board Richard DeVos, Peter Grace, and Jesse Helms. The crucial fact of USA politics over the past half century is that the “overton window” has been deliberately shifted by a conservative movement that is not at all organically spontaneous or democratically based.]

...George W. Bush and Karl Rove engineered an institutional takeover of faith communities. Note the roles of Ralph Reed, head of the unironically named Christian Coalition, and Richard Land in the passage below….

Richard Land was president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1988 to 2013. Land, through the ERLC, controlled the political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was simultaneously part of the Rove machine.

Subverting Liberal Churches

One more example, so you can see the process. If you’re old enough to have seen the 1960s battles for civil rights and all those other freedoms (sexual, feminist, and so on), you remember the great religious leaders that movement produced and attracted.

Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was a Baptist minister (a reason for the subversion described above) and the first President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

The brothers Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, and Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest, were strong pro-Movement activists and often jailed.

As Frederick Clarkson writes of the Movement’s Protestant contingents:

For much of the 20th century, the mainline Protestant churches maintained a vigorous “social witness.” That is what these Protestants call their views on such matters as peace, civil rights and environmental justice. While there was certainly conservative opposition to the development of these views, and to the activities that grew out of them, the direction of mainline Protestantism was clear. The churches became powerful proponents of social change in the United States. They stood at the moral and political center of society with historic roots in the earliest days of the nation. Indeed, they epitomize the very idea and image of “church” for many Americans….

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that powerful external interests would organize and finance the conservative rump factions into strategic formations intended to divide and conquer—and diminish the capacity of churches to carry forward their idea of a just society in the United States—and the world.

When the strategic funders of the Right, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, got together to create the institutional infrastructure of the Right in the 1970s and 80s, they underwrote the founding of the IRD [Institute on Religion and Democracy] in 1980 ….

The goal of the IRD is clear: to infiltrate, to neutralize, to control. The process, if you’re interested, is called “Steeplejacking.” For a book on this subject, the publisher says this (emphasis added):

An insider account by two ministers on the front lines of mainstream religion’s longtime shadow war against the religious right, Steeplejacking reveals how conservative renewal groups, backed by a right-wing organization called the Institute on Religion and Democracy [IRD], use social wedge issues like homosexuality to infiltrate mainline churches and stir up dissent among members of the congregation, with the goal of taking over the leadership of the church, and ultimately, the denomination. The book unmasks the covert methods that renewal groups and the IRD use to spread their propaganda[.]

The Right-Wing Media Takeover Is Destroying America

Michael Tomasky. January 19, 2024 [The New Republic]

The purchase of The Baltimore Sun is further proof that conservative billionaires understand the power of media control. Why don’t their liberal counterparts get it? ….

Smith wasted no time in showing his cards during his first meeting with the staff Wednesday. He was asked about a comment he made to New York magazine back in 2018, when he said, “Print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble.” (“Dribble”? Let’s hope he won’t be on the copy desk.) Did he feel that way about the Sun specifically? “In many ways, yes,” Smith said, adding that he wants the paper to emulate the local Fox affiliate, which is owned … by Sinclair….

I’ve been in the trenches of this fight for many years. Back in the George W. Bush era, the late Rob Stein, a Democratic insider and good friend of mine, mapped for the first time the conservative infrastructure in a PowerPoint presentation that became such a hot ticket in Washington liberal circles that The New York Times Magazine did a story about it. He showed, from looking over conservative groups’ 990s (because they were mostly all nonprofits), how much was spent on policy development, how much on field operations, how much on youth training, and how much on media. I don’t remember the numbers, but the media figure was high....

How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?

Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all.

The Fourteenth Amendment Scolds Abetting Trump’s Return

Jason Linkins, January 13, 2024 [The New Republic]

The pundit class has finally found a section of the Constitution they can’t abide. By coincidence, it’s the part that’s designed to protect the nation from an insurrectionist….

...We are, however, not completely unarmed against Trump’s thuggery: Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment lays out a fail-safe, disqualifying anyone who played a part in inciting an insurrection from holding office again. Unfortunately, while it is rare for the Supreme Court to disarm anyone, it will, in all likelihood, deny the American people this protection. But the Roberts court has been vastly aided and abetted by our political media, who after waiting so long for Trump to discover virtue, have quickly declared the Article 3 tool to be a vice—either searingly unfair to use in this instance or invalid on its face. When the decision eventually comes, the press will have created an environment in which the Supreme Court’s disregard for the Constitution’s text won’t be viewed as a radical act.

That this consensus was reached so quickly is something of a surprise, as the dominant mode of the pundit class is to venerate the Constitution as a peerless document, the final answer to all questions....

Writing for his newsletter, Indignity, Tom Scocca provides a concise survey of those who’ve recently endeavored to “pretend” that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say what it says, from the “half-baked excuses” from pundits to the “feeble political claims” of legal experts doing business as Constitution doubters.

One example that stands out for its sheer mendacity comes from Yale Law professor (and it’s almost always a Yale Law professor) Jed Rubenfeld, who pooh-poohed Article 3 for The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section, admonishing those who might wield it to save the country from harm that while the “Colorado Supreme Court didn’t exactly get the law wrong” when it plucked Trump from its ballot, the “problem” was “there was no law to get right,” on account of the fact that “almost no case law exists on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.”

….

[TW: I want to highlight Rubenfeld’s comment. because it is a painful example of the philosophical inability of liberalism to defend itself against the onslaught of conservative authoritarianism. “Almost no case law exists,” and this is an insurmountable barrier for Rubenfeld and his fellow travelers. Now, the question can be asked, “What did the first judges at the very beginning of the republic do when there was no case law?” Rubenfeld and other would probably answer, “The relied on the precedents of English common law.” But they are wrong: in the winter of 1790-1791, Supreme Court justice James Wilson — who also served as one of the most important delegates at the Constitutional Convention — in a series of lectures attended by almost all members of Congress, explicitly rejected English common law as the basis for American jurisprudence:

A question deeply interesting to the American States now presents itself. Should the elements of a law education, particularly as it respects publick law, be drawn entirely from another country—or should they be drawn, in part, at least, from the constitutions and governments and laws of the United States, and of the several States composing the Union?

The subject, to one standing where I stand, is not without its delicacy: let me, however, treat it with the decent but firm freedom, which befits an independent citizen, and a professor in independent states.

Surely I am justified in saying, that the principles of the constitutions and governments and laws of the United States, and the republicks, of which they, are formed, are materially different from the principles of the constitution and government and laws of England; for that is the only country, from the principles of whose constitution and government and laws, it will be contended, that the elements of a law education ought to be drawn. I presume to go further: the principles of our constitutions and governments and laws are materially better than the principles of the constitution and government and laws of England.

[The guide for law in a republic, Wilson insisted, must be justice.

The first and most necessary duty of nations, as well as of men, is to do no wrong or injury. Justice is a sacred law of nations. If the law of the great society of nations requires, as we have seen it to require, that each should contribute to the perfection and happiness of others; the first degree of this duty surely is, that each should abstain from every thing, which would positively impair that perfection and happiness.

[There are many that now believe that “The US Constitution is a document written by criminals for criminals to serve criminal purposes.” This erroneous view is the direct result of the propagandizing of the reactionary rich, who have successfully written out of history ideas such as Wilson’s. ]

How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid

Walker Bragman and Alex Kotc, December 22nd, 2021 [www.exposedbycmd.org]

This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign succeeded in supplanting public health experts and hijacking governmental response to the pandemic….

When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.

Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.

One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.

Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world.

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.

Republican State Financial Officers Group Doubled Its Revenue After Being Weaponized to Fight “Woke” Capitalism and Sustainable Investing Practices

by David Armiak, December 22nd, 2023 [www.exposedbycmd.org]

The State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a membership group of 37 Republican state treasurers, auditors, and financial executives weaponized to fight “woke” capitalism, more than doubled its revenue in 2022 — to over $2 million — according to its latest IRS filing obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

Prior to 2022, SFOF had only cracked $1 million in revenue once — in 2019. The organization maintained a low profile until CMD published a February 2022 report on its annual meeting, which exposed its agenda of fighting so-called “woke” capitalism and “defend[ing] the market economy” against the growing environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement among corporations to consider their potential impact on climate change, social justice, and other community interests (instead of just shareholders) when making business decisions.

SFOF has deep ties to both the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the pay-to-play, corporate bill mill, and CRC Advisors, a far-right PR firm catering to the fossil fuel industry and founded by Trump’s “court whisperer” Leonard Leo.

Who is Dr. Frankenstein? – Or, what Professor Hayek and his friends have done to science

Yuri Lazebnik, 2018 [ORGANISMS. JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES]

Figure 4. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. An outline of the connections between people, doctrines, texts, and organizations mentioned in the text. Only some connections are shown to keep the graph readable. The names of the Mont Pelerin Society members are rimmed in blue. The names of doctrines are sandwiched between blue lines; texts are indicated by the titles within white rectangles. mOCD stands for market obsessive compulsive disorder (see text), which is manifested as the malaise of science, education, industry, politics, and some other activities. Note that the depicted individuals can identify themselves with diverse political movements and philosophies, but share the belief that the best way to organize society is by considering all human activities as economic market transaction, and by assuming that the market as the highest authority on what is good and what is not. For example, Ayn Rand, who was born in the city where I grew up, was not fond of Hayek's ideas but both agreed on the superiority of a free market and the need for what I call neo-morals (see text).

[TW: At the bottom, right “Follow your calling” replaced by “Follow market signals.” Neo-liberalism is an assault on the moral foundations of a republic. A ‘calling” was the Christian idea that a person’s life vocation should be a way to serve God by serving all of humanity. Not by following self-interests alone.]

Inequality Inc. How corporate power divides our world and the need for a new era of public action

Rebecca Riddell et al. [OXFAM International, via Mike Norman Economics, January 17, 2024]

Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer. Hardship and hunger are a daily reality for many people worldwide. At current rates, it will take 230 years to end poverty, but we could have our first trillionaire in 10 years.

This report shows how a huge concentration of global corporate and monopoly power is exacerbating inequality economy-wide. Seven out of ten of the world’s biggest corporates have either a billionaire CEO or a billionaire as their principal shareholder. Through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are driving inequality and acting in the service of delivering ever-greater wealth to their rich owners. To end extreme inequality, governments must radically redistribute the power of billionaires and corporations back to ordinary people. A more equal world is possible if governments effectively regulate and reimagine the private sector.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Pondering Neoliberalism

Peter Radford [via Mike Norman Economics, January 17, 2024]

But what about the resource side? Where did all this money go? Why, for example, can the Lebanese Armed Forces, not the wealthiest military in the world, have a dozen Brigades deployed on operations, as well as numerous independent regiments, whereas the British, with their massively greater resources and a larger Army, would be pushed to deploy two? And in this, the British are the norm, rather than the exception.

The paradox has no one single cause, but is probably due more than anything else to the move since the 1980s towards managing defence as budgets, rather than programmes. Let me expand on that slightly gnomic statement. In the private sector, it is accepted that companies can and will manipulate their financial statements to inflate their profits and minimise their losses where possible. It’s also accepted that there is a distinction between the financial picture (a company makes increased profits by selling off assets) and the reality (it is doing so in a desperate attempt to avoid going out of business.) In a world where only profits and the share price matter, it is at least a coherent strategy for the short term. If you think about it, it’s also a ridiculous strategy for the public sector, since what matters, and what the voters want, is output for the long term. But from the 1980s onwards, beginning in Britain and spreading rapidly, the idea of managing the defence programme in terms of budgets, and the “efficient” spending of money took over. This meant, in effect, abandoning the previous pattern of managing programmes for capability output, and managing them instead according to budgetary limits. And as time passed, the poisonous theories of management consultants about “efficiency” began to seep into the public sectors of a number of countries.…

Saving Bidenomics: Biden’s industrial policy program promises a massive shift from decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. Can it deliver inclusive gains in time?

[Boston Review, via The Big Picture 01-13-2024]

At a June 2023 assembly of business and community leaders in Chicago, President Biden outlined what has become a central theme of his reelection campaign. “Bidenomics,” the President declared, embracing the moniker for his economic policy agenda, represents a “fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed” for decades. The Reaganite commitment to unfettered market capitalism and an anemic public sector never delivered on the promise of equitable prosperity. “It failed the middle class,” he continued. “It failed America. It blew up the deficit. It increased inequity. And it weakened our infrastructure. It stripped the dignity, pride, and hope out of communities one after another.”

Senior Biden administration leaders have self-consciously styled Biden’s approach as a move away from the neoliberal presumptions of the Washington Consensus. This approach signals a major shift from decades of economic policy, with massive new public investment in infrastructure and green energy, a commitment to worker empowerment, and policies to promote competition and limit unhealthy concentrations of power in the market. It also revives the tradition of “industrial policy,” the basic premise that governments can and ought to restructure markets to better advance public goals and values.

How does the Fed control interest rates?

Kevin Drum [via The Big Picture 01-19-2024]

The Fed no longer relies on open market operations to influence interest rates. Instead, it just changes the rate it pays banks on their reserves.

Boeing Supplier Ignored Warnings Of “Excessive Amount Of Defects,” Former Employees Allege

David Sirota, et al., January 8, 2024 [The Lever]

Less than a month before a catastrophic aircraft failure prompted the grounding of more than 150 of Boeing’s commercial aircraft, documents were filed in federal court alleging that former employees at the company’s subcontractor repeatedly warned corporate officials about safety problems and were told to falsify records.

According to the court documents, the employee told a colleague that “he believed it was just a matter of time until a major defect escaped to a customer.”

The allegations come from a federal securities lawsuit accusing Spirit of deliberately covering up systematic quality control problems, encouraging workers to undercount defects, and retaliating against those who raised safety concerns. Read the full complaint here….

Spirit was established in 2005 as a spinoff company from Boeing. The publicly traded firm remains heavily reliant on Boeing…. Spirit and Boeing are closely intertwined. Spirit’s new CEO Patrick Shanahan was a Trump administration Pentagon official who previously worked at Boeing for more than 30 years, serving as the company’s VP of various programs, including supply chain and operations….

Profits And Payouts Over Passenger Safety

[The Lever, January 12, 2024]

While the companies responsible for the door plug that blew out of a plane in mid-air last week were cutting corners, outsourcing manufacturing, laying off employees, and working to evade expensive safety upgrades, they paid their top executives $817 million and showered Wall Street investors with $68 billion in dividends and stock buybacks over the past decade.

How Boeing Ruined the JetBlue-Spirit Merger

David Dayen, January 19, 2024 [The American Prospect]

The judge’s ruling in the case revealed all the deficiencies in the manufacturing and distribution of commercial air travel.

This week, the sixth-largest and seventh-largest U.S. airlines, JetBlue and Spirit, were denied the opportunity to merge. Stripped from context, it doesn’t sound like an earth-shattering development. But the ruling by Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, signals the end of four decades of unstoppable waves of airline consolidation that have damaged passengers, workers, smaller communities, and commerce. More broadly, it’s another victory for the Biden Justice Department’s aggressive antitrust enforcers, who are drawing the line at additional concentration….

But if Spirit was subsumed into JetBlue’s fleet, it would likely not be replaced by other ultra-low-cost carriers (ULCCs) like Frontier or Allegiant, the judge concluded. It’s worth going through why he concluded that.

Airlines today simply cannot grow, because of a number of factors. There are shortages of both air traffic controllers and pilots, in large part because of voluntary retirements and buyouts during the COVID pandemic. But the bigger issue is that airlines can’t get their hands on any planes. Part of that is a supply chain issue, and part of it is a miscalculation of how many flights would be needed for increased post-pandemic demand. But mainly it’s because they’re all trying to source from one supplier….

The Airbus Advantage: Why Europe’s mixed economy produces safer planes than America’s financialized capitalism

Harold Meyerson, January 18, 2024 [The American Prospect]

...Boeing continually objected to what it said were Spirit’s high costs and inability to meet deadlines. As the workers on the shop floor and their union repeatedly noted, this led to rushed production and deficient oversight. Workers—members of the International Association of Machinists—had “great quality and safety concerns,” one union representative wrote to union leaders, but their concerns were routinely ignored by senior management, the Journal reported.

So how are work practices at Airbus different from those at Boeing? I’m not arguing that Airbus provides a panacea for 21st-century production; a chunk of their own production, for instance, is outsourced as well. But consider, for starters, who actually owns the two companies. Airbus’s four largest shareholders, in order, are the government of France, the government of Germany, the Capital Research and Management Company, and the government of Spain. Boeing’s four largest shareholders, in order, are The Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust Company, and State Street Corporation (a bank and asset manager). In other words, Airbus’s largest shareholders are mainly politically accountable governments that must pay heed to such public concerns as air safety; Boeing’s are entirely investors in business for profits….

By the way, just how outsourced is Boeing production? Only yesterday, it was revealed the door plug that blew out of the Alaska Airlines plane wasn’t actually produced in Wichita. It was produced in Malaysia, where I very much doubt that workers’ concerns about speed of production and quality oversight have much impact on their managers. More significantly, the fact that the Malaysian production of the door plug didn’t come to light until yesterday—12 days after the blowout—suggests just how profoundly outsourcing can obscure the public visibility required for corporate accountability.

Dollar General Overcharges ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Customers, Lawsuit Alleges

Ramenda Cyrus, January 19, 2024 [The American Prospect]

The prices paid at the register do not match the price tags, according to a class action lawsuit working through the courts….

Dann told the Prospect that his firm has collected “thousands of pages” of public records that show the violations. Part of the case has to do with “weights and measures standards,” which are designed to prevent stores from undercutting their customers by ensuring that products sold are the proper size and weight claimed on the packaging. As Dann told the Prospect, Dollar General regularly fails state and federal weights and measures tests, at an average of 20 percent….

In September 2023, Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey initiated a different lawsuit against Dollar General for pricing scams. As KOAM News reported, a joint investigation between the attorney general’s office and the Missouri Department of Agriculture Weights and Measures Division found that more than half of the inspected stores failed price accuracy checks, with discrepancies up to “as much as $6.50 per item.”

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

The DOJ’s Incestuous Relationship with Jamie Dimon Is Captured in a Graphic from an Historic Lawsuit

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, January 18, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade] [Wall Street on Parade]

Everything that’s Dangerous about U.S. Banks Today in One Highly Readable Book

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, January 17, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade] [Wall Street on Parade]

Three Branches of U.S. Government Have Kept the Secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Man, Leslie Wexner, Locked Up Tight

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, January 12, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade] [Wall Street on Parade]

Information age dystopia

The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore

[PC Magazine, via The Big Picture 01-07-2024]

An alarmingly large portion of the world’s business and finance systems run on COBOL, and only a small community of programmers know it. IBM thinks Watson can help, but it’s not guaranteed.

Climate and environmental crises

2023’s billion-dollar disasters list shattered the US record for weather and climate disasters amid Earth’s hottest year on record

[The Conversation, via The Big Picture 01-14-2024]

The U.S. set an unwelcome record for weather and climate disasters in 2023, with 28 disasters that exceeded more than US$1 billion in damage each. While it wasn’t the most expensive year overall – the costliest years included multiple hurricane strikes – it had the highest number of billion-dollar storms, floods, droughts and fires of any year since counting began in 1980, with six more than any other year, accounting for inflation.

Buying Home and Auto Insurance Is Becoming Impossible

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture 01-14-2024]

Huge losses from national disasters prompt industry to jack up prices and pull back from some markets; ‘worst possible scenario’ for consumers.

Democrats' political malpractice

It’s Time for Democrats to Make Some Enemies

Jason Linkins, January 20, 2024 [The New Republic]

...The New Republic’s editor, Michael Tomasky, in setting the table for this campaign season, has repeatedly stressed the need to name some enemies and pick some broad public fights with these foes… This can’t be the stuff of wonks and white papers—this is about emotions and morality, a gut punch to the bad guys….

...a slew of corporate enemies abound: junk-fee crooks; private equity goons; the gangsters of the pharmaceutical industry; banks plucking high overdraft fees out of the pockets of people living paycheck to paycheck; a small universe of price gougers, wage thieves, and consumer predators….

The fact that the Democrats are of two minds on the matter is emblematic of the asymmetry of America’s political warfare. Republicans can be counted on to speak with one voice, picking topics on a daily basis on which to do a Two Minutes Hate, keeping the right-wing media Wurlitzer filled with fresh sheet music to call the next dance. Democrats can’t match the GOP in terms of propaganda infrastructure, but they can marshal far more relevant and substantive topics of conflict than the Republican Party’s typical culture-war fare.…

Collapse of independent news media

How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism

Phillip Longman, January 16, 2024 [Washington Monthly]

The collapse of the news industry is not an inevitable consequence of technology or market forces. It’s the result of policy mistakes over the past 40 years that the Biden administration is already taking measures to fix….

...it is a direct result of specific, boneheaded policy choices that politicians in both parties made over the past 40 years. By repealing or failing to enforce basic market rules that had long contained concentrated corporate power, policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press….

This tradition in America’s political economy found early expression in the Postal Act of 1792. Reflecting the founding generation’s belief that a democratic republic required an informed citizenry, the law stated that the largest and most crucial communications network of the era had to treat all users equally by offering the same prices and terms of service to everyone. It was the same principle that in much later debates over the governance of the internet would be known as “net neutrality.”….

Americans once again deployed extensive government interventions after monopolists gained control of a new communications network that had become essential to journalism by the mid-19th century. The dominant telegraph company of the day, Western Union, which fell under the control of the financier Jay Gould, and the dominant newswire provider, the Associated Press, became so intertwined that they were called “a double-headed monopoly.” ...

To reverse such concentrations of control over the information environment, Americans took myriad measures. As with the U.S. Postal Service, they enacted regulations that required, for example, that telegraph and telephone companies operate as utilities providing every user, or class of users, with the same prices and terms of service. Similarly, while granted an exemption from liability for the messages people sent over their wires, telecommunications companies were not allowed to pick and choose who got to send or receive what content. Americans also used antitrust enforcement and utility regulations to prohibit such companies from vertically integrating into adjacent lines of businesses, such as advertising and publishing. Finally, by the end of the 19th century, privacy laws in every state prohibited them from disclosing or otherwise misusing the personal data generated by their users….

New York City Is a Lot Safer Than Small-Town America

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 01-17-2024]

Rising homicide rates don’t tell the whole story. When you dig deeper into data on deaths, you’ll find the more urban your surroundings, the less danger you face.

‘Plain historical falsehoods’: How amicus briefs bolstered Supreme Court conservatives

[Politico, via The Big Picture 01-07-2024]

A POLITICO review indicates most conservative briefs in high-profile cases have links to a small cadre of activists aligned with Leonard Leo.

…...

…..

Public Christian schools? Leonard Leo’s allies advance a new cause A tight-knit group of activists tied to Leo’s nonprofit network are rallying around an Oklahoma effort to create a public Catholic school. (Politico, via The Big Picture 01-07-2024]

Home-schoolers dismantled state oversight. Now they fear pushback. Some states are considering new regulations amid efforts by school-choice advocates to give home-school families taxpayer funding. (Washington Post, via The Big Picture 01-07-2024]

Inside Saudi Arabia’s $3 Trillion Plan to Move Past Oil: The world’s largest oil exporter has a plan to transform its economy into a high-tech hub for global business. How investors can ride along. (Barron’s, via The Big Picture 01-06-2024]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 31, 2023

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday January 01, 2024 · 8:31 PM PST

2024/01/01 · 20:31

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 31, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Oligarchy

Oligarchy and Democracy

Jeffrey A. Winters [The American Interest, via The Big Picture 12-24-2023]

Winters is professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of Oligarchy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.

Everyone is by now aware of the staggering shift in fortunes upward favoring the wealthy. Less well understood is that this rising inequality is not the result of something economically rational, such as a surge in productivity or value-added contributions from financiers and hedge-fund CEOs, but is rather a direct reflection of redistributive policies that have helped the richest get richer.

[TW: I would argue that this is, in fact, well understood: that’s why Biden’s polling is so terrible. People generally understand the economy is rigged, and the see no effort being made to unrig it, nor any effort to rein in the worst abuses of economic predators, such as private equity. ]

The tiny proportion of wealthy actors among eligible voters cannot account for the immense political firepower needed to keep winning these policy victories. While motivated and mobilized minorities—those organized over issues like gay marriage, for example—can sometimes win legislative victories despite broad opposition from the electorate, America’s ultra-rich all together could barely fill a large sports stadium. They never assemble for rallies or marches, sign petitions, or mount Facebook or Twitter campaigns. So how do they so consistently get their way?

One increasingly popular answer is that America is an oligarchy rather than a democracy.¹ The complex truth, however, is that the American political economy is both an oligarchy and a democracy; the challenge is to understand how these two political forms can coexist in a single system. Sorting out this duality begins with a recognition of the different kinds of power involved in each realm. Oligarchy rests on the concentration of material power, democracy on the dispersion of non-material power. The American system, like many others, pits a few with money power against the many with participation power. The chronic problem is not just that electoral democracy provides few constraints on the power of oligarchs in general, but that American democracy is by design particularly responsive to the power of money….

Oligarchy should be understood as the politics of wealth defense, which has evolved in important ways throughout human civilization. For most of history, this has meant oligarchs were focused on defending their claims to property. They did so by arming themselves or by ruling directly and jointly over armed forces they assembled and funded. Every great increase in wealth required oligarchs to spend additional resources on armaments, castles, militias and other means of defense. The greatest transformation in the politics of wealth defense and thus of oligarchy came with the rise of the modern state. Through its impersonal system of laws, the armed modern state converted individual oligarchic property claims into secure societal property rights. In exchange, oligarchs disarmed and submitted to the same protective legal infrastructure that applied to all citizens (in theory if not always in practice). Property rights offered reliable safeguards not only against potential antagonists without property, but also, no less important, against other oligarchs and the armed state itself that administered the entire arrangement.

[TW: Here, I think Winters commits a grievous error of omission by not considering the mental and social pathologies which characterize the rich, and the society they dominate. Theorists of civic republicanism repeatedly warned of the self-glorification the rich engage in. ]

Introducing MASTER PLAN

December 29, 2023 [The Lever]

The Lever’s upcoming podcast series exposes the 50-year plot to legalize corruption in America. Listen to the trailer now.

In MASTER PLAN, The Lever’s journalists unearth never-before-reported documents showing how a group of extremists and tycoons legalized corruption and took over the U.S. government. In this epic journey from the 1970s to the present, you’ll hear the untold history of famous villains you already thought you knew—people like President Richard Nixon, Senator Mitch McConnell and Fox News boss Roger Ailes. You’ll also meet operatives and oligarchs you’ve probably never heard of, because they’ve wielded their power in the shadows.…

Book Review: Sally Denton and Roger Morris, “The Money and the Power”

Conor Gallagher, December 25, 2023 [Naked Capitalism]

...Denton and Morris’ tale begins with Las Vegas as nothing more than a dusty intersection in the middle of the desert at a time when the state was still for the most part in opposition to runaway vice. In Vegas’ 1930s beginnings it was an organized crime outpost for money laundering and an escape for Hoover Dam construction workers. Local and state politics were largely in the pocket of organized crime, but still most contained to Nevada. While the US always has always had organized crime and corruption, it was for the most part local or regional and not in cahoots with the national state.

With World War Two, that begins to change.

The authors highlight the moment when US Naval Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) struck a deal with Meyer Lansky, the man who put the ‘organized’ in organized crime, to suppress leftist unions on New York docks during the war by any means necessary. It was aptly called Operation Underworld.

Now the government had been hiring thugs for a long time, but this collaboration would grow into something more to the point the two sides are one and the same. As Denton and Morris describe it, this was ‘the start of what would be a growing covert alliance with organized crime, beginning during the war and becoming all but institutionalized afterward, a “continuing mode of operation,” as one scholar called it later.’

The war-time measures against leftists did not end with the war. The CIA and FBI entered into an alliance with organized crime against Communists and Leftists….

Heather Cox Richardson, December 26, 2023 [Letters from an American]

With the “evil empire,” as President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union, no longer a viable enemy, Movement Conservatives, aided by new talk radio hosts, increasingly demonized their domestic political opponents. As they strengthened their hold on the Republican Party, Movement Conservatives cut taxes, slashed the social safety net, and deregulated the economy.

At the same time, the oligarchs who rose to power in the former Soviet republics looked to park their illicit money in western democracies, where the rule of law would protect their investments. Once invested in the United States, they favored the Republicans who focused on the protection of wealth rather than social services. For their part, Republican politicians focused on spreading capitalism rather than democracy, arguing that the two went hand in hand.

The financial deregulation that made the U.S. a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Congress passed the PATRIOT Act to address the threat of terrorism. The law took on money laundering and the illicit funding of terrorism, requiring financial institutions to inspect large sums of money passing through them. But the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) exempted many real estate deals from the new regulations.

The United States became one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars laundered in the U.S. every year.

In 2011 the international movement of illicit money led then–FBI director Robert Mueller to tell the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City that globalization and technology had changed the nature of organized crime. International enterprises, he said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real

[Scientific American, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2023]

...Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats. Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.

The Insufferable Bros Who Run Corporate America

Matt Stoller, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2023]

Given the trends in American business towards monopolization since the 1980s, it won’t surprise you to learn there’s one corporation that stands between pharmaceutical firm marketing divisions and the doctor with the pen. It’s called IQVIA, and it is the result of a series of mergers, with the original seed company being IMS Health, co-founded by Arthur Sackler in the 1950s. Yes, that Sackler.

IQVIA is now embroiled in a fight with the Federal Trade Commission over a merger that will determine the future of this $600 billion of spending, and more broadly, which medicines get developed and sold worldwide. Specifically, the FTC alleges IQVIA is trying to monopolize advertising to health care professionals (HCP) by buying up two of the three key firms that run online advertising targeted at doctors. These firms have vaguely titillating names. There’s Lasso, for which IQVIA paid a rumored $400 million, and DeepIntent, for which it forked over an apparent $800 million. (The remaining one is PulsePoint.)

Restoring balance to the economy

Where is the Party of the Working Class?

Les Leopold, December 27, 2023

A quarter century ago, the late labor leader, Tony Mazzocchi, issued a dire warning. Unless a labor party was created, working people would abandon the Democrats and flock towards authoritarians who would promise job protections and economic stability. Mazzocchi found enormous resonance among workers when he declared, “The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own.”

That rings even more true today for many working-class people. But is it possible to build a political party that truly speaks to the needs of working people in an era of runaway inequality and incessant mass layoffs?

Because neither Mazzocchi nor other labor leaders wanted to create a spoiler party that would siphon off Democratic votes and elect Republicans, the idea never found a way to gain significant traction. But the opportunity to create a new party would be more likely if one of the two major parties imploded, which might be happening right now to the Republican Party as it wallows in the fantasy world of Trump’s election lies and conspiracies….

Starting with Bill Clinton, the competition for Wall Street cash pulled the Democrats further away from the working-class, who the Dems thought had no place else to go. It could happen again.

Moving even closer to Wall Street could compound the difficulties that the Democrats already have. Not only are white working-class voters moving away from the Democrats, but so are Black and Hispanic voters. Biden’s support among non-white voters has fallen from the 70 percent he received in 2020 against Trump, to 53 percent today. And the decline has been dramatic among non-white voters with no college education and whose incomes are less than $50,000 per year. Many of those voters are unlikely to rush towards the Trump or Cheney Republicans, but they might instead sit out the election, which would be enormously harmful to the Democrats.

This creates an opportunity for the Trump Republicans to draw working-class voters by focusing on job security. But the Republicans seem fixated on culture wars and therefore run the risk of alienating working-class people of all shades and ethnicities who have become more liberal since 2010 on key social issues, including immigration.

Celebrate Christmas With the Gilded Age’s Forgotten Christian Socialists

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2023]

...The only church for this Jesus was the socialist movement. Political groups like the Knights of Labor and left-wing periodicals like Appeal to Reason already invoked a working-class Christ, quoting his Sermon on the Mount as a condemnation of greed and a cry of solidarity. Protestant ministers such as W. D. P. Bliss and Herbert Casson sympathized, and in the 1890s they began establishing “Labor churches” across the country. These were not ordinary churches: Bliss’s Boston congregation lived together, studied scripture together, ran a business together, and marched for workers together. Their goal was to model a new society, a shining Christian commonwealth — and to universalize that society through socialist politics.

This was an implicitly millenarian project, gazing past the charitable acts of “Churchianity” and toward the grand arrival of God’s kingdom. Yet crucially, it was a postmillennial one, in that it enjoined the faithful to build a just world as a precondition for Christ’s return. Radical Christians were to engage in politics, not withdraw from it. “It is utter nonsense to preach the gospel of individual conversation without adding the gospel of social regeneration,” as Casson wrote.

[TW: One of the great driving forces of modern American society, and which is largely ignored, is the opposite of postmillennialism, dispensational premillennialism. Basically, postmillennialists believe that Christ will return after Christians have established justice and equality on earth. There is thus a strong incentive to work for social and economic justice. Premillennialism believes that Christ will return after a period of tribulation, in which the wicked reign over chaos and misery. Premillennialists therefore have no incentive to work for social and economic justice.]

Strategic Political Economy

Assassination Will Not Help Israel

Ian Welsh, December 29, 2023

The problem with American leaders is that they don’t believe in anything enough to die for it. Oh, they have beliefs, the beliefs of a leech (which is unfair to leeches, which are, unlike ticks, largely beneficial to their hosts.) They really, really believe in neoliberalism, because it has made them filthy rich.

But die for it, except in the sense of “destroy the world for profit?”

No.

The leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, even Iran to a lesser extent, have beliefs they are willing to die for, personally, not just send other people to die for.

Further, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian army (especially the Revolutionary Guards) are ideological organizations. From top to bottom, they believe in more or less the same things. You could kill the top 99 leaders of those orgs, and Mr. #100 would not be that much different.

Selfishness Cannot Be the Basis of Society

[Naked Capitalism 12-26-2023]

On Christianity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb [Medium, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2023]

“Ironically, modernists fall for what I have called the opiate of the middle classes[i.e., the PMC], that is social science and stock market speculation. They refuse religion on rational grounds, then fall for economic forecasters, stock market analysts, and psychologists. We know that economic forecasts work no better than astrology; stock market analysts are more pompous but much less elegant than the bishop, and psychology papers do not replicate meaning their results do not hold. My co-author Rupert Read and I have argued (using evolutionary arguments) that religion, via interdicts, allows the intergenerational transmission of survival heuristics and is effective in nudging people into some classes of behavior[16]. By some irony, “nudging” theory developed by social scientists (which earned Richard Thaler a Nobel in economic sciences) has been recently shown to be nonreplicable, owing to a statistical artifact[17]. Nonreplicable is the polite scientific term to mean that it is no different from astrology. Listen to the bishop — the recipient of generations of survival wisdom — not the psychologist.”

Global power shift

How Yemen is blocking US hegemony in West Asia

[The Cradle, December 22, 2023

...The embarrassment for Secretary Austin and White House advisor Jake Sullivan was swift. Shortly after the coalition's announcement, key US allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt declined participation. European allies Denmark, Holland, and Norway provided minimal support, sending only a handful of naval officers.

France agreed to participate but refused to deploy additional ships to the region or place its existing vessel there under US command. Italy and Spain refuted claims of their participation, and eight countries remained anonymous, casting doubt on their existence.

Ansarallah has therefore destroyed another pillar of the White House National Security Strategy, which seeks “to promote regional integration by building political, economic, and security connections between and among US partners, including through integrated air and maritime defense structures.”

Revolutions in naval warfare

The Pentagon plans to defend commercial ships using missile defense systems on US and allied naval carriers deployed to the region.

But the world’s superpower, now largely on its own, does not have the military capacity to counter attacks from war-torn Yemen, the poorest country in West Asia.

This is because the US relies on expensive and difficult to manufacture interceptor missiles to counter the inexpensive and mass-produced drones and missiles that Ansarallah possesses.

Austin made his announcement shortly after the USS Carney destroyer intercepted 14 one-way attack drones on just one day, the 16th of December.

The operation appeared to be a success, but Politico swiftly reported that according to three US Defense Department officials, the cost of countering such attacks “is a growing concern.”

The SM-2 missiles used by the USS Carney cost roughly $2.1 million each, while Ansarallah's one-way attack drones cost a mere $2,000 each.

This means that to shoot down the $28,000 worth of drones on 16 December, the US spent at least $28 million in just one day….

As Fortis Analysis observed, the US has eight guided missile cruisers and destroyers operating in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, with a total of 800 SM-2 and SM-6 interceptor missiles for ship defense between them. Fortis Analysis further notes that production of these missiles is slow, meaning any ongoing campaign to counter Ansarallah will quickly deplete US interceptor missile stocks to dangerously low levels. Meanwhile, the US weapons manufacturer Raytheon can produce less than 50 SM-2 and fewer than 200 SM-6 missiles annually….

While the US military is successful at producing expensive, technologically complex weapons systems that provide excellent profits for the arms industry, such as the F-15 warplanes, it is not capable of producing enough of the weapons needed to actually fight and win real wars on the other side of the world, where supply chains become even more critical….

Moscow has the industrial base and the supply chains in place to produce hundreds of thousands of the low-cost, rudimentary 152mm artillery shells – two million annually – needed for success in a multi-year war of attrition fought largely in trenches. The US, quite simply, does not. Washington's war industrial complex is currently, at best, manufacturing 288,000 shells annually and seeks to manufacture one million shells by the year 2028, still only half of the Russian manufacturing ability.

Additionally, one Russian 152mm artillery round costs $600 dollars according to western experts, whereas it costs a western country $5,000 to $6,000 to produce a comparable 155mm artillery shell.

American Spies Confront a New, Formidable China

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2023]

The U.S. lost its human network in China just as Xi became Communist Party leader, in late 2012, and then president a few months later. Multiple, sometimes daily, CIA reports predicted he would be a different kind of Chinese leader, more forceful, nationalistic and security-focused, current and former intelligence officials said.

Several officials said the analysis was largely ignored by President Barack Obama’s White House, which hoped that as China grew economically, it would liberalize and join the U.S.-led international world order. That policy had been followed by Democratic and Republican administrations for two decades. “There was a lot of desperation to believe that,” said Gail Helt, a former CIA East Asia analyst.

[TW: It wasn’t just Obama. I remember having arguments with conservatives and Bush supporters when Dubya was President.]

Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

[Foreign Policy, August 15, 2018]

It was considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades: Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S. spies….

Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials. The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it.

“The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable,” said one of the officials who, like the others, declined to be named discussing sensitive information. The former official described the attitude of those in the agency who worked on China at the time as “invincible.”

Moscow’s anti-sanctions tsarina: What the woman leading Russia’s Central Bank says about economic war with the West

[RT, via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2023]

The head of the Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, has held the position for more than ten years. When she was just starting the job, the world's media highlighted that Nabiullina had become the first woman to run a central bank in a G8 country. Now, however, the Western press talks about her in a completely different context. Not long ago, Politico magazine named her “disruptor of the year” because she “has managed to stave off the effects of unprecedented Western sanctions designed to drain the Kremlin’s coffers.”….

— We have been living under sanctions since 2014 and, therefore, have always considered the risk that the sanctions may increase. We did a lot of work in this respect and conducted stress tests with many financial institutions. Therefore, when the major banks fell under sanctions, they were largely prepared for it. Disconnection from SWIFT has been a threat since 2014, so we created our own national payment system. We diversified our reserves and increased the share of yuan and gold reserves. International payments were actually the biggest issue, and we are still working on it. Blocked and frozen individual assets are also a painful subject since millions of people who were not sanctioned ended up with frozen assets. We are still trying to solve this problem together with the government.

As for the frozen reserves, I think this is a highly negative signal for all the central banks, because it violates the basic principles of security. But in this regard, we were aided by the floating exchange rate and the currency restrictions, which we adopted last spring and which were quite severe. Later, as you remember, these restrictions were weakened. This helped us mitigate financial stability risks.

The Biden Administration Is Quietly Shifting Its Strategy in Ukraine

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2023]

For two years, Biden and Zelenskyy have been focused on driving Russia from Ukraine. Now Washington is discussing a move to a more defensive posture.

ZELENSKY’S DRUG EMPIRE: HOW UKRAINE TURNED INTO EUROPE’S LARGEST DRUG PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION CENTER

[Foundation to Battle Injustice, via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2023]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel is losing the war against Hamas – but Netanyahu and his government will never admit it

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-2023]

...Very recently there have been two further incidents. On 12 December, there was a skilful triple ambush staged by Hamas paramilitaries in a part of Gaza supposedly controlled by Israeli forces. An IDF unit was ambushed and took casualties. Further troops were sent to aid that unit, and they were then ambushed, as were reinforcements.

Ten IDF soldiers were reported killed and other seriously wounded, but it was their seniority that counted, including as it did a colonel and three majors from the elite Golani Brigade. That Hamas, supposedly decimated and with thousands of troops already killed, could mount such an operation anywhere in Gaza, let alone a district reportedly already under IDF control, should raise doubts about the idea that Israel is making substantial progress in the war….

There are other, wider indications of the IDF’s problems. Official casualty figures have shown more than 460 military personnel killed in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank and about 1,900 wounded. But other sources suggest far greater numbers of wounded.

Ten days ago, Israel’s leading daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, published information obtained from the ministry of defence’s rehabilitation department. The head of the department, Limor Luria, was reported as saying that more than 2,000 IDF soldiers had been registered as disabled since the conflict began – with 58% of all those it had treated suffering from severe injuries to their hands and feet – suggesting a far higher casualty toll than the official figure. Meanwhile, the Times of Israel has reported the number of injured IDF soldiers, Israel Police and other security forces as 6,125. There have also been a number of friendly fire casualties, with the same paper reporting 20 out of 105 deaths due to such fire or accidents during fighting.

The Problem With Israel’s Military

Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2023]

One of the strengths of an army with a solid, experienced crew of Sergeants, especially Master Sergeants and First Sergeants, is that they are men (or women) with at least 15 years of military experience. The senior Sergeants also play an important role in training newly minted Lieutenants and Captains. Just because a guy is commissioned as a Second Lieutenant after graduating from West Point or the Virginia Military Institute does not mean that new officer has a clue about how to lead men in combat. That comes with experience from following senior NCOs and Officers that are experienced. All nine of the Israeli casualties listed above would not be eligible to hold those ranks if they were in any NATO army unit.

Master Sgt. (res.) Eliyahu Meir Ohana, age 28, is holding a rank that, in the U.S. Army, is held by a soldier with at least 20 years experience. The youth and inexperience of the Israeli NCOs helps explain why the reports that Israeli soldiers are shooting and killing unarmed civilians. They are young, inexperienced and lacking in the maturity one normally expects from a Staff Sergeant or Master Sergeant.

Netanyahu Says He’s Looking for Countries to ‘Absorb’ Palestinians from Gaza

[Antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2023]

Why moving to the Sinai peninsula is the solution for Gaza’s Palestinians

[The Jerusalem Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2023]

Gas, Gaza, and Western imperialism

[Mondoweiss, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2023]

Gaza Ceasefire Protesters are Shutting Down Weapons Manufacturers

[Teen Vogue, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-26-2023]

“According to organizer Lara Kiswani, she and other organizers had just a few hours to galvanize protesters to form a picket line at the port around 6 a.m. Kiswani is the executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), one of the organizations that led the demonstration…. AROC led the first #BlocktheBoat campaign, in 2014, alongside a coalition of local organizations, picketing for days and discouraging rank and file workers from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 from working ships owned by Zim Integrated Shipping Services, the largest Israeli cargo shipping company. In 2021, when a Zim vessel attempted to return to the Port of Oakland for the first time in seven years, ILWU 10 workers refused to cross he #BlocktheBoat community picket line, heeding the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions’ call for US labor unions to ‘boycott the Israeli occupation’ in part by ‘refusing to unload their ships.'” • The departing ship was delayed, but not stopped. Lots of detail in the article, which I am no longer surprised to see in Teen Vogue, and nowhere else.

Billionaires, imperialists, and antisemites: The forces behind the assault on opposition to Gaza genocide

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-2023]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Why ‘Bidenomics’ is falling flat with voters

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-2023]

Bidenomics Puts Business, Not Workers, First

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2023]

Measuring income inequality: A primer on the debate

[Brookings Institution, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2023]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-2023]

At least 50 fertilizer production facilities have closed in Europe. This is stated in a report by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (a major financial group among the world's top ten).

Fertilizer production in the EU has become completely unprofitable due to gas prices. 75% of the… pic.twitter.com/DPZyf6CJpc
— Mats Nilsson (@mazzenilsson) December 23, 2023

IMF surcharges or surtaxes: How, in total opacity, the International Monetary Funds is making money at the expense of countries in the most precarious position [CADTM, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-2023]

From FedEx to airlines, companies are starting to lose their pricing power

[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2023]

GRAPH: Average quarterly earnings and revenues for companies in the S&P 500
Year-over-year percent change

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class

[Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2023]

Serious Medical Errors Rose After Private Equity Firms Bought Hospitals

New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2023]

Changes in Hospital Adverse Events and Patient Outcomes Associated With Private Equity Acquisition

JAMA, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2023] Underlying study.

Climate and environmental crises

Genetic engineering was meant to save chestnut trees. Then there was a mistake.

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2023]

40% of US Electricity Is Now Emissions-Free

[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-2023]

Researchers develop ‘electronic soil’ that enhances crop growth

[PhysOrg, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2023]

World’s tallest wooden wind turbine starts turning

[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-2023]

The 105m (345ft) tower's strength comes from the 144 layers of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) that make its thick walls.

By varying the grain of each of the 3mm-thick layers of spruce, Modvion says it has been able to control the wall's strength and flexibility. "It's our secret recipe," says company co-founder - and former architect and boat builder - David Olivegren, with a smile.

At the factory, on the edge of Gothenburg, the thin layers of wood have been glued and compressed together to make the curved sections. Those pieces are then taken on site, glued together into cylinders and then stacked on top of each other to make the tower.

"Wood and glue is the perfect combination, we've known that for hundreds of years," Olivegren says. "And because using wood is lighter [than steel] you can build taller turbines with less material."

First EV With Lithium-Free Sodium Battery Hits the Road In January

[CarNewsChina, via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2023]

Sodium-ion batteries are expected to play an essential role in the battery mix in the future. Their best-case use is stationary energy storage, two-wheelers, and entry-level EVs. They are cheaper than LFP, don’t need lithium, and perform better in winter conditions. On the other hand, they have lower energy density. In China, many automakers are pushing into sodium-ion development; BYD recently announced a 30 GWh sodium battery plant in Xuzhou in a joint venture with tricycle giant Huaihai Group. The total investment reaches 10 billion yuan (1.4 billion USD). Another player is CATL, which has already shown us some prototypes but hasn’t announced the mass production plans yet.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

New York Times sues Microsoft, ChatGPT maker OpenAI over copyright infringement

[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-27-2023]

“In its lawsuit Wednesday, the Times accused Microsoft and OpenAI of creating a business model based on ‘mass copyright infringement,’ stating that the companies’ AI systems were ‘used to create multiple reproductions of The Times’s intellectual property for the purpose of creating the GPT models that exploit and, in many cases, retain large portions of the copyrightable expression contained in those works.’ Publishers are concerned that, with the advent of generative AI chatbots, fewer people will click through to news sites, resulting in shrinking traffic and revenues. The Times included numerous examples in the suit of instances where GPT-4 produced altered versions of material published by the newspaper. In one example, the filing shows OpenAI’s software producing almost identical text to a Times article about predatory lending practices in New York City’s taxi industry. But in OpenAI’s version, GPT-4 excludes a critical piece of context about the sum of money the city made selling taxi medallions and collecting taxes on private sales.”

Tucker Carlson Visits Julian Assange

[Rumble, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2023]

Disrupting mainstream politics

The Squad Has a Serious Shot at Party Leadership
Julian Zelizer, December 29, 2023 [The New Republic]

Despite attacks from their colleagues, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her peers are part of a proud tradition of influential legislators who moved their party left….

...since the early twentieth century, left legislators have been organizing, mobilizing, coalition-building, and legislating from within Capitol Hill. We have seen this in the past, and we are seeing this again today. Without New York Senator Robert Wagner, for example, much of the New Deal might never have come into being. The senator and his allies in the upper chamber had been fighting to expand the role of government before there was a Great Depression or Franklin Roosevelt was president. Even once FDR was in office, the senator was the driving force behind landmark legislation such as the National Labor Relations Act, which legitimated unions and created a government body to oversee union rights—and is correctly known as the “Wagner Act.” Many of the policies we now associate with Roosevelt were born out of Wagner’s efforts. As the political scientist David R. Mayhew wrote in America’s Congress, “it is a fair question whether the 1930s, at least as an epic legislative era, should not be labeled ‘the age of Wagner’ as much as it is the ‘age of Roosevelt.’”

(anti)Republican Party

How Mass Mail-In Voting Changes Everything

[The American Conservative, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-27-2023]

[TW: If you ever wondered why conservatives are so unhappy with efforts to make voting easier.]

“The objective of mail-in voting activists is an electoral world in which polls, historical trends, economic issues, messaging, voter enthusiasm, candidate quality, traditional get-out-the-vote efforts, candidate debates, and voter persuasion no longer matter in elections. All that ultimately matters in mass mail-in voting states is the number of absentee ballots that can be distributed, harvested, and ultimately counted in local election offices by partisan election activists over the weeks and months preceding election day. Through the strategic expansion of mass mail-in voting, Democrats are creating a new urban based, activist driven electoral playing field where they alone can win. The idea that mass mail-in voting expands general “voters rights” is not what it appears to be. Instead, the spread of mass mail-in voting since 2020 has greatly increased the political power of urban and university-based bloc voters, partisan election activists, and the many wealthy nonprofits that support them, such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the National Vote at Home Institute. Meanwhile, conventional, in-person suburban and rural voters see their votes diluted by a flood of questionable absentee ballots emanating from heavily Democratic cities and university towns.”

Local communities keep trying to help workers. Corporate lobbyists and Florida politicians keep teaming up to stop them.

[Seeking Rents, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-2023]

Urged on by lobbyists for some of the state’s biggest businesses, Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee have proposed new legislation that would crush local laws meant to make corporations pay higher wages, provide better benefits, or ensure safer workplaces….

House Bill 433 would do three main things:

First, it would stop cities, counties and towns from making any business — even government contractors — pay their employees more than the minimum wage. That would dissolve a number of “living wage” laws that protect tens of thousands of workers in cities like Miami, Tampa and Gainesville.

Second, it would prevent communities from passing any other local laws regulating the “terms and conditions of employment.” That prohibition would cover a vast universe of potential ordinances — though it appears primarily aimed at stopping the spread of “fair workweek” laws that attempt to ensure more stable and predictable schedules for hourly workers.

And third, it would specifically preclude communities from protecting Floridians working in extreme heat. This comes as county commissioners in Miami-Dade County have been trying to craft a first-of-its kind law that would require employers to provide workers laboring in extreme heat with precautions like cool drinking water, regular breaks, and shade cover. Lobbyists for construction companies and agribusinesses have been fighting that effort.

The bill, which gets its first hearing Wednesday afternoon in the House Regulatory Reform & Economic Development Subcommittee, is an astonishingly anti-worker piece of legislation.

GOP voter-fraud crackdown overwhelmingly targets minorities, Democrats

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 12-24-2023]

Black and Hispanic people made up more than 75 percent of defendants and Democrats nearly 60 percent in a controversial push by Republicans to prosecute election cheating, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by The Washington Post.

From Resentment Politics To Vengeance Politics—a Guest Post By Zoe Roberts

[downwithtyranny.com 12-25-2023]

In the last fifteen years, our political landscape has shifted dramatically. We’ve seen resentment politics, obstructionism based on tribal identity and now we’re confronted with the very real possibility of what I call “vengeance politics.”

In many ways vengeance politics is the natural evolution of resentment politics, which can be loosely defined as the grievance politically toward another group of people. Katherine Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison did an excellent job defining its impact on our politics through her field work throughout the State of Wisconsin. She found that rural communities have a resentment toward urban dwellers. Essentially documenting what many call the rural/urban divide.

Where vengeance politics differs is in that it’s about the response to a group not getting their way. Examples include, losing an election, losing a referendum vote, having a bill vetoed, and lashing out at peaceful protestors. Where resentment politics doesn’t include the threat of violence or actual violence is where vengeance politics differs and does….

14th Amendment

There are five judicial opinions out of Colorado on this Trump ballot thing

Jarvis [ThreadReader, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-26-2023]

“I think SCOTUS will reverse the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, and will largely follow the dissent of Justice Samour. I think the SCOTUS decision will be either 9-0 or 7-2…. The trial court held that Section 3 did not apply to the President, and the trial court might be right. Justice Samour did not need to resolve that issue, though [in dissent]… Because of Section FIVE of the 14th Amendment. That section says hey — you know the whole insurrection thing we just talked about? How is this supposed to work? Who gets to decide who engaged in an insurrection? What sort of standard of proof applies? Is it a civil trial or a criminal trial? Is it a judge or a jury or someone else who decides that a particular person engaged in insurrection and therefore disqualified? What if they’re already appointed – do they still get paid while the proceedings are going on? The 14th amendment doesn’t answer any of these questions. Instead, Section 5 says that Congress gets to pass legislation to give enforcement power to carry out Section 3… And Congress did just that! Justice Samour points out that in 1870, Congress passed a law that allowed for both civil and criminal enforcement of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.”

The Meaning and Ambiguity of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment (PDF)

Kurt Lash, SSRN, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-26-2023]

[N]one of the multiple drafts of Section Three addressed whether the text could be enforced in the absence of congressional enabling legislation. Instead, key framers insisted that the text was not self-executing. For example, drafting committee member Thaddeus Stevens explained that Congress would have to pass enabling legislation since the Joint Committee’s draft of Section Three ‘will not execute itself.’… As far as enabling legislation is concerned, every time the subject arose the speak speaker presumed the necessity of such legislation. This was publicly announced understanding of Thaddeus Stevens, the view of Thomas Chalfant in the Pennsylvania ratifying debates, the view of Chief Justice Chase in Griffin’s Case, and the view of Lyman Trumbull during the passage of the 1869 Enforcement Act. I have not discovered a single person who thought the text was self-executing and capable of disqualifying a candidate prior to some kind of adjudication. It would have been surprising to find otherwise, given the Republican commitment to due process–a concern reflected in the opening section of the Fourteenth Amendment itself.”

The Non-Originalist Decision That May Save Trump

Adrian Vermeule [The New Digest, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-28-2023]

The irony looming over the situation is that our current Court, stocked with a supermajority of Justices who consider themselves ‘originalists,’ may well end up ruling in Trump’s favor on the basis of a precedent that is profoundly non-originalist in method. Indeed that precedent, Griffin’s Case, decided in 1869, underscores what I have called ‘the paradox of originalism.’ Today’s originalists look backwards to anchor the meaning of law in the public understandings of earlier eras — either the founding era or, in the case of the Reconstruction Amendments, the post-Civil War era. But the public legal cultures, and public understandings of law, of those periods were not themselves originalist…. [Chief Justice Salmon P.] Chase held [in Griffin] that the disqualification embodied in Section 3 is not ‘self-executing.’ … Chase argued, in essence, that the consequences to the constitutional order from holding Section 3 to be self-executing would be intolerable, creating a kind of political-legal chaos and inflicting forms of targeted injustice inconsistent with the “general spirit of the Constitution.” Avoiding such consequences was itself a good legal reason to weight the scales of interpretation against self-execution…..

“Interpreting Section 3 as non-self-executing would be a far more reasonable construction, Chase argued, because it would require Congress to create an orderly, regular and fair process for determining who had or had not participated or engaged in ‘insurrection.'” Chase concluded: “To accomplish this ascertainment and ensure effective results, proceedings, evidence, decisions, and enforcements of decisions, more or less formal, are indispensable; and these can only be provided for by Congress.'” • Well worth a read. Makes clear why the “self-executing” crowd pounds the table so hard when it comes to Griffen.

Some belated thoughts on the Colorado Supreme Court’s historic ruling

Roger Parloff [ThreadReader, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-28-2023]

[Lamber Strether: ”A long thread, well worth a read. The author is a Senior editor at Lawfare. so clearly an expert in the field.’]

The Colorado Court’s Ruling Banning Trump From the Ballot Is Sharp as Hell

Elie Mystal. [The New Republic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-26-2023]

“[Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment] doesn’t say ‘convicted’ of insurrection…. It says what it says: Government officers who engage in insurrection cannot be officers of the government again. Donald Trump engaged in insurrection. That’s not me saying it, or Jack Smith saying it; that’s what the first court to hear this case, the Colorado state court, ruled at trial a few weeks ago.”

The Liberal Plot Against Democracy

Samuel Moyn, Compass, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-26-2023]

“An equally grave concern is what happens in the short and long run when self-styled democrats refuse the grubbiness of democracy itself. I suspect the backlash to constitutionally disqualifying Trump would be enormous. If that happens, it isn’t clear “our democracy” will survive the storm into which a Colorado court might just have piloted the ship of state. Regardless, it would be a strange way of responding to the most plausible truth—among so many baleful lies—that Trump has stood for: that America’s ongoing crisis is a result of elite failure, which is never going to be addressed so long as popular control of politics is seen as worth circumventing, rather than reclaiming.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 24, 2023

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday December 26, 2023 · 8:27 AM PST

2023/12/26 · 08:27

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 24, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

14th Amendment

Why 14th Amendment bars Trump from office: A constitutional law scholar explains principle behind Colorado Supreme Court ruling

Mark A. Graber [The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-20-2023]

“Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion.’ Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose. Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government. What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.”

Donald Trump blocked from appearing on presidential primary ballot by Colorado Supreme Court

[Colorado Sun, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

Chief Justice Boatright: “The framework that (Colorado’s election law) offers for identifying qualified candidates is not commensurate with the extraordinary determination to disqualify a candidate because they engaged in insurrection against the Constitution.” [Boatright] said the plaintiffs relied on the ‘breakneck pace’ required in Colorado’s election laws to pursue Trump’s disqualification and that they ‘overwhelmed the process.’ ‘This speed comes with consequences, namely, the absence of procedures that courts, litigants, and the public would expect for complex constitutional litigation,’ Boatright added.” Justice Samour called the challenge ‘a square constitutional peg that could not be jammed into our election code’s round hole’ and labeled the district court proceedings a ‘procedural Frankenstein’ for not following the strict deadlines in state election law.” Berkenkotter: “Three days to appeal a district court’s order regarding a challenge to a candidate’s age? Sure. But a challenge to whether a former President engaged in insurrection by inciting a mob to breach the Capitol and prevent the peaceful transfer of power? I am not convinced this is what the General Assembly had in mind.”

The Colorado Supreme Court Got It Right

Matt Ford, December 20, 2023 [The New Republic]

Critics of the court’s ruling are breezily dismissing the notion there should be any legal accountability for Trump’s actions on January 6….

Most abhorrent to me is the idea that Trump shouldn’t be disqualified—even if disqualification would be legally and constitutionally valid, as Chait conceded for the purposes of his argument—simply because Trump supporters do not like it. This is precisely the reasoning that got us into this situation in the first place. Trump and a few thousand of his supporters gathered in Washington on January 6, 2021, because they thought their beliefs mattered more than the Constitution.

Other counterarguments have come from the likes of Erickson, a conservative commentator who promised some sort of retribution against Democrats for the Colorado ruling. “A court that did not put the man on trial and who has not been convicted of a crime related to an insurrection,” he wrote on Twitter. “You people will regret this. Kamala [Harris] raised money for BLM activists who burned down cities. It is so obvious where this heads.”….

If the threat here is that Republicans will use false and disingenuous legal attacks on their political opponents, then it’s not really a threat at all. The birtherism that more than a few conservatives indulged in during Obama’s first term already met that threshold. So does the free-floating impeachment inquiry that Republicans are trying to find a reason to open against Joe Biden. So did the Supreme Court lawsuit by multiple Republican-led states to strip Biden of Electoral College votes based on false claims of voter fraud. It’s not a deterrent if you’re going to do it anyway….

But as a civic and political matter, the disqualification question is actually pretty easy. Trump summoned a mob to attack Congress to illegally keep himself in power on January 6. He broke his oath of office and tried to overturn an election by force. When you try to destroy the American constitutional order, Section 3 says that you forfeit the right to hold office under it. I understand why Trump’s supporters might resist those conclusions. What baffles me is when people who think that Trump is a danger to the republic refuse to treat him like one.

[TW: There are a number of “liberals” and anti-Trumpers who profess themselves appalled by the ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court. Their opinions are a study in the philosophical inability of liberalism to oppose conservatism, and the authoritarianism conservatism leads to. One prominent line of argument is that Trump has not been convicted of inssurection, so the Article 3 prohibition does not apply.

[To which I respond: Jefferson Davis was never convicted of treason. Are you willing to argue that therefore Davis did not commit treason?

[A reply I actually received:

Did you miss the civics lesson that describes a core principle of American jurisprudence, “innocent until proven guilty?” And the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt?

Had you bothered checking (I take umbrage at being made to do research that the commenter should have made before engaging in assertions), US authorities dithered as to how to charge Jefferson Davis. And Davis thought he has a path to vindication:

President Andrew Johnson’s cabinet was unsure what to do with Davis. They considered trying him by military court for war crimes—his alleged involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or the mistreatment of Union prisoners of war at Andersonville Prison— but could not find any reliable evidence directly linking Davis to either. In late summer 1865, Attorney General James Speed determined that it was best to try Davis for treason in a civil criminal trial. In June 1866, the House of Representatives passed a resolution by a vote of 105 to 19 to put Davis on trial for treason. Davis also desired a trial to vindicate his actions. His defense lawyer, Charles O’Conor wanted to argue that Davis did not commit treason because he was no longer a citizen of the United States when Mississippi left the United States.[288] The trial was to be held in Richmond, which might be sympathetic to Davis, and an acquittal could be interpreted as validating the constitutionality of secession.

[All true, but the question I posed remains unanswered: Are you willing to argue that therefore Davis did not commit treason? In fact, even if there had been a trial of Davis, AND even if he had been acquitted, it is simply not credible to argue that Davis had not committed treason by acting as president of the Confederacy. An acquittal of Davis of the charge of treason would only be a miscarriage of justice, or the result of fear of possible political repercussions, or fear of a renewal of armed hostilities, or at the very least, a result of bureaucratic and political fecklessness. An acquittal of Davis in an actual trial for treason would not eliminate, an should not be allowed to obviate, the historical record created by Davis’s actions and words. Only Davis would have thought he had been vindicated, and anyone else who thought he had been vindicated, would have ensured that the Union dead had indeed died in vain. Even if there had been a dutiful adherence to “due process,” Davis would have remained unacceptable for filling the post of President of the United States.

[Al Capone was never tried for being a gangster and a murderer. Capone was convicted and jailed for tax evasion. Are we therefore to believe that Capone was never a gangster and a murderer?

[A few days later on the same site, someone else posted the comments of Fox commentator Jesse Waters, Are Democrats hoping to start a second Civil War? [FOX, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

”Five years after the Civil War, pro-slavery Democrats filled the halls of Congress, and 15 years later, pro-slavery Confederates actually flipped the House – 51 former Confederate soldiers or officials were elected into office. Even the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, an arch secessionist, landed a seat in Congress. Another Confederate rebel, Lucius Lamar – great name – who literally drafted the Missouri secession plan, went on to serve as interior secretary and was later appointed to the Supreme Court. But how is that possible? Because all week we’ve been hearing how the Constitution bans insurrectionists from office. The 14th Amendment. How would Confederate soldiers be allowed to serve in government, but not Donald Trump?”

[According to this second poster, this effectively answers the Jefferson Davis question. I vehemently disagree. In fact, I argue that the historical record of former Confederates being allowed back into positions of power — the failure of Reconstruction, the reestablishment of white supremacy in the Confederate states, and the century-long pain and humiliation of African Americans under Jim Crow — fully vindicates the views and wisdom of intents of the Radical Republicans, who wanted a ruthless application of justice imposed vindictively on all former Confederate leaders.

[I’m not sure why these people are so willing to accept that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal, despite there never having been such finding in a legal proceeding with due process, or that Israel is now engaging in war crimes in Gaza, but are freaking out that Trump is being sanctioned as an insurrectionist. 2 Corinthians 3:6

[The lesson in all this is how difficult it is for a justice system to actually deliver justice. And note that we would not have arrive here if not for the nearly century old campaign by rich reactionaries to roll back the New Deal and the legal protections extended to working people. Abortion was ginned up as a wedge issue by Richard Viguerie to line up christianist evangelical votes for the (anti)Republican Party. So were gun “rights” and the second Amendment. Nearly 90 years of “feeding red meat to the base” and now liberals are squeamish about treating Trump as an insurrectionist. The whole history of the conservative movement is a record of opposing the most basic tenets of the American republic — promoting the General Welfare, mandated as a purpose at the very beginning of the Constitution itself. But “none dare call it treason.”]

Is It Too Harsh A Punishment To Hang High-Ranking Coup Plotters Against The U.S. Government?

Howie Klein, December 18, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

BLOOD MONEY: THE TOP TEN POLITICIANS TAKING THE MOST ISRAEL LOBBY CASH

[MintPress, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-2023]

The Cost of Bearing Witness

Chris Hedges, December 23, 2023

Writing and photographing in wartime are acts of resistance, acts of faith. They affirm the belief that one day - a day the writers, journalists and photographers may never see - the words and images will evoke empathy, understanding, outrage and provide wisdom. They chronicle not only the facts, although facts are important, but the texture, sacredness and grief of lives and communities lost. They tell the world what war is like, how those caught in its maw of death endure, how there are those who sacrifice for others and those who do not, what fear and hunger are like, what death is like. They transmit the cries of children, the wails of grief of the mothers, the daily struggle in the face of savage industrial violence, the triumph of their humanity through filth, sickness, humiliation and fear. This is why writers, photographers and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war — including the Israelis — for obliteration. They stand as witnesses to evil, an evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten. They expose the lies. They condemn, even from the grave, their killers. Israel has killed at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers along with at least 67 journalists and media workers in Gaza, and three in Lebanon since Oct. 7….

...the professor and poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed, along with Refaat’s brother, sister and her four children, in an airstrike on his sister’s apartment building in Gaza on Dec. 7. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said that Alareer was deliberately targeted, “surgically bombed out of the entire building.” His killing came after weeks of “death threats that Refaat received online and by phone from Israeli accounts.” He had moved to his sister’s because of the threats.

Refaat, whose doctorate was on the metaphysical poet John Donne, wrote a poem in November, called “If I Must Die,” which became his last will and testament. It has been translated into numerous languages. A reading of the poem by the actor Brian Cox has been viewed almost 30 million times….

I was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. The peasant farmers and their families, living in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate the Massacre of the Innocents.

“Why is this such an important day?” I asked.

“It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered.

The Christmas story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world — the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups — who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.

Chris Hedges: The Death of Israel

[ScheerPost, December 17, 2023]

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy….

You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline….

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2023]

Israelis, when speaking in Hebrew, are often far more candid and truthful about the real goals of Israel in Gaza than their American supporters in both parties are: https://t.co/2gFY7SmLQ5
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 20, 2023

Would Israel Be Any Different Without Netanyahu?

[Haaretz, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-2023]

CIA’s chief spy William Burns emerges as key figure in Hamas hostage crisis

[Straits Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

[TW: According to the biography on Wikipedia, “Burns allegedly had three scheduled meetings with Jeffrey Epstein in 2014, according to 'documents' and 'calendars' in their possession. At the time, Burns was deputy secretary of state, and Epstein had already plead guilty to the charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18.” Refer to Ian Welsh, November 22, 2023, Many Politicians Support Israeli Genocide Because They’re Being Blackmailed. This is the director of the CIA who is stuck in the web. ]

List of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates named in lawsuit must be unsealed, judge rules. Here are details on the document release.

[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-2023]

[TW: I have not seen any discussion of what Israeli and British intelligence did to replace Epstein/Maxwell. I’m sure there still are other om going operations that serve the same intelligence collecting and blackmail purposes as the Epstein/Maxwell pedophile operation.]

How Many Times Was Trump On Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express? Will It Matter To Any MAGAts?

Howie Klein, December 20, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

One-State Solution

[Harpers, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

Saïd had understood that Oslo was a ploy that would mark “the end of the peace process,” rather than progress toward a Palestinian state. Like I.F. Stone, his unorthodox point of view earned him attacks from his Arab compatriots, supported by President Clinton, whom Saïd described as “a twentieth-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance.”

The Oslo Accords provided no agreement on the status of Jerusalem; no curbs on illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza; no recognition of Palestinian sovereignty. What were the accords for if not for the construction of a weak and corrupt government of seven disconnected enclaves under Israeli stewardship? Arafat ended up banning Saïd’s books in his strongholds, and Saïd ended up adopting I.F. Stone’s ideal: “the one-state solution.”

Absurd? Utopian? Not more so than “the two-state solution,” which has become a cynical trap advocated by hypocrites. No matter what, Arabs and Jews intermingle demographically–there are already 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. No other practical solution appears to be within sight. Where are the Stones and Saïds of our day to provide us with realistic and principled points of view? Who is there to reach out to across this bloody trench?

Global power shift

SCOTT RITTER AND LARRY JOHNSON JOIN ON UKRAINE’S WOES, ISRAEL OUT OF CONTROL, PLUS MORE! (podcast)

Danny Haiphong [via Naked Capitalism 12-23-2023]

[TW: Ritter details new weapons technologies and the collapse of USA military power beginning around ten minutes after the one hour mark. Especially important is Ritters analysis of how the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have demonstrated that even with carrier groups present, the US cannot protect the Strait of Hormuz from Iran. ]

Chinese scholar Jiang Ping, who helped lay legal foundation for market economy, dies at 93

[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2023]

Megatrends: The Collapse of Global Democracy

[The Issue, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-2023]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Have wages “really” increased since before the pandemic?

[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-2023]

Wall Street private equity vultures are getting hit by high debt costs

[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 12-19-2023]

The Robber Barons of Prison Tech

[Slate, via The Big Picture 12-17-2023]

Meet the name-changing, monopoly-holding, profit-raking companies that control what it’s like to be in prison.

Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away

[New Yorker, via The Big Picture 12-17-2023]

A draconian legal doctrine called felony murder has put thousands of Americans—disproportionately young and Black—in prison.

Enshittification: A Monopoly Story

Cory Doctorow [Real Progressives Substack, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2023]

Why the U.S. steel industry is dying

Noah Smith [Noahpinion, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

When economists shut off your water

[Africa is a Country, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2023]

Eight Wall Street Mega Banks Have Teamed Up to Run Television Ads in a Bogus Scare Campaign

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, December 11, 2023 [Wall Street on Parade]

During the Sunday, December 10 news program on CNN, “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash,” a deceptive, scare-mongering TV commercial popped up, warning that federal banking regulators’ proposed plan to require the mega banks on Wall Street to hold more capital against their riskiest trading activities “will increase the cost of mortgages and car payments” and “hurt small businesses, making it harder for them to access credit, meet payroll and run their operations.” The ad featured images of a farmer on his tractor, an auto mechanic, a worried small business owner, and other emotion-packed images. Wall Street On Parade has been warning our readers for weeks about this deceptive campaign by the Wall Street mega banks….

Building a Giant: Mapping UnitedHealth’s consumption of our health care system—from the ’70s to today

Krista Brown, Sara Sirota, December 20, 2023 [The American Prospect]

Oligarchy

The Rich Have all the “Excess” Cash Now (excerpt)

[The Overshoot, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

Billionaires Turn to Legal Bribery in Quest to Build Utopia

[The Daily Beast, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

The University of Phoenixification of Elite Education

Maureen Tkacik, December 22, 2023 [American Prospect]

Under Apollo’s stewardship, the University of Phoenix shut down 80 associate degree programs and closed, sold, or made plans to shutter all but one of its more than 200 physical campuses and mini-campuses worldwide. It whittled its full-time faculty to just 127 full-time instructors for 96,000 students. It agreed to pay Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission $191 million to settle a deceptive practices lawsuit, and was the subject of more than 3,000 consumer complaints to the FTC between 2017 and the beginning of 2021, along with over 73,000 borrower defense to repayment claims to the Department of Education. It appointed its third president in a single year after the DOE launched an investigation into the role of its newly appointed president in the collapse of his last online university. And it reported a six-year graduation rate of 26.2 percent.

But for Rowan, the University of Phoenix overhaul was a glorious success. The Apollo fund that acquired the online school extracted about $1 billion in dividends during the first four years of its investment, despite the unprecedented tens of billions of dollars in student loans the Biden administration has canceled on behalf of students of virtually every shady for-profit online college other than University of Phoenix. Apollo then brokered the aforementioned lucrative agreement to double its initial investment by selling the school to the University of Idaho, though state attorney general Raúl Labrador has sued to block that purchase, arguing the deal was hashed out in secret meetings that violated state law. (The university has demanded $2,400 from a local education website to comply with open records requests it filed to learn more about the transaction.)

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-20-2023]

It’s not an American problem or (mostly) a Biden-specific problem. Biden is trying to hold together a coalition of those who want populism and those who despise the public. They hate each other. This is a global dynamic. https://t.co/DwJ4clHwML
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 19, 2023

COVID

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-20-2023]

I had a chat with a woman yesterday who described a car crash she had been in the day before.
"I didn't understand it. We were just driving along the road here, and the driver of the car looked straight at us and pulled out straight into our car."
— tern (@1goodtern) December 17, 2023

How a well-timed legal assault unraveled Mississippi’s stellar record in vaccinating kids

[NBC, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2023]

“Mississippi was forced to grant religious exemptions from vaccines.”

Restoring balance to the economy

The Billionaires Tax Is Back: Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has a plan to make the ultrarich pay.

Grace Segers, December 21, 2023 [The New Republic]

New Merger Guidelines Quietly Reshape the Business Landscape: It just got much harder for companies to buy up their competitors.

Luke Goldstein, December 19, 2023 [The American Prospect]

This week, the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission released the final version of the new Merger Guidelines, first announced earlier this summer.

The legal document amounts to a new corporate charter for American commerce that sends a clear message: In order to grow, companies will have to focus on investing in product, innovation, and job quality instead of relying on acquiring competitors through mergers and acquisitions. It is a significant accomplishment for antitrust regulators that restores their ability to enforce the laws as originally intended by Congress, which had been hemmed in by previous versions of the guidelines….

Specifically, the guidelines outline several new categories of anti-competitive harms that hadn’t previously been a primary focus of antitrust reviews. Those include vertical mergers where a firm acquires companies that are not direct head-to-head competitors in order to integrate operations across multiple lines of business. Vertical integration in health care, for example, has been a common practice where insurers, hospitals, and pharmacies are all owned by the same conglomerate.

Creating new economic potential - science and technology

Tiny biobots surprise their creators by healing wound

[FreeThink, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-2023]

Tiny “biobots” made from human windpipe cells encouraged damaged neural tissue to repair itself in a lab experiment — potentially foreshadowing a future in which creations like this patrol our bodies, healing damage, delivering drugs, and more.

The Sahara Desert Used To Be a Green Savannah and New Research Explains Why

[The Wire, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2023]

This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified over 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.

These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganisation of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper-arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.

As a team of climate modellers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.

We identified why North Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession – the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

The coming dystopia will be a robust public-private partnership

WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2023]

Google to pay $700 million to US states, consumers in app store settlement

[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-19-2023]

“Google has agreed to pay $700 million and make several other concessions to settle allegations that it had been stifling competition against its Android app store — the same issue that went to trial in another case that could result in even bigger changes. Although Google struck the deal with state attorneys general in September, the settlement’s terms weren’t revealed until late Monday in documents filed in San Francisco federal court. The disclosure came a week after a federal court jury rebuked Google for deploying anticompetitive tactics in its Play Store for Android apps. The settlement with the states includes $630 million to compensate U.S. consumers funneled into a payment processing system that state attorneys general alleged drove up the prices for digital transactions within apps downloaded from the Play Store. That store caters to the Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones. Like Apple does in its iPhone app store, Google collects commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app purchases — fees that state attorneys general contended drove prices higher than they would have been had there been an open market for payment processing. Those commissions generated billions of dollars in profit annually for Google, according to evidence presented in the recent trial focused on its Play Store.”

Rite Aid banned from using facial recognition software after falsely identifying shoplifters

[TechCrunch, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-21-2023]

2024’s public domain is a banger

Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-21-2023]

“They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped. First in 1976, and then again in 1998, Congress retroactively extended copyright’s duration by 20 years, for all works, including works whose authors were unknown and long dead, whose proper successors could not be located. Many of these authors were permanently erased from history as every known copy of their works disappeared before they could be brought back into our culture through reproduction, adaptation and re-use (copyright is “strict liability,” meaning that even if you pay to clear the rights to a work from someone who has good reason to believe they control those rights, if they’re wrong, you are on the hook as an infringer, and the statutory damages run to six figures). Works that are still in our cultural currents 50 or 70 or 90 years after their creation are an infinitesimal fraction of all the works we create as a species. But these works are – by definition – extraordinarily important to our culture. The creators who made these works were able to plunder a rich public domain of still-current works as inputs to their own enduring creations. The slow-motion arson attack on the public domain meant that two generations of creators were denied the public domain that every other creator in the history of the human race had enjoyed.”

Democrats' political malpractice

John Fetterman Exits the Progressive Coalition

[Political Currents by Ross Barkan, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-20-2023]

”Fetterman is in the first year of a six-year term. He has time to repair relations with progressives or sever ties altogether. At this point, the latter is rapidly happening anyway. For the Pennsylvania activist class, Fetterman is increasingly persona non grata. Since he also needs to appeal to centrists and Israel-supporting Jews in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metropolitan areas, he might not care at all. If he does go down this path, though, he’ll have to find a new way to raise cash and wrangle volunteers. There are many young people who showed up to canvass for Fetterman 2022 that will not bother for Fetterman 2028. They’ll have long memories—and other heroes by then.”

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-21-2023]

Pandemic aid was the largest social program of the last 60 years. The kind of thing Dems promised voters for decades.

They dismantled it the first chance they got.

People who didn’t benefit from the aid refuse to understand how deeply alienating that was. It broke a spell. https://t.co/MQw4FN0TvI
— Decorum Disassembly - mas.to/@decorummanager (@DecorumManager) December 21, 2023

Biden said to be increasingly frustrated by dismal poll numbers

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-19-2023]

“After pardoning a pair of turkeys, an annual White House tradition, Biden delivered some stern words for the small group assembled: His poll numbers were unacceptably low and he wanted to know what his team and his campaign were doing about it. He complained that his economic message had done little to move the ball, even as the economy was growing and unemployment was falling, according to people familiar with his comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation…. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who is running for the state’s open Senate seat, has expressed concern to allies that she may not be able to win her race if Biden is at the top of the ticket, according to people familiar with the conversations. A spokesman for Slotkin’s campaign said she “ooks forward to running with President Biden.'” Slotkin is, of course, a CIA Democrat. Hmmm. More: “‘The Republican primary could end quickly, and the general election could begin in weeks, not months,’ said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist. ‘Given Trump’s noisiness and his ability to bully his way through the daily information wars, I think it’s really important that the Biden campaign move into general election mode as soon as possible. We’re not where we want to be. Some of our coalition is wandering and we need to go get them back.'”

The Alarming Calm of the Biden Campaign

[New York Magazine, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-19-2023]

“Early this fall, [Jim] Messina, who talks regularly with members of Biden’s inner circle, distributed a 22-slide deck that he hoped would send a message to concerned Democrats — or, as he termed them to Politico, the ‘f*cking bed-wetters.’ He acknowledged that the race would be close but looked to ratchet nerves down by arguing that Biden has at least four credible avenues to victory in the Electoral College. One is simply to replicate the 2020 map for 303 electoral votes. This was not easy to do the first time around and may be harder to pull off again; Biden flipped Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and became the first Democrat to win Arizona and Georgia in decades. A second path is narrower: Biden could win exactly the necessary 270 by carrying those midwestern ‘blue wall’ states — even if he concedes Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada. A third route is the reverse of the second one, a ‘Sunbelt strategy’ that would net 275. The fourth option calls for replicating 2022’s Senate-race results, dropping Wisconsin and North Carolina but winning the other battlegrounds for 293. The hard part is that no two of these states require the same winning formula, not even the ones that tend to swing together or that look demographically similar from afar.”

(anti)Republican Party

Mike Johnson Is the Christian Nationalist We Should Have Seen Coming

Melissa Gira Grant, December 20, 2023 [The New Republic]

look to Johnson’s membership in the Council for National Policy, an influential conservative group regarded as a kingmaker. Members of CNP are forbidden from telling anyone outside the group that they are a member. Their executive director recently told The Washington Post that the group doesn’t “do anything.” Its aim, as laid out in its vision statement, is to create a “united conservative movement” that can “[restore] religious and economic freedom, a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.” Journalist Anne Nelson, author of the book on the Council for National Policy, Shadow Network, has described them as “the secret hub of the radical right.” She has also described Johnson as their “creation.”

Leaked CNP membership lists have included a who’s who of the far- and farther-right: anointer of conservative judges Leonard Leo; Clarence Thomas’s conspiracy theorist spouse, Ginni Thomas; and longtime Christian-right leadership figures like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Michael Farris of Alliance Defending Freedom (that’s the group that had employed Johnson, where he could put his “legal ministry” to work). Such members reportedly meet in secret three times each year, often in Ritz-Carlton hotels. They are joined by lesser-known members too, some who have been current or former leadership in the John Birch Society, the neo-Confederate group League of the South, and the violent anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. Josh Duggar, of the fundamentalist reality television–starring Duggar family, has been a member, while working for the Family Research Council. Mike Johnson was photographed with Duggar at a 2014 campaign event. In 2021, Duggar was convicted of possessing child sexual abuse material.

Texas’s Middle Finger to the Federal Government—and the Constitution

Matt Ford, December 21, 2023 [The New Republic]

Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill this week declaring that the state will enforce federal immigration laws within its own borders. Even the Supreme Court may find that to be a bridge too far.

Billionaire Gifts To Thomas: Generosity Or Taxable Income?

[The Lever, December 22, 2023

If billionaires’ largesse was designed to keep the justice on the high court, experts say the money could be considered a taxable payment.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 17, 2023

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday December 18, 2023 · 9:45 AM PST

2023/12/18 · 09:45

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 17, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Oligarchs' war on the experiment of republican self-government

Constitution in the Crosshairs: The Far Right’s Plan for a New Confederacy

Nancy Maclean, Arn Pearson, December 11, 2023 [progressive.org, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2023]

Frustrated by the surprise defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, a group of breathtakingly rich and highly strategic actors on the radical right, including the Koch brothers, quietly launched an ambitious new campaign to lock in their political control once and for all. They had used their immense wealth and institution-building savvy to capture a majority of state legislatures in 2010, so the groundwork was already in place.

This campaign would be spearheaded by a corporate pay-to-play group they had long funded to influence state laws—the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—and a dark money group with deep ties to Charles and the late David Koch (who died in 2019), as well as the Tea Party movement—Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG). When legislators arrived at ALEC’s annual meeting in August 2013, they were given detailed instructions and model text to bring back to their statehouses for a resolution demanding the first Constitutional convention since 1787….

In the decade since those first secretive meetings, Meckler’s Convention of States has managed to rack up wins in nineteen states for a convention that would address sweeping proposals to radically curtail the powers of the federal government. ALEC-led groups also claim to have twenty-eight states behind their call for a more limited convention to propose a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Should a convention be convened, what is it that the ultra-rich backers want? Their chosen so-called grassroots leaders mince no words when speaking to friendly audiences. Meckler has declared that the purpose is “to reverse 115 years of progressivism.” In fact, the endgame is even more consequential: to return this nation to its pre-Constitution roots under the Articles of Confederation, with a weak central government and sovereign states….

Indeed, most of what ALEC, CSG, and their billionaire backers want to achieve flies in the face of public opinion. And that’s what makes their plan so devious. “Voters have no role to play in the right’s vision of a Constitutional convention,” a report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) concluded. Delegates would be handpicked by legislative leaders, and here’s the kicker: The votes taken at such a convention would be based not on population but on one vote per state in order to grossly underrepresent the majority of Americans.

In audio obtained by CMD, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, told an ALEC audience in 2021 how this strategy could be used to circumvent what most Americans want. “Because their [Democrats’] population is concentrated and ours isn’t,” Santorum said, “rural voters [Republicans] . . . actually have an outsized power granted under this process.”

He added, “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though . . . we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

[TW: The most disconcerting aspect of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza is not the brutality and inhumanity of it, or the shamelessness of Israeli officials, but the complete lack of any plan or even proposal for a constructive alternative to the killing and destruction.

[Israeli leaders are clearly intent on driving Palestinians out of Gaza. And they say they will not accept a Palestinian state. But a Palestinian state is the only humane solution. Whether or not a Palestinian state will include Gaza and the West Bank is, at this point, entirely subject to Israeli intransigence.

[Palestinians must be given hope for building a better future, otherwise they can never be expected to be peaceful. Give them a chunk of Sinai and the resources to begin building new farms, villages, and cities, new schools, universities, and hospitals, and they will soon enough cease harboring a hatred for the state of Israel. They will be too busy building a new future to listen to jihadists who want to exterminate Israel. This is the only true way to lasting peace.

[The only place for a Palestinian state, given Israeli intransigence, is the Sinai. The Egyptian government has very good reasons to oppose the displacement of over two million Palestinians into a peninsula that currently is home to only 600,000. But if the international community can summon the will, it is possible to offer Egypt much, much more than the complete forgiveness of its $160 billion in debt.

[Gathering $1 trillion to create a new state of Palestine in Sinai would also force a break with the bankers dictatorship that has enforced neoliberal austerity on the world’s poor countries for three quarters of a century. Over $30 trillion is sitting in hot money centers around the world. Impose a mere one percent tax on those holdings world wide and you have a third of what’s needed. The oil rich Middle East countries can surely come up with another third. That leaves some $330 billion to be provided by the rest of the world. By contrast, the US has already provided $111 billion in weapons, equipment, humanitarian assistance and other aid to Ukraine. ]

John D. Liu's journey to the Sinai

[The Weather Makers, YouTube, 2019]

YouTube Video

[TW: John Dennis Liu is a Chinese American film-maker and ecologist who helped establish the CBS News bureau in Beijing in 1981. In 1995 he began documenting the Chinese government’s reclamation and rehydration of the Loess Plateau, a 35,000 square kilometer area slightly larger than the state of Maryland. The Loess Plateau is adjacent to the Gobi Desert. The video features footage of areas in the Loess Plateau before and after rehydration, showing the dramatic changes, including the successful establishment of vegetation corridors to protect roads in shifting deserts. ]

Regreening the Sinai : Ties van der Hoeven of the Weathermakers

[Climate Water Project, YouTube, February 2023]

YouTube Video

Egypt Needs Cash and Gaza War Gives World New Reasons to Help Out

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

...Israel’s war with Hamas has put Egypt center-stage. It’s the only gateway for aid to reach Gaza, and besieged Palestinians to escape. It’s a key player in hostage talks that allowed a truce after six weeks of fighting. Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the former army chief set to be re-elected as president in a barely contested vote next week, is suddenly high on the must-visit list for global leaders.

Kirby: White House knows two-state solution to Israel-Hamas war ‘elusive,’ not giving up

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2023]

In shift, a top Hamas official floats Israel recognition

[Al Monitor, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2023]

[TW: This is major news, but an internet search showed it is only being covered in some Israeli and Arab media.]

Israel Rejected Peace with Hamas on Five Occasions

Zachary Foster, October 25, 2023 [inkstickmedia.com]

Death and Destruction in Gaza

John Mearsheimer [via Naked Capitalism 12-12-2023]

Half of Gazans Are Starving, Warns UN Food Agency Chief

[yahoo news, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

Israel is mass assassinating medical professionals across Gaza and destroying every possible medical institution and all US legacy media can talk about is college presidents failing to denounce the students protesting this https://t.co/yqJH4Zt2aF
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 9, 2023

Israel’s Netanyahu Rejects U.S. Plan for Postwar Gaza

Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-2023]

Rifts between Biden and Netanyahu spill into public view

[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-2023]

Israel-Hamas war: ‘For the moment, Netanyahu strongly rejects the two-state solution’

[Le Monde, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2023]

Can an Israeli security zone succeed in Gaza when it failed in southern Lebanon?

[Arab News, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-2023]

All of 2024 likely to be spent in ‘war mode’ against Hamas, IDF says

[YNet News, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2023]

“[O]n the ground, the army is amazed every day by how strong Hamas is. It is a real army (…) that was established 50 minutes from Tel Aviv over the past years.”

Jordan’s foreign minister says Israel aiming ‘to empty Gaza of its people

[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2023]

John Mearsheimer: There is no two-state solution Unherd or if you prefer YouTube John Mearsheimer: There is no two-state solution

[via Naked Capitalism 12-16-2023]

Global power shift

China’s economy is now a staggering 22% bigger than America’s, but for differing reasons, neither nation wants to acknowledge this fact

[Eastern Angle

[TW: Only 22%? China has been producing over one billion tons of steel a year for almost a decade. The USA has produced less than 100 million tons a year all that time. And have you seen a map of China’s passenger rail network? China’s economy is probably two or three times larger than USA’s at this point. Especially if you remove “financial services” from the computation of GDP.]

The Clueless American Elite’s View of the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War

Gordon Hahn [Russian & Eurasian Politics, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

The World’s Top Thinkers 2024: ideas for a world on the brink

Prospect Team, December 6, 2023 [Prospect]

America’s undoing

Samuel Moyn, December 6, 2023 [Prospect]

[TW: Moyn is professor of law and history at Yale, and author of Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023) ]

Today, it is clearer than ever that the war in Ukraine is deadlocked. Bogged down by criticisms of mainstream foreign policy and wracked by its record of military quagmires, the US is no longer credible as the lynchpin of freedom and justice worldwide. Gaza has reinforced this conclusion without the carnage-filled wait that Ukraine involved; after Hamas acted, illusory yearnings for restored credibility for US leadership were shattered within days, not months or years. And worse will be to come, if America has put its own democracy on the line even as it has invested in another endless war….

When Trump blindsided Democrats and Republican warmongers alike, who continued to preach the need for the US’s indispensable role amid the haze of one failed war after another, many could still take offence—but they were unceremoniously cast from the circle of power for four years.

Yet instead of prompting a reckoning with how endless war abroad had led to Trump’s unexpected victory, many openly treated Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as providential. According to the New York Times, it provided the cadre of Beltway elites who were perturbed by the immediate past with “a new sense of mission”, and “re-energized Washington’s leadership role in the democratic world just months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan ended 20 years of conflict on a dismal note.”

...The global south doesn’t buy into the revivalist sloganeering of Beltway policymakers chanting about freedom. Of course, it is familiar with being bypassed and ignored. But the Gaza conflict is showing that its misgivings about American beneficence are hitting home with Americans themselves—especially the young. A shift in opinion has thrown American global leadership into doubt.

‘The U.S. May Not Be Coming To Save Us.’ Why, And How, Europe Might Have To Battle Russia By Itself.

[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

Gaza and Ukraine: How the US Risks Losing the Global South

[Antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-2023]

Why China Is Stepping Up Its Maritime Attacks on the Philippines

[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2023]

Hollowed-out superpower

Experts: New Disruptive, Asymmetric Approaches Needed to Rebuild US Advantages

[Air and Space Forces Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

... Quoting from the recent National Defense Industrial Strategy Report, he contended the DIB “‘does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale.” The war in the Ukraine has made the DIB’s deficiencies “obvious and urgent,” he added....

Pentagon Stupidity Is a Design Choice

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

...In August, I wrote up an important shift among antitrust enforcers, in a piece titled “Government Stupidity Is a Design Choice.” In it, I described how the Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division, prompted by Congress, tweaked a form, called the Hart Scott Rodino form, that companies must fill out when they want to engage in any corporate acquisition worth over $100 million….

...the big D.C. and New York corporate law firms that advise all large companies, private equity funds, foreign governments, and large institutions were absolutely furious about the shift. (Here are, for instance, angry notes to clients from Wilmer Hale. Steptoe. Kirkland and Ellis. Dechert. Wilson Sonsini. Sullivan and Cromwell. Covington & Burling. Etc.)….

Oligarchy

World’s Richest Families Got $1.5 Trillion Richer in 2023

[The Morning News, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

That Insufferable Billionaire Tyrannizing Harvard Enriches Himself by Tyrannizing the Bond Market

Timothy Noah, December 15, 2023 [The New Republic]

Bill Ackman, chief executive of the giant hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, is getting a lot of bad press right now for his vicious campaign against Harvard president Claudine Gay, and deservedly so. He’s just about the perfect example of a particular social type: the plutocrat who thinks that being very rich entitles him to run more or less everything.

The United States is populated with many more such preening oligarchs than it was 30 or 40 years ago, because income and wealth are now much more concentrated at the very top. The most stupendously arrogant of them tend to emanate from tech (see Musk, Elon). The Princeton historian David Bell, in a thought-provoking recent essay in Liberties on “The Triumph of Anti-Politics,” judged the Silicon Valley technocrats even more dangerous to democracy than Trumpian MAGA-heads. But Ackman shows that Wall Street financiers are no slouches at this oligarchy game….

Meet all 3,800 graduates of Klaus Schwab’s globalist WEF education programs by name

[Riot Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-16-2023]

The Untold Story of Vienna’s Global Influence

[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2023]

The Revenge Of The Ottoman Empire

[Gavekal, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2023]

[Lambert Strether: Well worth a read for some long-awaited, Arrighi-esque historical and economic perspective on multipolarity (in the Fifteenth Century, and now).]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Corporate America Is Testing the Limits of Its Pricing Power

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 12-12-2023]

Big companies that had previously pushed through one standard price increase per year are now raising prices more frequently. Retailers increasingly use digital price displays, which they can change with the touch of a button. Across the economy, executives trying to maximize profits are effectively running tests to see what prices consumers will bear before they stop buying. Huge disruptions to supply chains pushed up corporate costs during the pandemic and forced many companies to think more creatively about their pricing strategies, Mr. MacKay said. That supercharged a trend toward more rigorous pricing, and showed many companies that they could more boldly play with prices without chasing shoppers away. The experimentation continues even as costs ease.

Hospitals across the country are dumping Medicare Advantage plans and canceling their contracts with insurers

[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

...There’s a new twist to the Medicare Advantage story this year that is slowly seeping out. Hospitals across the country are dumping Medicare Advantage plans and canceling their contracts with insurers, which means their patients must select new plans. The CEO of the Brookings Hospital System in Brookings, South Dakota, Jason Merkley, was one hospital executive willing to speak about the problems with Advantage plans. “The difference between original Medicare and Medicare Advantage is vast," he said, noting that MA plans “pay less, don’t follow medical policy, coverage, billing, and payment rules and procedures, and they are always trying to figure out how to deny payment for services.”

He said his 49-bed hospital is getting 17% less in reimbursement from Advantage plans than the payments from regular Medicare, noting plans used other tactics such as being slow to approve, partially approve or deny medically necessary services. Sometimes they don’t get back to the hospital until after discharge to say they were denying those services, he said. Merkley said the hospital spent “a lot of time and resources to appeal,” adding “we estimated it required three times more labor and expense to collect from Medicare Advantage plans than from traditional Medicare.”

Giant food companies are quietly ruining your favorite snacks — and hoping you don’t notice

[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-14-2023]

“[T]he Coke didn’t taste as good as it used to — and it left a weird aftertaste. I thought there might be something wrong with the can, or perhaps my rosy childhood memories clouded my judgment. But as I indulged my urge, I found the same thing. Even Coke-drinking friends I spoke to agreed: The taste had changed. It wasn’t just Coke; other foods from my childhood taste different now. The Dairy Milk chocolate bars I used to enjoy after school aren’t as creamy and taste too sweet. Lay’s potato chips don’t pack the same flavor punch they used to. A stroll through Reddit shows I’m not alone: Thousands of people have noticed the quality of their favorite snacks getting worse.” Perhaps some other factor is affecting taste? However, texture and mouth feel have degraded as well: “‘Ritz crackers. For some inexplicable reason, maybe around 5 years ago the crackers went from being nice and firm and dippable to nowadays easily crumbling to bits with even the lightest dip,’ one user complained a few years ago. ‘You could bite into a Twix and feel your teeth travel through a heavy layer of caramel,’ another Redditor lamented, adding, ‘Now they snap in half and taste like a sugar cookie with some chocolate on it.'” And: “People aren’t imagining these changes — manufacturers are quietly modifying their recipes to save money and maintain their profit margins. The phenomenon, which has been called ‘skimpflation’ and ‘flavorflation,’ is a way to hide the impact of inflation and avoid passing higher costs on to the consumer. But by replacing expensive ingredients with cheaper ones, companies are also making food less tasty, less healthy, and less satisfying.”

Restoring balance to the economy

FTC opens inquiry of Chevron-Hess merger, marking second review this week of major oil industry deal

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2023]

FCC votes to ban termination fees for cable and satellite services

[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-14-2023]

“The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday voted to pass a measure banning cable and satellite companies from charging early termination fees. ‘Consumers are tired of these junk fees,’ FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said before casting the deciding vote at an open commission meeting. ‘They now have more choices when it comes to video content but these friction-filled tactics to keep us subscribing to our current providers are aggravating and unfair,’ Rosenworcel added. ‘So, today we kick out a rulemaking to put an end to these practices.'”

The war on ‘junk fees’ is gaining ground, but the fight is not yet won

[LA Times, via The Big Picture 12-13-2023]

If you’ve rented a car, bought an airline ticket, booked a hotel room or paid a cable bill, you probably know what the White House is talking about: hidden, surprise charges for services you may not even have used, transaction charges for buying online or downloading a concert ticket instead of picking it up at the box office, etc., etc.

The Telecom Industry Is Very Mad Because The FCC MIGHT Examine High Broadband Prices

[TechDirt, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-12-2023]

“We’ve long noted how the FCC (regardless of party) largely ignores how muted competition and monopolization drives up prices for consumers. The agency often talks a good (if ambiguous) game about ‘bridging the digital divide,’ but they don’t collect and share pricing data proving market failure, nor are they capable of admitting monopolies exist and are harmful in public-facing messaging.,,, Back in November, the agency issued a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) pondering whether they should more seriously analyze the cost of broadband when making those determinations (yes, duh)…. But even the faint possibility of the FCC looking at expensive U.S. broadband has been enough to send telecom lobbyists into a tizzy, with cable lobbying organizations arguing in filings that even asking the question is ‘inappropriate’…. The majority of Americans live under a monopoly or duopoly for broadband access protected by state and federal corruption. This muted competition consistently results in spotty coverage, high prices, slow speeds, and comically terrible customer service. And again, FCC officials can’t even openly admit there’s a monopoly/duopoly problem, much less field concrete solutions to the problem…. The fact that it’s 2023 and the FCC and [National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)] have only fairly recently realized they should be considering affordability in broadband access policy genuinely speaks for itself.”

Climate and environmental crises

How lending-based climate finance is pushing poor countries deeper into debt

[France24, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2023]

‘Small minority’ of nations blocking progress on fossil fuels at COP28, says at-risk Vanuatu

[France24, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2023]

What Ails Offshore Wind: Supply Chains, Ships and Interest Rates

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 12-13-2023]

Government officials and energy developers misjudged the difficulty of building huge clean energy projects in the United States, which has built very few of them.

Why Repairing Your EV Is So Expensive

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture 12-12-2023]

Creating new economic potential - science and technology

Why scientists are making transparent wood

[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-11-2023]

“Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures; and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows…. Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin’s color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains. This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does—a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent. The material the scientists worked with is thin—typically less than a millimeter to around a centimeter thick. But the cells create a sturdy honeycomb structure, and the tiny wood fibers are stronger than the best carbon fibers, says materials scientist Liangbing Hu, who leads the research group working on transparent wood at the University of Maryland in College Park. And with the resin added, transparent wood outperforms plastic and glass: In tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure, transparent wood came out around three times stronger than transparent plastics like Plexiglass and about 10 times tougher than glass. ‘The results are amazing, that a piece of wood can be as strong as glass,’ says Hu, who highlighted the features of transparent wood in the 2023 Annual Review of Materials Research.”

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2023]

ON ALGORITHMIC WAGE DISCRIMINATION

Veena Dubal [Columbia Law Review, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance

[Fast Company, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-2023]

...Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet.

Reader surveillance is a deeply intersectional threat, according to a congressional letter issued last week from a coalition of groups whose interests span civil rights, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and antimonopoly. Our letter calls on federal lawmakers to investigate the harms of tech and publishing corporations’ powerful hold over digital book access.

News Publishers See Google’s AI Search Tool as a Traffic-Destroying Nightmare

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-14-2023]

“Shortly after the launch of ChatGPT, the Atlantic drew up a list of the greatest threats to the 166-year-old publication from generative artificial intelligence. At the top: Google’s embrace of the technology. About 40% of the magazine’s web traffic comes from Google searches, which turn up links that users click on. A task force at the Atlantic modeled what could happen if Google integrated AI into search. It found that 75% of the time, the AI-powered search would likely provide a full answer to a user’s query and the Atlantic’s site would miss out on traffic it otherwise would have gotten.

What was once a hypothetical threat is now a very real one. Since May, Google has been testing an AI product dubbed ‘Search Generative Experience’ on a group of roughly 10 million users, and has been vocal about its intention to bring it into the heart of its core search engine. Google’s integration of AI is crystallizing for media outlets the perils of relying on big technology companies to get their content in front of readers and viewers. Already, publishers are reeling from a major decline in traffic sourced from social-media sites, as both Meta and X, the former Twitter, have pulled away from distributing news. As bad as the social-media downshift is, Google’s generative-AI-powered search is the true nightmare for publishers. Across the media world, Google generates nearly 40% of publishers’ traffic, accounting for the largest share of their ‘referrals,’ according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from measurement firm Similarweb. • “[T]he AI-powered search would likely provide a full answer to a user’s query” because Google stole the publisher’s data for its training sets. That’s the only reason it works. A classic case of “original accumulation,” as the Bearded One puts it.

Democrats' political malpractice

John Fetterman Finally Announces He’s Not the Progressive He Pretended to Be

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, December 15, 2023 [The New Republic]

Replacing Kamala Harris

Thomas Neuburger, December 12, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

by Guy Saperstein

...The mayor and later Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, was a personal friend and political supporter of trial lawyers….

Willie was married and estranged from his wife. It was well-known he had a young — 30 years younger — black girlfriend. He didn't even try to hide it. The girlfriend was Kamala Harris, then a nondescript assistant city attorney. Next thing I knew, Kamala was running for District Attorney, supported by Willie's powerful political machine against the then DA, Terence Hallinan, a progressive. Willie's machine won and Kamala became San Francisco DA.

Next next thing I knew, assistant San Francisco DAs were calling me and asking, “Where is Kamala?” They knew I was a friend of Willie's. Apparently, she wasn't showing up for work.

A few months later, I read that Kamala had been read the riot act by a solid Democratic judge for not maintaining good chain of custody for evidence.… Kamala was hauled before three liberal judges who were outraged by her sloppiness.

A Moral Theory for Why People Don’t Like Bidenomics

Ryan Cooper, December 15, 2023 [The American Prospect]

After all, people do not just view prices as an accounting convenience; they are also thought to carry moral implications, which can be seen in the language of buying and selling itself. A price viewed as acceptable to a buyer is a fair price. If you paid too much for something, you got ripped off. A seller who exploits market conditions to raise prices is gouging the customer.

One might call this a sentiment of market egalitarianism. Prices are morally sound insofar as they are transparent and fair—meaning neither party to a transaction is leveraging some advantage to make a disproportionate, unearned profit. That’s why a really serious violation of price norms, like gas stations that jack up prices after a natural disaster, can spark protests or even violence.

The economist Richard A. Radford once examined this thinking in a famous paper on the economics of a POW camp….

Libertarian economists often mock this kind of thinking. Complaining about unfair prices is simply irrational, they believe, because the market always maximizes utility by letting supply calibrate to demand on its own.

But this is not true even on its own terms, particularly in conditions of inequality or emergency. If the supply of taxis is limited during a time of high demand and high inequality, for instance, it is “rational” in the economic sense for everyone but the rich to prefer taxis be allocated by queuing rather than price, because otherwise the rich (who may not even notice the cost) will get all the taxi rides, and everyone else will be priced out.

This is most evident during wartime. The Roosevelt administration understood during the Second World War that it would be disastrous to let prices float, because the price of goods vital to everyday life like gasoline, rubber, steel, and food would surge upward, harming the citizenry, while randomly well-placed companies would enjoy massive unearned profits. It would have been unfair and would undermine the social solidarity on which necessary wartime sacrifices rested. It also would have been inefficient, because big chunks of economic production would have surged into mega-profits for defense contractors and commodity producers rather than into guns, tanks, and planes.

Trump is overperforming, but there’s a way back for Biden

Stanley Greenberg [Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-13-2023]

“The reason Donald Trump is currently overperforming as an anti-system, anti-immigrant candidate is that Joe Biden hasn’t realised yet the rules of the next US presidential election. The 2024 race is being shaped by three exceptional factors. First, the inflation produced by the economy restarting after the pandemic, supply chain problems, rising energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the high cost of food. Second, heightened anger at profiteering by big companies and increasingly visible monopolies. And third, surging levels of migration caused by wars, political unrest and extreme weather…. So, Trump will overperform as long as almost 60 per cent of voters choose him and the Republicans over Biden and the Democrats on ‘your wages and salary keeping up with the cost of living’, handling ‘crime’ and the ‘border’. And those are three of the top four issues facing the country. When voters hear the Inflation Reduction Act is here ‘to save you money’, that message is welcomed by 52 per cent of voters — seven points above Biden’s vote. The Biden administration is also well placed to talk about profiteering and what it has done to shift power from Wall Street and big corporations. Its appointments to regulatory agencies have made it clear workers have a right to organise, have brought a fresh antitrust lawsuit against Amazon and have issued new guidelines for mergers. And messaging on the economy that begins with the contention that ‘economic power is concentrated in the hands of big banks’ and insists Biden has ‘an agenda to shift power away from corporate giants and corporate executives’ is welcomed by 53 per cent of voters.”

Calls grow for Congress to subpoena Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs despite Democrat ‘stonewalling'

[FOX, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-13-2023]

[“Calls are growing for Congress to subpoena convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs in order to identify possible perpetrators who may have partaken in his sex trafficking ring. In a Monday letter to the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said there were still many unanswered questions surrounding Epstein’s operation, including the identities of “America’s most powerful and well-known people” who may have been involved.”

(anti)Republican Party

Who Exactly Is Paying To End Democracy In America? There Are Actual Bad Guys Worth Naming ...And Shaming

Howie Klein, December 14, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

How Far Has The Fascist "Hungarian Model" Seeped Into The Republican Party?

Howie Klein, December 11, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

Yesterday, Flora Garamvolgyi and David Smith reported that Orbán allies from the the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy are in DC to hold closed-door meetings with Republicans today and tomorrow to map out a strategy to end U.S. aid to Ukraine. The fascist-oriented Heritage Foundation is hosting.

Yet Another State Shuts the Door on Partisan Gerrymandering Complaints

[Bolts Mag, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2023]

Project Veritas CEO Jumps Ship After Finding ‘Evidence of Past Illegality'

[The Daily Beast, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-12-2023]

“Hannah Giles, the CEO of conservative nonprofit Project Veritas, announced her resignation ‘effective immediately’ on Monday, saying she’d unwittingly ‘stepped into an unsalvageable mess’ upon taking the job earlier this year. Giles was named the group’s chief executive four months after its messy breakup with founder James O’Keefe in February. In a statement posted to X, she claimed she’d taken over an organization ‘wrought with strong evidence of past illegality and past financial improprieties.’ Suggesting she’d had no prior knowledge of the infamously embattled nonprofit’s alleged improprieties, Giles continued on to say that once she’d ‘discovered’ the evidence, ‘I brought the information to the appropriate law enforcement agencies.'”

The Republican leading the probe of Hunter Biden has his own shell company and complicated friends

[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-14-2023]

“Rep. James Comer, a multimillionaire farmer, boasts of being one of the largest landholders near his rural Kentucky hometown, and he has meticulously documented nearly all of his landholdings on congressional financial disclosure documents – roughly 1,600 acres in all. But there are six acres that he bought in 2015 and co-owns with a longtime campaign contributor that he has treated differently, transferring his ownership to Farm Team Properties, a shell company he co-owns with his wife. Interviews and records reviewed by The Associated Press provide new insights into the financial deal, which risks undercutting the force of some of Comer’s central arguments in his impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden. For months, the chairman of the House Oversight committee and his Republican colleagues have been pounding Biden for how his relatives traded on their famous name to secure business deals. In particular, Comer has attacked some Biden family members, including the president’s son Hunter, over their use of ‘shell companies’ that appear designed to obscure millions of dollars in earnings they received from shadowy middlemen and foreign interests… But as Comer works to “deliver the transparency and accountability that the American people demand” through the GOP’s investigation, his own finances and relationships have begun to draw notice, too, including his ties to prominent local figures who have complicated pasts not all that dissimilar to some of those caught up in his Biden probe…. Comer created the company in 2017 to hold his stake in the six acres that he purchased two years earlier in a joint venture with Darren Cleary, a major campaign contributor and construction contractor from Monroe County, Kentucky, where the congressman was born and raised…. Cleary, his businesses and family have donated roughly $70,000 to Comer’s various campaigns, records show. He has also lauded Comer on social media for “For Fighting For Us Everyday” and has posted photos of the two on a golf course together.”

Good Is Bad-- Very, Very Bad... And The Nut Primarying Him Is Even Worse! Virginia GOP Politics!

Howie Klein, December 13, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

How Trump netted evangelical votes in Iowa — with help from a young Christian operative

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-14-2023]

“Before Donald Trump stepped on stage for a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in early December, several leaders joined him in a prayer on behalf of a candidate whose latest presidential quest they see as a mission ordained by God. ‘The gates of hell will not prevail over him,’ Iowa state legislator and pastor Brad Sherman told the prayer circle. ‘There is a great victory coming for this nation and the world because of the calling you’ve placed on this man.’ That moment, captured in a video that went viral, was orchestrated by an aide just a few years out of college who has been locking in the crucial Iowa evangelical vote for Trump. Since joining the campaign in September as Iowa director of faith outreach, Jackson Lane, the 25-year-old son of prominent Christian activist David Lane, has rounded up key endorsements and shored up evangelical support, helping the Trump team blunt a push by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to win over conservative Christian voters with his hard-line stances on abortion and other issues. Evangelical voters make up more than half of the Republican electorate in Iowa, whose population is around 90% white and where the caucuses on Jan. 15 kick off voting in the Republican primary race.”

The Bogus Historians Who Teach Evangelicals They Live in a Theocracy

[Politico, via The Big Picture 12-10-2023]

A new book on the Christian right reveals how a series of unscrupulous leaders turned politics into a powerful and lucrative gospel.

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

How a Supreme Court Leak Helped Conservative Justices Unite to Overturn Roe

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, December 15, 2023 [The New Republic]

Summarizes the major New York Times report.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 10, 2023

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday December 11, 2023 · 8:55 AM PST

2023/12/11 · 08:55

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 10, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

War in Ukraine

Seymour Hersh, Anatol Lieven and the desperate DC gambit to end hostilities in Ukraine while claiming ‘victory’

Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023] Excellent.

Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

Key elements that shaped the counteroffensive and the initial outcome include:

● Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting force in a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.

● U.S. and Ukrainian officials sharply disagreed at times over strategy, tactics and timing. The Pentagon wanted the assault to begin in mid-April to prevent Russia from continuing to strengthen its lines. The Ukrainians hesitated, insisting they weren’t ready without additional weapons and training.

● U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces, in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days.

● The United States advocated a focused assault along that southern axis, but Ukraine’s leadership believed its forces had to attack at three distinct points along the 600-mile front, southward toward both Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and east toward the embattled city of Bakhmut.

Dissecting the Washington Post’s “analysis” of Ukraine’s Failed Counter Offensive — Part 1

Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2023]

Establishment Alarmism in Overdrive as Raytheon Lloyd Threatens Congress with War

Simplicius the Thinker [via Naked Capitalism 12-08-2023]

Lying Was the Only Plan Biden, U.S. Ever Had in Ukraine

Matt Taibbi [via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2023]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

The collapse of Israel and the United States

Thierry Meyssan [via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2023]

Senior US lawmakers review plan linking Gaza refugee resettlement to US aid to Arab countries

[Israel Hayom, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

said to have been owned by Sheldon Adelson:

The proposal was shown to key figures in the House and Senate from both parties. Some who were privy to the details of the text have so far kept a low profile, saying that publicly coming out in favor of the program could derail it…. They continue: ‘The neighboring borders have been closed for too long, but it is now clear that in order to free the Gazan population from the tyrannical oppression of Hamas and to allow them to live free of war and bloodshed, Israel must encourage the international community to find the correct, moral and humane avenues for the relocation of the Gazan population.'”

Map, with quotas for relocating 2 million Palestinians to Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Yemen

Egypt 1 million
Turkey 500,000
Iraq 250,000
Yemen 250,000

Egypt’s former vice president warns of Gaza depopulation amid growing fear in Cairo

[The New Arab, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

Netanyahu’s Goal for Gaza: “Thin” Population “to a Minimum”

[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

How the Biden team is planning for a postwar Gaza Strip

[Politico 12-04-2023]

Biden administration officials have spent weeks quietly drafting a multiphase postwar game plan that envisions a revamped Palestinian Authority ultimately taking over the Gaza Strip.

It’s an imperfect solution, but American officials view it as the best of only bad options….

Officials at the State Department, the White House and beyond have been laying out pieces of the strategy in multiple position papers and interagency meetings since mid-October, according to two U.S. officials, a State Department official and an administration official familiar with the discussions.

Although Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others in the administration have publicly declared that a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority should run the strip, they haven’t unveiled details of how that would work.

But they’ve already run into resistance from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has effectively ruled out a future Gaza role for the Palestinian Authority. Israeli officials for the most part are unwilling to discuss much beyond the current war….

Netanyahu tells Washington no Palestinian rule in Gaza after war

[Anadolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 12-06-2023]

As Israel Plans Gaza Ethnic Cleansing, US Says No

[Tikun Olam, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

Israel wants ‘security envelope’, no Hamas on border after war, official says

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-06-2023]

Message I just received from an Israeli friend in Israel: "We need your urgent help. If there is no international intervention, we're gone. The entire Palestinian people are under a genocidal attack, and democratic Jews in Israel are under violent fascist persecution that…
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) December 6, 2023

Inside the Pro-Israel Information War

Lee Fang [via Naked Capitalism 12-08-2023]

Global power shift

Pentagon: US arms industry struggling to keep up with China

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2023]

The Most Dangerous Conflict No One Is Talking About

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2023]

The South China Sea is perhaps the most contested waterway in the world. China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Taiwan all have competing claims there. But no actor has pursued those claims as belligerently as China. The Philippines complains that Chinese forces menace its sailors and fishermen on an almost daily basis, and the government of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos has taken to airing videos, photos, and eyewitness accounts of these encounters. In late October, officials released footage of Chinese vessels twice colliding with Philippines ships.

Such incidents don’t concern only Manila: The Philippines, a former U.S. colony, is America’s oldest ally in the Indo-Pacific, and the two countries have signed a mutual-defense treaty. In fact, of all the world’s conflicts, which today include wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Chinese-Philippine tensions in the South China Sea may be the least remarked on but among the most potentially explosive. Earlier this year, a former high-ranking Chinese military official said that a conflict between the United States and China was more likely to occur in the South China Sea than around Taiwan.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Free trade and debt : the two sides of neocolonialism

[CADTM, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

The Great American Eye-Exam Scam

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 12-3-2023]

Why is it so difficult to get a new pair of glasses or contacts in this country? It’s easier pretty much everywhere else.

Jeff Bezos-Backed Real Estate Company Is Launching A New Fund To Acquire More Single-Family Homes Across The U.S.

[Yahoo Finance, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

“Arrived currently operates a fractional real estate investing platform that has attracted nearly half a million retail investors since its launch in 2021. The platform allows these investors to purchase shares of single-family rental properties with as little as $100.”

Wall Street CEOs Want the Line Between a Federally-Insured Bank and a Wall Street Trading Casino Erased; Regulators Want Higher Capital to Prevent That

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, December 7, 2023 [Wall Street on Parade]

An exhaustive debunking of the dumbest myths about Social Security

Michael Hiltzik [Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

Tallying the Best Stats on US Gun Violence Is Trauma of Its Own

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

Cigna said to be going after Humana to buy its way into Medicare Advantage

Wendell Potter [via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

Restoring balance to the economy

Restructuring Bankruptcy Law

[The Regulatory Review, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

‘We Go Where We Think We Can Have The Most Impact

[Nieman Reports), via The Big Picture 12-8-2023]

Five lessons from successful local news startups.

There’s No Stopping the Newspaper Death Spiral

[Politico 12-028-2023]

About 750 members of the Washington Post Guild staged a one-day strike against the paper on Thursday to publicize their position that management is not bargaining with them in good faith….

According to a Thursday Post piece about the Post strike, labor and management aren’t even talking the same language. Workers have not had a contract for 18 months. The Guild wants a minimum salary of $100,100 for reporters, and management is offering only $73,000. The parties are also separated by annual cost-of-living demands.

Seeing as it’s only money they’re talking about, Bezos could buy every newsroom employee a $4 million home in the Hollywood Hills or thereabouts, give each $1 million in walking around money and make a bonfire on Malibu beach of $1 billion just to celebrate his generosity, and he’d still have $165 billion in his pocket. But that’s not how Bezos thinks. He counts every penny and fights unions hard wherever they appear in his kingdom. Since buying the money-losing Post a decade ago for a mere $250 million, he’s been adamant about not running the paper as a philanthropy. Instead, he invested untold millions to reverse the newsroom headcount decline, expanding it by more than a third and adding new foreign bureaus, too. And miracle of miracles, he succeeded in making the paper profitable as recently as 2019.

Amazon ‘Cannot Claim Shock’ That Bathroom Spycams Were Used as Advertised, Judge Says

[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 12-06-2023]

Oligarchy

The 25 Richest Families in the World — 2023

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-08-2023]

“From the house of Hermès to Gulf royals, the wealth of global dynasties soared 43% in the last year.” Names are: AL NAHYAN (UAE), WALTON (USA), HERMÈS (FRANCE), MARS (USA), AL THANI (QATAR), KOCH (USA), AL SAUD (SAUDI ARABIA), AMBANI (INDIA), WERTHEIMER (FRANCE), THOMSON (CANADA), CARGILL, MACMILLAN (USA), JOHNSON (USA), BOEHRINGER, VON BAUMBACH (GERMANY), QUANDT (GERMANY), ALBRECHT (GERMANY), PRITZKER (USA), HOFFMANN, OERI (SWITZERLAND), VAN DAMME, DE SPOELBERCH, DE MEVIUS (BELGIUM), HARTONO (INDONESIA), DASSAULT (FRANCE), COX (USA), MULLIEZ (FRANCE), FERRERO (ITALY), KWOK (HONG KONG), and DUNCAN (USA).

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers We asked them about it — and they deleted everything

[Futurism, via The Big Picture 12-3-2023]

After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated‘s site without explanation. Our questions received no response.

No Laws Protect People From Deepfake Porn. These Victims Fought Back

[Businessweek, via The Big Picture 12-3-2023]

A group of young women in a New York City suburb, horrified to learn their photographs had been manipulated and posted online, took matters into their own hands….

No federal law criminalizes the creation or sharing of fake pornographic images in the US. When it comes to fake nudes of children, the law is narrow and pertains only to cases where children are being abused. And Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects web forums, social media platforms and internet providers from being held liable for content posted on their sites.

This legal landscape was problem enough for police and prosecutors when it took time and a modicum of skill to create realistic-looking fake pornography. But with billions of dollars of venture capital flowing into image-generating software powered by artificial intelligence, it’s gotten cheaper and easier to create convincing photos and videos of things that never happened. Tools such as Midjourney and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion have been used to produce images of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket, actress Emma Watson as a mermaid and former President Donald Trump sprinting from a cadre of FBI agents.

The term “deepfake” was coined on a Reddit forum dedicated to fake porn made with deep-learning models. It’s now in the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as an image digitally manipulated to depict an individual doing something they didn’t. More than 15 billion such images have been created since April 2022, according to Everypixel Group, an AI photo company. The vendors that designed these tools have installed safety filters to ban the creation of explicit images, but because much of the software is open source, anyone can use it, build off it and deactivate the safeguards. Online security experts say more than 90% of deepfakes are pornographic in nature.

Europe’s AI Crackdown Doomed by Silicon Valley’s Lobbying Power

Scott Dylan, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

McKinsey Sees AI Adding Up To $340 Billion To Wall Street Profit

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-06-2023]

The first humanoid robot factory is about to open

[Axios, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-05-2023]

“A factory planning to pump out 10,000 two-legged robots a year is taking shape in Salem, Oregon — the better to help Amazon and other giant companies with dangerous hauling, lifting and moving. Agility Robotics says that its RoboFab manufacturing facility will be the first to mass-produce humanoid robots, which could be nimbler and more versatile than their existing industrial counterparts. China seems to think so: Beijing recently announced a goal of mass-producing humanoid robots by 2025. Agility Robotics, which makes a bot named Digit that’s being tested by Amazon, plans to open RoboFab early next year, inaugurating what CEO Damion Shelton calls ‘the world’s first purpose-built humanoid robot factory.’ ‘We’ve placed a very high priority on just getting robots out there as fast as possible,’ [CEO Damion Shelton], who’s also a co-founder, tells Axios. ‘Our big plan is that we want to get to general-purpose humanoids as soon as we can. There’s a growing backlog of orders for Digit, which the company says is the first commercially available human-shaped robot designed for warehouse work. Agility has produced about 100 robots since its founding in 2016.”

Boffins devise ‘universal backdoor’ for image models to cause AI hallucinations

[The Register, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

Climate and environmental crises

Future of fossil fuels sparks fiery debate at COP28 climate summit

[Upstream, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

In a first, a major airline will cross the Atlantic without fossil fuels

[Canarymedia.com, via DailyKos GNR Newsroom 12-4-2023]

A Virgin Atlantic flight taking off this week from London to New York City will last about eight hours, span around 3,500 miles — and emit only a fraction of the planet-warming gases associated with a typical transatlantic flight.

On Tuesday, the British airline is set to pluck a Boeing 787 Dreamliner from its fleet and run the two powerful engines on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, during the journey from Heathrow Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport. If all goes to plan, Virgin Atlantic will be the first commercial airline to fly a passenger plane across the Atlantic Ocean by burning only fossil-free jet fuel, marking an important milestone for the CO₂-intensive industry.

America’s first ‘enhanced’ geothermal plant just got up and running

[Canarymedia.com, via DailyKos GNR Newsroom 12-4-2023]

A next-generation geothermal plant backed by Google has started sending carbon-free electricity to the grid in Nevada, where the tech company operates some of its massive data centers.

On Tuesday, Google and geothermal developer Fervo Energy said that electrons began flowing from the first-of-a-kind facility earlier this month. The 3.5-megawatt project, called Project Red, is now supplying power directly to the Las Vegas–based utility NV Energy.

Orsted Powers Up America’s First Major Offshore Wind Farm

[Heated, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.

[New York Times, via DailyKos GNR Newsroom 12-4-2023]

Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022 as we turned in the first draft.

And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair. The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.

I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.

To limit global warming, we need many more people to get on board. This will be hard: It will require large-scale changes in infrastructure and behavior as well as removing carbon from the atmosphere. And not everyone is on board yet. In particular, the fossil fuel industry is still ignoring the science.

The Doom Loop: Insurance markets and climate risk

[Phenomenal World, via The Big Picture 12-3-2023]

Rising insurance prices and the credible threat of insurer divestment from higher-risk areas will constrain investment in both homes and businesses across vulnerable communities. Yet more people are moving into higher-risk areas, and some politicians fear backlash if they let insurance companies deny these communities coverage. In response, state leaders in California and Florida have sought to prevent divestment by directing their insurance commissioners to adjust pricing regulations, invite competition in insurance markets, or derisk insurers by imposing disaster-risk fees on all insurance purchasers regardless of risk.

Creating new economic potential - science and technology

Scan of 27 million compounds finds one that outdoes pain medications

[goodnewsnetwork.org, via DailyKos GNR Newsroom 12-4-2023]

Brain Study Suggests Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 12-4-2023]

Traumatic memories had their own neural mechanism, brain scans showed, which may help explain their vivid and intrusive nature.

Commercial companies to collaborate for DARPA’s new lunar economy study

[TechCrunch, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

Democrats' political malpractice

‘She got so mad at me’: book on the ‘Squad’ details AOC-Pelosi clashes

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-06-2023]

“[AOC and Pelosi’s] first ‘live meeting’, [Ryan] Grim says, came in July 2018 at a restaurant in San Francisco, which Pelosi represents. Then 76, Pelosi had been in Congress since 1987, Democratic House leader since 2003 and speaker from 2007 to 2011. The older woman spoke for nearly the entire lunch, dishing out her trademark looping, run-on sentences to her bewildered companions. ‘She just keeps talking; it’s a fascinating thing,’ Saikat Chakrabarti, then AOC’s chief of staff, recalls. ‘We were eating, and she just talked the entire time without even taking a break. And I wasn’t sure exactly what she was saying, but I was like, ‘Huh, OK.” ‘Getting Pelosi’s unfiltered thoughts was both eye-opening and disturbing,’ Grim writes. ‘Ocasio-Cortez, who had made the slogan ‘Abolish Ice’ [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] central to her challenge to Crowley, was particularly perplexed to hear Pelosi say that the phrase had been injected into American political discourse by the Russians and that Democrats needed to quash it. ‘AOC wondered, ‘This is how the leader of the party thinks?'”

Voters Deserve More Than A Choice Between A Lesser And A Greater Evil-- And They Know It

Howie Klein, December 4, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

Les Leopold, executive director of the Labor Institute, has a new book coming out, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying The Working Class And What To Do About It. In an essay for CommoDreams.org yesterday, he wrote that the Democrats must choose between Wall Street and the working class. “The Democrats,” he wrote, “want it both ways. The Party of the New Deal claims to be still championing the working class while it is also working to enrich Wall Street. The obvious goal is to secure campaign cash from the wealthy while, at the same time, attract working-class votes. After all, the thinking goes, working people don’t have any place else to turn politically. Certainly not to the Republicans, the historic party of the bosses. But this thinking is wrong, and this approach hasn’t worked. And it’s still not working. The more the Democrats have supported Wall Street over the past four decades, the more the working class, especially the white working class, has drifted away. Even after the anti-civil rights southern Dixiecrat exodus from the Democratic Party in the Nixon years, white working-class support for the Democrats remained strong. Jimmy Carter in 1976 gathered a solid 52.3% of the white working-class vote. Bill Clinton in 1996 received 50.0 percent, again a strong showing. But by 2012, Barack Obama won only 40.6 percent. And in 2020, Joe ‘Six-Pack’ Biden stumbled to a meager 36.2 percent of the white working-class vote. And it’s not just the white members of the working class who are defecting. Recent polling reveals that Black and Latino working-class voters also show declining support for Democratic candidates.”

“The real cause of working-class defections from the Democratic Party has been (and still is) mass layoffs. Working people got fed up with losing their jobs again and again, and they saw that the Democrats, who claimed to represent them, did little or nothing to stop the carnage. Since 1996, approximately 30 million of us have gone through a mass layoff (defined as 50 or more workers let go at one time.) Many more than once. Our research demonstrates clearly that in the key ‘Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, when mass layoffs go up the Democratic vote goes down.

“…Why aren’t Democrats giving “more of a damn?” Because if they really helped working people meet these economic challenges, they would lose favor with the barons of Wall Street and their corporate cronies.

It’s not a win/win game. Mass layoffs are part and parcel of how corporate executives and hedge funds extract billions of dollars in profit. Those mass layoffs are very often used to finance stock buybacks, a legalized method of stock manipulation that was severely restricted by the Securities and Exchange Commission until 1982. Since corporate executives get most of their pay in stock incentives, jacking up the price of shares through stock buybacks is the quickest path to great wealth. The same goes for the Wall Street stock-sellers who force their way onto corporate boards and then demand massive stock buybacks to enrich themselves. Today nearly 70 percent of all corporate profits go to stock buybacks.

“…Most of the Democratic Party, unfortunately, has drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. They believe that placating Wall Street and large corporate interests will strengthen the economy, improve the U.S. position in the global economy, and produce better paying jobs at home. That’s understandable when you view the economy through the elite lens of high salaries, growing 401(K)s, and the stock market, which seems to go up and up and up. But good luck selling that vision to laid-off workers.
Those workers remember that the Democrats eagerly supported the massive deregulation of Wall Street during the Clinton administration. They also remember Democrats pushing trade deals like NAFTA and China’s admission into the WTO, which led to millions of manufacturing jobs rushing to Mexico and China. And that the Obama administration refused to punish and remove the Wall Street executives who crashed the economy in 2008-09 with their reckless gambling, enabled by deregulation championed by both political parties. Instead, the Obama administration bailed out Wall Street while distressed homeowners got nothing. That’s 16 years of Wall Street coddling by Democratic administrations.”

Biden's Continued Struggles Ain't Rocket Science

Patrick Toomey, December 8, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

GRAPH: Percent of Individuals Whose Real Disposable Income Increase or Decreased From Prior Year (1025-2022)

Disrupting mainstream politics

An exhaustive debunking of the dumbest myths about Social Security

[Los Angeles Times, via The Big Picture 12-3-2023]

The roughly 2,000-word piece contained so many misconceptions, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies about the program that I almost gave up counting. That said, it’s perhaps worthwhile to have a one-stop shop for all these sophistries, if only for the purpose of debunking them en masse.

How America Ends and Begins Again

Sherrilyn Ifill [The New York Review, December 21, 2023 issue]

Because so much of what we have come to expect of our country is unraveling, we have an opportunity to build it anew….

Finally, we need to pursue power, and when we have power we need to be prepared to make transformative change. I hope we’ll see this in the coming years. We must be prepared to leave behind traditions and policies that have not served us as a democracy, whether that means reforming long-standing rules that inhibit effective representation in the Senate, or adding seats to the Supreme Court, or reimagining public safety to address police brutality and racism, or adopting a guaranteed national income, or pursuing new models of public education.

Progressive people often seem averse to the pursuit of power. It is as though we think “power” is a bad word. We think it unseemly. We worry, perhaps appropriately, about how power can corrupt and harm. But that is what happens when people abuse their power. It is not power’s natural tendency. We must believe enough in our own integrity to trust ourselves with power. “Power without love is reckless and abusive,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, and

love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

We must pursue power to implement the demands of justice, and the justice that we seek must correct that which stands against love.

The Trump-Populist-MAGA Revolution Is Just Taking Shape... And Biden Won't Know How To Combat It

Howie Klein, December 3, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

Trump Is Playing To Win, Not To Be Constrained By Unpopular, Stale GOP Positions….

What I’ve been more interested in is that Trump is quite capable of announcing plans for the most popular possible policies that will win him the election. Example: he has announced that he will replace ObamaCare, a very flawed— can I say crappy— program, with something better. The Democrats immediately lit their hair on fire and ran around screaming that he wants to repeal ObamaCare and end coverage for people with preexisting conditions. But that isn’t what Trump said at all. He said he would replace ObamaCare with something better. There could be many ways to do that, although not if you were going to adhere to Republican orthodoxy. Trump has zero interest in Republican orthodoxy… so, presumably, he’s busy looking for the perfect way to garner him the most votes through a replacement. Maybe he’ll come up with something else but the obvious way would be to expand Medicare. Dare I say, “single payer” or “Medicare-For-All?”

Would that win him the election? I think so-- if he can persuade people he means it this time. Yesterday, my old friend from Amsterdam, Toon Janssen, updated us on the recent election in Holland, where a Trump-like character, Geert Wilders, an authoritarian, Islamaphobic populist saw his cult-like party win more seats than any other party. The platform he ran on did not sound like some conservative or right-wing appeal at all. Aside from raising the speed limit on the highways, some of Wilders’ more popular promises included lowering the age for pensions (conservatives having raised it), abolishing the sales tax on food, lower rents and higher rental subsidies, increasing the minimum wage, smaller school classes, including dental care in the basic healthcare package, lower home heating and electricity bills.

(anti)Republican Party

Is Corporate America Betting on Trump ?

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-07-2023]

“A few well-connected contacts in the big tech world told me early on they were quite confident it would be a reversion to Obama era antitrust, that Kamala Harris would take care of them. Were they ever wrong! Biden appointed aggressive enforcers to both the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and to the Federal Trade Commission, and issued a meaningful executive order on competition. The net effect is a massive deterrent against mergers, especially large ones, with deal volume down 16% this year alone. There’s also a lot of litigation where judges have to start dealing with antitrust. From the book industry to health insurance to Google and Amazon to prescription routing networks to virtual reality to video games to semiconductors to sugar to health-specific adtech to pharmaceutical patents and private equity health care providers to airlines to pipelines to meat to pesticides, the antitrust world has been busy. And that’s unlikely to slow. The JetBlue-Spirit trial is ending, which could go to appeal. The IQVIA merger trial is ongoing, as is the first Google antitrust search trial. Another Google trial starts early next year, as does an FTC trial against Facebook. My guess is there will be more challenges, potentially against the supermarket combination of Kroger-Albertsons, the design software merger of Adobe and Figma, and/or pharma giant Pfizer’s purchase of Seagan. But what’s interesting is that over the past few months, the deterrent effect seems to be waning, as there have been some major announcements of big mergers.” What I don’t get: If Biden’s going to do all this, why isn’t he selling it, instead of Bidenomics™? More: “[W]hat’s happening is that deal-makers think that Trump could win.”

Behind the Curtain — Exclusive: How Trump would build his loyalty-first Cabinet

[Axios, downwithtyranny.com, December 8, 2023]

Steve Bannon said this week on his "War Room" podcast that Patel would "probably" be CIA director in a second term.

Patel told Bannon: "One thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go-round is we've got to put in all of our compatriots from top to bottom. And we've got them for law enforcement ... [Defense Department], CIA, everywhere. ... Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens."….

Jamie Dimon: Trump is open to a few more mainstream picks if they bring celebrity or pizzazz. For example, Trump would consider JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, a Democrat, to head Treasury. "He wants a big name," a source close to the campaign said. "And he loves billionaires."….

Sen Tom Cotton (R-AR): a former Army infantry officer known for his hard edge, and who wrote a New York Times op-ed in Trump's first term supporting use of the Insurrection Act against civil disorder— would be considered to head the Pentagon….

Would You Want To Live In A Country Where Most Voters Pick Trump? Don't Worry Too Much

Howie Klein, December 7, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

[In] Ron Brownstein’s new essay for The Atlantic, A War On Blue America... he warns that “in a second term, Trump would punish the cities and states that don’t support him.” What Brownstein doesn’t say, but only hints at, is that is exactly what Trump’s zombified MAGAts want. He wrote that “During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president— with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends— to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes. Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. He attempted to strip California of the authority it has wielded since the early 1970s to set its own, more stringent pollution standards.”

Democracy Is in Peril, Just Not the Way We Thought

Sam Rosenfeld, November 29, 2023 [The New Republic]

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explained “How Democracies Die.” Then they decided to look even deeper.….

Two norms in particular were pivotal. Mutual toleration entailed “recognizing that our political rivals are decent, patriotic, law-abiding citizens” and thus accepting their legitimacy as power-seeking actors in the system. And forbearance required deliberately restraining oneself from maximizing the exercise of institutional power so as not to destabilize the system as a whole. The modern GOP, increasingly prone to demonizing its opponents and ever more ruthless in the deployment of escalatory hardball for power, had discarded both of those codes of conduct, eroded its own capacity to police internal boundaries against extremism, and so forged a path to power for the man on the escalator.

Chuck Todd: How elected officials are gaslighting America

[NBC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-07-2023]

“Among Republicans nationally, just 26% believed Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate. Among former GOP members of Congress, a whopping 82% believe he won legitimately…. It’s obvious that members of Congress too often give in to the belief systems of their (sometimes overly whipped-up) constituents out of fear of losing their jobs. What’s less clear is exactly the price those self-preservation decisions cost us….. I’ll never forget a conversation I had, when Trump was first elected, with a prominent Republican senator who pulled me aside while getting off of a plane and promised to stand up to Trump. They were the guardrail, they swore, against Trump’s running roughshod over the system and the Constitution. Needless to say, that senator’s pledge lasted less than a year….. As has been said numerous times, authoritarians usually don’t take power, they are handed it, and the elected GOP class has gotten more comfortable handing power to Trump with every year that has gone by since he burst onto the scene in 2016.”.

We Didn't Drive Old Dixie Down Deep Enough... And Now We Have Trump Threatening Our National Unity

Howie Klein, December 5, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

...Yesterday, the New Yorker publshed an essay by Jill Lepore, What Happened When The U.S. Failed To Prosecute An Insurrectionist Ex-President, looking how leniency towards Jefferson Davis could hold lessons we need consider in regard to a more recent national traitor….

She began by describing how a spy and fit 58 year old Davis hobbled into court pretending to be a feeble, broken and sickly man, which he wasn’t all. Outrageously, Davis, who had been arrested in Georgia (in drag, trying to escape)— after issuing a proclamation encouraging the MAGAts of the day to continue the Civil War— got away with his treason, never tried, even though the House voted 105-19 to try him for treason. He spent the rest of his life bitter and unreconciled that Blacks were allowed to vote.

Lepore wrote that today, “The American Presidency is draped in a red-white-and-blue cloak of impunity. Trump is the first President to have been impeached twice and the first ex-President to have been criminally indicted. If he’s convicted and sentenced and— unlikeliest of all— goes to prison, he will be the first in those dishonors, too.” She ties that to Davis’ lack of historical accountability. “If Davis had been tried and convicted, the cloak of Presidential impunity would be flimsier. Leniency for Davis also bolstered the cause of white supremacy….

Then as now, what one half of the country thought best for the country the other half thought worst. In February, 1868, the House impeached Johnson, having investigated him for, among other things, intentionally derailing the Davis prosecution. Lieber favored impeachment, not least for the precedent that it would establish. “As to history, it will be a wonderful thing to have the ruler over a large country removed for the first time without revolution,” he wrote. The same hesitancy that derailed the Davis prosecution derailed the Johnson impeachment: so grave a thing, to try a king….

Yes, They’re Pro-Confederacy. But They’re Just the Nicest Ladies.

Anna Venarchik, December 5, 2023 [The New Republic]

...“The time has come when the South, the true home of the Anglo-Saxon race, which has stood for truth and honesty and righteousness in the past, should come back to the faith and principles for which their forefathers stood.” This 1925 call to make Dixie Confederate again came from Mildred Lewis Rutherford, a prominent historian general of the UDC. A decade prior, a Daughter published The Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire, a children’s textbook that exonerated the Klan. The “heroes” protected white women from “ignorant and vicious negroes” who “considered freedom synonymous with equality” and only wanted “to marry a white wife.” The UDC pledged to disseminate the book to schools and libraries….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Justices to review novel bankruptcy maneuver in public harms litigation

[SCOTUSblog, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023]

‘Plain historical falsehoods’: How amicus briefs bolstered Supreme Court conservatives

[Politico 12-04-2023]

A POLITICO review indicates most conservative briefs in high-profile cases have links to a small cadre of activists aligned with Leonard Leo.

...That this questionable assertion is now enshrined in the court’s ruling is “a flawed and troubling precedent,” the Organization of American Historians, which represents 6,000 history scholars and experts, and the American Historical Association, the largest membership association of professional historians in the world, said in a statement. It is also a prime example of how a tight circle of conservative legal activists have built a highly effective thought chamber around the court’s conservative flank over the past decade.

A POLITICO review of tax filings, financial statements and other public documents found that Leo and his network of nonprofit groups are either directly or indirectly connected to a majority of amicus briefs filed on behalf of conservative parties in seven of the highest-profile rulings the court has issued over the past two years.

It is the first comprehensive review of amicus briefs that have streamed into the court since Trump nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, solidifying the court’s conservative majority. POLITICO’s review found multiple instances of language used in the amicus briefs appearing in the court’s opinions.

Democratic Party "stuck in its addictions to neoliberal economics" - Sen. Chris Murphy

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday December 05, 2023 · 8:54 PM PST

2023/12/05 · 20:54

Luke Goldstein of The American Prospect reports on Senator Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) recent shift to an explicit rejection of neoliberalism.

I pressed Murphy about why, despite executive actions, Democrats in Congress weren’t able to move forward in the last session on new antitrust legislation, such as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act or the Open App Markets Act, when they controlled both the House and Senate. He didn’t blame it on Senate Republicans or on party leadership, despite ample reporting that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was the main impediment holding up votes on both bills last year.

Did you catch that? The junior Democratic Senator from Connecticut says Democrats in Congress are not being blocked by Republicans, or even by the gerontocracy that unfortunately dominates the Democratic Party. So who or what does the Senator blame?

“I think there is still a sizable portion of the Democratic Party that is sort of stuck in its addictions to neoliberal economics that concentrated and globally integrated markets can deliver prosperity. I still think this party has not made a firm break from neoliberalism,” said Murphy.

If ever there was a cause for hope, it’s someone in a position of power like a United States Senator coming to the realization that what they thought they knew about how the economy works, is all wrong.

“I was guilty of accepting this paradigm we were stuck in and in which we assumed we had to live with this massive concentration of corporate power,” said Murphy. “I had no living memory of government using its power to break up monopolies.”

Let me tell you, back in the early years of the Obama presidency, it was very discouraging to have a discussion on economics here at DailyKos. It had become clear to me that Obama and his advisers were totally under the sway of neoliberal economics, but I repeatedly encountered people here who argued otherwise, and expressed disgust that I wasn’t “clapping louder.”

In fact, there were many people who argued that “neoliberalism” was a phantasm of the left, and did not actually exist as a policy or even an idea. I’m not kidding — that was actually what many people believed in 2008 and after, in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis. Much the same problem still exists: just read some of the comments in dmontaine’s recced story today, The economy sucks - for many of us. There are comments expressing dismay and anger that people are not blaming Republicans for their economic misery, and more than one commenter argues that people should be happy that earnings have grown a few quarters in a row.

Really? The 2020 RAND study Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 documented that $47 trillion in wealth was transferred upwards to elites in those four decades. There are 167.77 million people in the US labor force. Leave out the top ten percent, and increase every working person’s income by a $1,000 a year and it’s less than $160 billion. It would take over three centuries of $1,000 annual increases to undo the damage done in the past half century.

Here’s another way to look at how much damage was done under neoliberalism. If the average household income had continued to grow at the same rate it had in the three decades before the “Reagan revolution,” household income now would be almost triple what it now is. So, recent “jumps” in income really don’t amount to much. Income distribution must be shifted toward the bottom much more radically and much faster than anything we’ve seen yet.

So take note that Senator Murphy now blames neoliberalism for this popular discontent that has Biden wallowing in dangerously low approval ratings:

“The disease is a really deep, insidious one rooted in the fact that people feel like they have no control over their lives any longer … in politics we often treat the symptoms, not the disease, and that’s what I’m trying to address…. I am very convinced that America is in the middle of a spiritual crisis,”

This is very important. Senator Murphy is not the first person to raise the issue of the soul killing weight of free market capitalism. Goldstein notes that “populist figures on the Catholic right, such as Sohrab Ahmari, author of recent book Tyranny Inc., which offers a conservative critique of the free-market economic paradigm,” have expressed support of Senator Murphy’s idea. In the October 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All), Pope Francis wrote:

168. The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of “spillover” or “trickle” – without using the name – as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged “spillover” does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at “promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity” [140] and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc….

This is not a new position for the Catholic Church. In May 1891, responding to the worsening economic and social conditions of workers around the world, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.

And of course, the actual gospels have much to say about economics and social justice, though today’s conservative christianists seem not to have read them. In 1907, Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, published Christianity and the Social Crisis (pdf 457 pages).

In July 2014, Salon published an essay by Yale University professor Jim Sleeper, We, the people are violent and filled with rage: A nation spinning apart on its Independence Day, lamenting

a body politic so drained of candor and trust that, beneath our continuing lip-service to republican premises and practices, we’ve let a court conflate the free speech of flesh-and-blood citizens with the disembodied wealth of anonymous shareholders.

Two years after Trump was elected, Salon published Sleeper’s essay again, with the lead, “Four years ago I published this essay in Salon: It predicted the rise of a demagogue, and much of what would follow.”

Has anything been done yet to exorcise the curse of corporate personhood? Has anything been done yet to break the spell neoliberalism has over the Democratic Party?

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 3, 2023

NBBooks

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday December 03, 2023 · 8:07 PM PST

2023/12/03 · 20:07

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 3, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-01-2023]

WOW, this might be THE most important piece of journalism on the war on Gaza since it began, by Israeli newspaper @972mag :https://t.co/ORhMha76B5

Essentially they confirm, with unimpeachable sourcing, that the killing of civilians was all calculated and intentional.

Their…
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 30, 2023

‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

[+972, via X-Teitter. above]

Permissive airstrikes on non-military targets and the use of an artificial intelligence system have enabled the Israeli army to carry out its deadliest war on Gaza….

The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions….

Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

“Wiping Gaza Off the Map”: Implementing Israel’s “Secret Intelligence Memorandum.” More Than 20,000 Civilians Killed

Michel Chossudovsky [via Naked Capitalism 12-01-2023]

Out of Gaza’s 2.3 million people,

1.73 million are now displaced…

20,030 civilians killed…

8,176 children have been killed…

4,112 women have been killed…

7,000 people remain unaccounted for, including more than 4,700 children…

36,350 civilians have been injured….

...It’s genocide. The underlying modalities are confirmed in an official “secret” memorandum of Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence. Washington is fully supportive of this military-intelligence operation.

Both US and British Operation Forces are collaborating with the I.D.F. (See this)

The 10 page document recommends “the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”, namely to a refugee camp in Egyptian territory. There are indications of Israel-Egypt negotiations as well as routine consultations with U.S. intelligence….

Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago

[New York Times, 2023 Nov 30]

The Hamas Attack and Israel’s War in Gaza

[Council for Global Cooperation, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2023]. Important.

Global power shift

ADRIFT ON A SEA OF DELUSIONS

Sonar 21, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2023]

A very good guest post. Chuck L: “With elites like R. Gates who needs enemies?”

The End of US Nuclear Superiority

Scott Ritter [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2023]

...The failures of the aging U.S. and British strategic nuclear deterrence force contrasts sharply with a series of successful tests carried out by the Russian counterparts, including the recent launches of a modern Bulava missile from a new Borei-class submarine, a Yars ICBM equipped with an advanced Avangard hypersonic warhead, and the successful test launch of a new nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile (the Russians are not immune to test failures, either, as demonstrated by the failure of a Sarmat heavy ICBM earlier this year.)

The fielding of a new generation of Russian strategic nuclear missiles places additional pressure on both the U.S. and U.K. to push forward with expensive modernization programs at a time when competition for funding has created domestic political challenges in both nations.

Complicating things further is the lack of any viable arms control framework to keep the rush to deploy new strategic systems by all three nations from exploding into an arms race that could destabilize the strategic balance of power that has existed for decades. Citing the incompatibility of strategic arms control with the U.S. at a time when Washington’s official policy is to strategically defeat Russia, Moscow has suspended its participation in the New START treaty.

America’s undying empire: why the decline of US power has been greatly exaggerated

[(The Guardian, via The Big Picture 12-02-2023]

...If proponents of the end of the US global order do not assert a decrease in the potency of the instruments of American power, that is because there has been no such decrease. The share of global transactions conducted in dollars has been increasing, not declining. No other state can affect political outcomes in other countries the way the US still does. The reach of the contemporary US is so great that it tends to blend into the background of daily events. In January 2019, the US demanded that Germany ban the Iranian airline Mahan Air from landing on its territory. In September 2020, it sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court for refusing to drop investigations into American citizens. In February 2022, at US request, Japan agreed to redirect liquefied fossil gas, which is critical to Japanese industry, to Europe in the event of a conflict with Russia over Ukraine. At the height of that conflict, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, found the time to visit Algiers to negotiate the reopening of a gas pipeline to Spain via Morocco. These were all quotidian events, unremarkable daily instances of humdrum imperial activity. The practical operation of the empire remains poorly understood, not despite its ubiquity, but because of it….

Europe Is Written Off.

Andrei Martyanov [via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2023]

Putin Seizes Major Airport’s Management From Foreign Shareholders

[Bloombergvia Naked Capitalism 12-01-2023]

War

The Myth that Putin Was Bent on Conquering Ukraine and Creating a Greater Russia

John Mearsheimer [via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2023]

Beyond Iron Dome: Is Defending Against [Directed Energy Weapons] Possible

John Oncea, November 20, 2023 [Photonics Online]

Israeli defense technology company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, responsible for developing Iron Dome, is also credited with the development of Iron Beam, the fifth element of Israel's integrated missile defense system which is composed of the aforementioned Iron Dome, as well as Arrow 2, Arrow 3, and David’s Sling.

“Iron Beam is considered a directed-energy weapon,” writes C4ISR. “Such wartime tools typically come in two forms. One, like Rafael’s, is a high-energy laser; the other is a high-power microwave. Whereas the former focuses a beam or beams of energy to blind, cut, or inflict heat damage on a target, the latter pumps out waves of energy that fry electronic components and render technologies useless.”

But these types of defenses are DEWs applied to beefing up a military’s offensive and defensive arsenal. They’re not a system designed to stop a DEW attack.

A DEW is a weapon that damages its target with highly focused energy without a solid projectile, including lasers, microwaves, particle beams, and sound beams. Potential applications of this technology include weapons that target personnel, missiles, vehicles, and optical devices.

In addition to Israel, China, Russia, France, Germany, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States are developing military-grade DEWs while Iran and Turkey also claim to have them in service. The first use of DEWs in combat between military forces was claimed to have occurred in Libya in August 2019 by Turkey, which claimed to use the ALKA directed-energy weapon.

After decades of research and development, most DEWs are still at the experimental stage and it remains to be seen if or when they will be deployed as practical, high-performance military weapons.

Will it be possible to defend against the use of DEWs? Yes, but it’s difficult because their capabilities are not yet fully known. One program looking into methods of defense is the Counter-Directed Energy Weapons (CDEW) Program, created in response to the development of DEWs by potential foreign adversaries.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Putting Energy Back into Economics

Steve Keen [via Naked Capitalism 12-01-2023]

American Borrowers Are Getting Closer to Maxing Out

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2023]

The average rate of 30-day-plus delinquency across the five big lenders jumped 0.16 percentage point from September to October, above the typical seasonal jump of 0.06 point, according to Goldman’s tracking. Net charge-offs jumped 0.77 point on average, compared with a 0.18-point typical rise….

A recent note published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that as of July, consumers with annual household incomes of less than $50,000 whose accounts were delinquent were on average utilizing 80 to 90 percent of their available credit. This leaves “those consumers with a very small amount of credit left on their accounts to cushion against a deterioration of their financial situation,” according to the paper. Across all cardholder income groups as of July, average utilization rates—the ratio of outstanding card account balance to the account’s credit limit—were above February 2020 levels.

U.S. Poverty is More Entrenched Than Ever

[Counterpunch, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2023]

...More Americans are poorer and persistently poorer than they have been in a long time. Since last year the number of people living in poverty in the U.S. increased by 15.3 million, as pandemic aid ended, according to CBS September 12. The census and CBS differ over how many American households endure penury, with the latter claiming 12.4 percent and the former 11.5 percent….

To blame for the recent increase in indigence was termination of such benefits as stimulus checks and the Child Tax Credit. “If the expanded Child Tax Credit had been renewed,” CBS said, “about 3 million additional children would have been kept out of poverty last year, while child poverty would have been about 8.4 percent, rather than 12.4 percent.” Imagine a world where the U.S. kept the CTC but ditched Donald “Save the Billionaires” Trump’s God-awful tax cut for the rich. There might even be enough money to provide low-income housing for the homeless….

A more specific problem for the poor is that they earned less last year, according to the census. “The median household income in 2022 was $74,580, a decline of 2.3 percent and the third year in a row that incomes have dipped.”

Americans need an extra $11,400 today just to afford the basics

[CBS, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-29-2023]

“The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs, according to a recent analysis of government data…. Although inflation is cooling, many consumers may not be feeling much relief because most prices aren’t declining (One major exception: gas prices, which are notoriously volatile and which have declined about 5% in the past year.) Consumers are still paying more, albeit at a slower pace, on top of the higher prices that were locked in when price hikes surged in 2022 and earlier this year.” • Prices don’t “surge” (note lack of agency). Prices rise because firms raise them.

Our Democratic and Republican voting states death rate as percent of Canada's by age

pecanjim, November 26, 2023 [DailyKos]

GRAPH

Precarious finances: 38% of Europeans no longer eat three meals a day

[Euronews, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2023]

Economists May Have Been Flying Blind All Along

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 11-27-2023]

Declining response rates to official surveys raise the possibility that government and central bank officials have been making decisions based on flawed data….

The Distributional Financial Accounts the Fed created in 2019 are a good example of how to make that connection. It uses aggregate data on wealth from financial institutions and a household survey of wealth to merge the macro and micro. As such, we now know the top 0.1% of households by wealth have five times more wealth than the bottom 50%. How much wealth the country has and who has it are both facts that should inform policy. The first step is to know that such data exist, and economists must use the figures.

Capitalism, war and plunder in the Horn of Africa

[Review of African Political Economy, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2023]

Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton write about the spectacular growth in livestock exports from the Horn of Africa to the urbanising Gulf states, and argue that neoliberalism has transformed the former reciprocity between ‘farmers’ and ‘herders’ into a relation of permanent war. Based on their article in ROAPE – freely available to read below – they argue that the crisis in the Horn is rooted in how the wealth of its peoples is being internationally plundered.

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2023]

New paper on pharmaceutical mergers. The conclusions are that (1) mergers boost net drug prices by a fifth and (2) don't help bring new drugs to market. https://t.co/r6jKchUObs
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 27, 2023

Mergers, Prices, and Innovation: Lessons from the Pharmaceutical Industry (pdf)

Abstract:

The significant surge in pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions (M&A), averaging a 50% year-to-year increase over the last decade, has drawn concerns regarding its potential impact on consumers. Claims made by pharmaceutical companies suggest M&A, by increasing synergies, will cause innovation to increase and the firm to become more efficient, passing on lower prices to consumers. However, regulators worry firms, in gaining market power through M&A, will raise drug prices and have less incentive to innovate. The prior literature has not yet come to a consensus on how mergers and acquisitions will impact these outcomes. This paper empirically assesses M&A's effects, employing an event study design and difference-in-differences analysis along with new, more comprehensive data on innovation and net prices. I show that, upon an M&A event, firms increase research and development (R&D) spending, decrease filed patents, and do not experience significant changes in the the number of drugs passing through clinical trials compared to pre-M&A levels. Further, I show decreases in patents come from primary patents on new technologies, rather than secondary patents, suggesting that firms use M&A to substitute their internal R&D by acquiring new technologies in development from smaller firms. They then increase R&D spending to support the progression of these assets through clinical trials. However, despite financial backing, I find firms are largely unsuccessful in advancing newly acquired drugs through development. I also find, after M&A activity, net drug prices increase by 19%. These increases occur both in mergers and acquisitions where targets and acquirers have overlapping and non-overlapping therapeutic area portfolios, suggesting multiple mechanisms for price increases. Ultimately, these findings emphasize that M&A leaves consumers at a net loss, with higher drug prices and a pharmaceutical industry that is less efficient at producing the innovation that defines its business model. Therefore, it is critical that regulators consider the impact consolidation has on innovation, in addition to traditional measures like prices, when evaluating whether mergers and acquisitions are ultimately beneficial for consumers.

Mergers, Product Prices, and Innovation: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry (pdf)

Alice Bonaim´e and Ye (Emma) Wang* April 2022 [DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3445753]

Abstract
Using novel data from the pharmaceutical industry, we study product prices and innovation around mergers. Exploiting within-deal variation in product market consolidation, we show prices increase more within drugs in consolidating markets than within matched control drugs. Estimates indicate a 2% average price effect that persists for about one year. Price increases are more pronounced for drugs in concentrated markets and without generic competition. Examination of trade-offs reveals these deals generate significant shareholder value and spur labeling and other manufacturing-related innovation, but not new drug approvals.

Health care crisis

‘Immunity Debt’? Established 2021

[Counter-Disinformation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-28-2023]

“This is how one unconvincing paper and the Wall Street Journal seeded the idea of immunity debt which was then repeated and amplified by other media sources. From being mentioned in a single paper released in May, by mid July immunity debt was being treated as a well established and well known part of scientific literature. It’s astounding that the same people who dismiss so many studies as lacking rigour or not being valid because there isn’t a RCT were so quick to adopt immunity debt when you consider the time it took for covid to be accepted as being airborne, how long some have continued to debate masks, and how air filtration is still not accepted as a means to reducing transmission. The high standards required to justify measures in schools dissipated like a puff of smoke when a concept to argue against measures in schools was encountered.”

No one’s promising you can keep your doctor anymore

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2023]

Facing Financial Ruin as Costs Soar for Elder Care

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 11-26-2023]

The United States has no coherent system for providing long-term care, leading many who are aging to struggle to stay independent or to rely on a patchwork of solutions.

Restoring balance to the economy

No, Really. Building More Housing Can Combat Rising Rents

[CityLab, via The Big Picture 11-27-2023]

...a review of recent research into the link between new housing production and apartment affordability offers new evidence that the rules of supply and demand do apply to housing: Building more can slow rent growth in cities and free up more affordable vacant units in surrounding neighborhoods, without causing significant displacement….

The analysis, conducted by three faculty directors at New York University’s Furman Center, speaks directly to these so-called supply skeptics. It cites dozens of studies and explains how their findings consistently debunk or complicate concerns that building more housing could do more harm than good to housing affordability.

Supply Skepticism Revisited

Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine M. O'Regan, 13 Nov 2023 [NYU Law and Economics Research Paper Forthcoming 65 Pages, via CityLab, above]

Abstract
Although “supply skeptics” claim that new housing supply does not slow growth in rents, we show that rigorous recent studies demonstrate that: 1) Increases in housing supply slow the growth in rents in the region; 2) In some circumstances, new construction also reduces rents or rent growth in the surrounding area; 3) The chains of moves sparked by new construction free up apartments that are then rented (or retained) by households across the income spectrum; 4) While new supply is associated with gentrification, it has not been shown to cause significant displacement of lower income households; and 5) Easing land use restrictions, at least on a broad scale and in ways that change binding constraints on development, generally leads to more new housing over time, but only a fraction of the new capacity created because many other factors constrain the pace of new development.

The Tesla battle is about so much more than Sweden.

[Aftonbladet via machine translation, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2023]

GM execs boast about low costs of UAW contract, hand over billions to shareholders

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 12-01-2023]

GM Plans $10 Billion Stock Buyback in Bid to Assuage Investors

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 11-30-2023]

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Meta Designed Products to Capitalize on Teen Vulnerabilities, States Allege

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-30-2023]

“An internal 2020 Meta presentation shows that the company sought to engineer its products to capitalize on the parts of youth psychology that render teens ‘predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior,’ the filings show…. ‘Teens are insatiable when it comes to ‘feel good’ dopamine effects,’ the Meta presentation shows, according to the unredacted filing, describing the company’s existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. ‘And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit.’ Well-being concerns were especially pronounced for younger teens, some Meta executives involved with youth well-being issues internally acknowledged. ‘It’s not ‘regulators’ or ‘critics’ who think Instagram is unhealthy for young teens—it’s everyone from researchers and academic experts to parents,’ Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of policy, wrote in a May 2021 email cited by the attorneys general. ‘The blueprint of the app is inherently not designed for an age group that don’t have the same cognitive and emotional skills that older teens do.’ Meta says it didn’t design its products to be addictive for teens. ‘The complaint mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents,’ said Stephanie Otway, a spokeswoman for the company.”

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-30-2023]

What is Facebook’s response to the ugly stories on how it tracks and manipulates children? To apologize? To obey the Federal Trade Commission’s order to stop? Nope.

Zuckerberg just asked a court to declare the FTC unconstitutional. https://t.co/xHq5O29DBW
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 30, 2023

From the filing:

3. In this Complaint, Meta does not seek to litigate the merits of the Commission’s accusations and findings against Meta in the FTC Proceeding. Instead, Meta challenges the constitutionality of five structural characteristics of the Commission that render the FTC Proceeding unconstitutional.

4. First, the FTC is structured so that in administrative adjudications, including the FTC Proceeding against Meta, the Commission has a dual role as prosecutor and judge in violation of the Due Process Clause….

5. Second, the Commissioners exercise executive authority while being unconstitutionally insulated from removal by the President, who can remove a Commissioner only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” ….

6. Third, Congress unconstitutionally has delegated to the FTC the power to assign disputes to administrative adjudication rather than litigating them before an Article III court….

7. Fourth, the FTC adjudicates private rights in violation of Article III….

8. Fifth, adjudication of these issues by the Commission in a proceeding that affords Meta no right to a trial by jury—and pursuant to a statutory scheme that provides for the potential future imposition of civil penalties, see 15 U.S.C. § 45(l)—violates Meta’s right to a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment.

CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show

Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi [Public, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-01-2023]

“Now, a large trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that, in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA in the spring of 2020. In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018. Internal [Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process. The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.” Gramsci urges, somewhere, that state and civil society can be separated only as objects of study. That is, we cannot think of the State as a single entity, a la the “Deep State.” Both are aspects of the same governing class of people, all playing their roles (sometimes multiple roles) in parallel and intersecting fields. As for example: “According to the whistleblower, roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA. “For a while, they had their agency seals — FBI, CISA, whatever — next to your name,” on the Slack messaging service, said the whistleblower.” • Janine Wedel’s model of networked “Flexians” (The Shadow Elites) is far better framework to approach understanding these developments; I should really review it one day. Anyhow, here is Taibbi’s accompanying video:

“Anti-Disinformation” Is a Partisan Con

Matt Taibbi [via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2023]

Climate and environmental crises
Dubai’s Costly Water World

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 11-27-2023]

The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority supplies water to more than 3.6 million residents along with the city’s active daytime population of more than 4.7 million visitors, according to a 2022 sustainability report. By 2040, the utility expects these numbers to grow, increasing the demand for clean water.

The city desalinated approximately 163.6 billion gallons of water last year, according to the sustainability report. For each gallon of desalinated water produced in the Gulf, an average of a gallon and a half of brine is released into the ocean.

In Dubai, the Jebel Ali Power and Desalination Complex — the largest facility of its kind in the world — pipes water from the sea, sending it through a series of treatment phases, then to the city as drinkable water. But Jebel Ali’s 43 desalination plants are powered by fossil fuels. The U.A.E. produced more than 200 million tons of carbon in 2022, among the highest emissions per capita worldwide.

Oil and gas giants to cash in on climate crisis they helped cause: Melting ice exposes new petroleum reservoirs in the Arctic worth $7TRILLION – in what is being dubbed a ‘modern day gold rush’

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2023]

The asbestos times

[Works in Progress, via The Big Picture 11-27-2023]

Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides.

Where could millions of EV batteries retire? Solar farms

[Grist, via The Big Picture 12-01-2023]

A Southern California company is showing how repurposing EV batteries for stationary storage can extend their usefulness for several years.

Plutocracy results in oligarchy

The Ideologies of Silicon Valley (PDF)

[Crooked Timber]

A Crooked Timber Seminar, November 2023

Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder: Silicon Valley’s ideology is this: Libertarianism for me. Feudalism for thee. (Crooked Timber, via The Big Picture 11-26-2023]

‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2023]

Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon, underground lair in New Zealand, or virtual reality server in the cloud. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension.

While plans for Peter Thiel’s 193-hectare (477-acre) “doomsday” escape, complete with spa, theatre, meditation lounge and library, were ultimately rejected on environmental grounds, he still wants to build a startup community that floats on the ocean, where so-called seasteaders can live beyond government regulation as well as whatever disasters may befall us back on the continents.

Why rich people tend to think they deserve their money

[Marketplace, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-28-2023]

[Lambert Strether: “From 2021, still germane.”]

“One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed ‘Go,’ they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100…. In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice. At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck. ‘They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,’ that contributed to their win, [psychologist Paul Piff] said in an interview with host David Brancaccio. Piff said the experiment reveals a fundamental bias that most humans share. ‘When something good happens to you, we think about the things that we did that contributed to that success,’ Piff said.”

New Billionaires Are Inheriting More Wealth Than Creating It — And Shaking Up Portfolios

[Institutional Investor, via The Big Picture 12-01-2023]

Over the coming decades, about a thousand billionaires will pass on an estimated $5.2 trillion and the inheritors have their own plans for those assets.

Billionaires amass more through inheritance than wealth creation, says UBS

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-01-2023]

“‘The heirs to billionaires are gaining prominence,’ said Benjamin Cavalli, UBS’s head of global wealth management strategic clients. ‘New billionaires minted during this year’s study period accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship. That’s a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 to 30 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated $5.2tn to their children.'”

The oligarchy’s corrosive effects on Democrats and democrats

A Big-Money Operation Purged Critics of Israel From the Democratic Party

[Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2023]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-28-2023]

I have an apology to make to @BernieSanders

I had long dismissed his complaints about the rigged Democratic Party primary system. But you know what? He was right. And I apologize, Bernie.

Voter suppression (NH), candidate suppression (ballot access), and debate suppression…
— Dean Phillips (@deanbphillips) November 8, 2023

Whither The Squad? If you’re someone who hungered for a political revolution, an actual one, Ryan Grim's new book is for you.

Thomas Neuburger, November 29, 2023 [God's Spies]

...This conundrum and others surrounding the Squad — a group of progressive House members with Justice Democrat roots — are wonderfully covered in Ryan Grim’s new book, apply named The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.

The question the book addresses, and the one I hoped it would address when I learned he was writing it, is the same one that Kyle Kulinski, a founder of Justice Democrats, has regularly asked:

The Justice Democrats group was formed to create in the House a “Tea Party on the left” with all that that implies. So, what the hell happened to them?

A great way to preview the book is to listen to the interview linked at the top. Kyle Kulinski and Krystal Ball speak with the author, Ryan Grim, and cover a lot of the book’s material — the Squad members themselves, their history as a group, their future, notable controversies, and why in hell the Israeli government, through its goon squad (sorry, domestic lobbying arm) is spending a ton of cash to see them defeated.

How Haley’s Hawks Brought Carnage to Ukraine

[The American Conservative, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-28-2023]

“[T]he ‘responsible people’ are determined to maintain their perches of responsibility—which is to say, their power. On the right, this means a concerted push to manufacture enthusiasm for Nikki Haley’s challenge to Donald Trump in the GOP primary. A $1,000-per-ticket fundraiser for Haley on Nov. 13, previously unreported elsewhere, opened a revealing window onto this effort…. The host committee was a who’s who of the sorts of “responsible people” who plunged the United States into two fruitless wars in the two decades after 9/11 and/or served as hired guns for various foreign regimes and companies.”

2024— Not Another Lesser Of Two Evils Election… Way Beyond That

Howie Klein, December 1, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

I didn’t vote to reelect Obama in 2012 and I didn’t vote for Hillary or Biden. I’m long done with supporting the Democraps' lesser evil election strategy. But 2024 is way, way beyond a lesser of two evils confrontation. I’m seeing this as an existential choice and I feel like I really have no responsible option other than to vote for Biden, as much as I don’t want to. Trump is just too dangerous.

Conservative / Libertarian Drive to Civil War

The Blueprint

Harold Meyerson, November 27, 2023 [The American Prospect]

“Earlier this year, Project 2025 published a 920-page manifesto called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, laying out its agenda for Trump or any other Republican who should win the White House. The book consists chiefly of the world’s longest enemies list, with detailed instructions on how to target them, oust them, and reverse their policies, both real and imagined.” Another way of saying this is that Republicans have always been a more serious party than Democrats, at least in my lifetime. Contrast Obama, who, for example, rationalized and legitimized Bush’s felonious program of warrantless surveillance, and looked forward and not backward on torture. To be fair, Obama probably didn’t consider spooks “enemies.” More: “This is not the first time Heritage has sketched out a blueprint for a conservative presidency. In 1980, the think tank aided another neophyte politician with revolutionary aspirations—Ronald Reagan—with a report, also called Mandate for Leadership, that stretched to 1,100 pages and covered virtually every nook and cranny of government…. A subsequent edition of Mandate for Leadership has been produced for every presidential election since 1980. This iteration, very much in the spirit of Trump, is lighter on policy and heavier on retribution…. Heritage’s knowledge of the federal vacancy process becomes useful. Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, for most federal agencies, a vacancy at the top means that the next available deputy becomes the acting head. Project 2025 sees a path to manipulating this law to ensure loyalists take control. ‘Where a career employee holds a leadership position,’ explains Ken Cuccinelli, the former acting deputy homeland security secretary under Trump, ‘that position should be deemed vacant for line-of-succession purposes, and the next eligible political appointee in the sequence should assume acting authority.’ Other authors call for political appointees to be put into the line of succession directly, ‘selected by the President-elect’s transition team’ and ‘in place the first day of the Administration.’ This gambit would hand over the administrative state to those dedicated to crushing it. That would combine with the restoration of Trump’s October 2020 ‘Schedule F’ order, which would reassign up to 50,000 civil service workers with a designation that robs them of employment protections, making them easier to terminate. So the leadership of executive branch agencies would be ideologues, and many bureaucrats under their care could be fired at will.”

Trump's Blueprint For American Fascism Is Real-- And His Fans Have No Problem With That At All

Howie Klein, November 28, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

...Donald P. Moynihan … [is] an Irish-American political scientist, who wrote the highly acclaimed book The Dynamics of Performance Management: Constructing Information and Reform. He teaches at Georgetown and yesterday the NY Times published his guest essay, Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’. His field is bureaucracies and urges everyone who would normally ignore the topic— pretty much everyone other than his students— to start paying attention since Señor Trumpanzee has some plans: “‘Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.’ This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy… This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions. It has three major parts.”

Charles Koch’s anti-Trump group endorses Nikki Haley in Republican primary

[ABC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-28-2023]

“[Americans for Prosperity Action, the] Koch-backed group stayed out of the 2016 and 2020 presidential cycles but has significant resources to try and boost Haley’s campaign, though AFP Action is so far staying mum on how much it plans to spend. The group reported raising more than $70 million in its last public filing, in June, with $25 million coming from Koch himself and another $25 million from one of his nonprofit groups… AFP Action thinks it can make a difference: ABC News reviewed several internal memos, based on the organization’s polling and door-knocking operations in early states, suggesting that about four in 10 GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire say the primary campaign ‘hasn’t begun’ or has ‘just started.’ AFP Action also believes that three in four Republicans are open to a Trump alternative if they think that person has a better chance of winning.”

‘Tons of Crazy’: The Inside Story of How Fox Fell for the ‘Big Lie’

[Politico, via The Big Picture 11-26-2023]

A play-by-play from inside Fox reveals how the network poisoned politics — and lost $787.5 million.

They Tried to Expose Louisiana Judges Who Had Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions. No One Listened: The Scandal That Never Happened

[ProPublica, via The Big Picture 11-26-2023]

Years ago, the all-white judges of a Louisiana appellate court decided, in secret, to systematically ignore petitions filed by prisoners, most of them Black, who claimed they had been unjustly convicted.This is the story of a horrendous injustice and the three people who tried to expose it. It begins with a suicide note.

Republican Officials Are Petrified Of Young Voters— Especially The Educated Ones

Howie Klein, November 30, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

Trump Is A Weak General Election Candidate… If Trump Runs On Medicare-For-All, He Could Win

Howie Klein, November 28, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

Yesterday, historian Harvey J Kaye tweeted a couple of paragraphs about America’s last great president. It’s worth reading if you missed it: “Yes, we have a lot to learn from FDR about how to confront the fascist threat in America: Running for President in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, Roosevelt had come to see that the only way to save American democratic life was to radically enhance it— and he believed that most Americans had come to see that too. Unlike so many of his station, FDR did not fear Americans’ democratic impulses. He feared what might happen if they were too long thwarted, with Fascist Italy and Communist Russia as prime examples. In fact, two years earlier, on May 12, 1930, he had written to his friend John Kingsbury, a leading authority on social welfare, saying: ‘There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolution.’ And when Roosevelt did win the White House, he acted to encourage, empower, and mobilize Americans, especially working people, to join him in democratically harnessing the powers of government and making America ‘fairly radical for at least a generation.’

“Together, President and people redeemed the nation’s promise by initiating revolutionary changes in American government and public life. They subjected business and banking to public account and regulation; empowered government to address the needs of working people and the poor; organized labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil-rights groups to fight for their rights and broaden and level the ‘We’ in ‘We the People;’ established a social security system; built schools, libraries, post offices, and parks all across country; vastly expanded the nation’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams; dramatically improved the American landscape and environment; and energetically cultivated the arts and refashioned popular culture (just think Swing Music). Moreover, while much remained to be done, they had imbued themselves with fresh democratic convictions, hopes, and aspirations— which enabled them confront and defeat Fascism overseas.”

[TW: In her new book, Democracy Awakening, Heather Cox Richardson begins by asking why the USA avoided fascism in the 1930s. She credits Franklin Roosevelt for providing a persistent and understandable explanation of why democracy — and defending it — was important. By contrast, of course, Germany’s leaders sought to blame the Jews for their society’s economic misery. But I think Richardson fails to elevate one important element in FDR’s successful defense of democracy: he explicitly blamed the rich, the “economic royalists,” for the Great Depression, and “welcomed their hatred.” Of course, it was also important to provide hope for a better economic future, which is exactly what FDR’s New Deal did. During the winter of 1933-34, the Civil Works Administration under Harry Hopkins, put four million people to work, giving them the income to literally avoid starvation. Compare that to Barack Obama tolerating millions of Americans to lose their homes to foreclosure fraud. And Democratic Party elites still wonder how Trump won in 2016 to succeed Obama,]

Biden, the Economy, and the Election

Robert Kuttner, December 1, 2023 [The American Prospect]

...the public’s negative view of the economy should not be a major puzzle at all. Ordinary people have been taking it on the chin for about four decades, during which time virtually all GDP gains were captured by the very rich. People suffered more during the COVID inflation despite Biden’s heroic efforts to mitigate that suffering, and those relief programs are now expiring.

The economy’s deep structural changes include more gig jobs and fewer real payroll jobs, a far less reliable retirement system, impossible costs of both rental housing and homeownership, and a crushing debt-for-diploma system. (Borrowers just started paying on those student loans again after a three-year hiatus.) A few months of modest statistical improvement in real wage growth outstripping inflation doesn’t change those fundamentals, and thus doesn’t change attitudes….

Bloomberg just ran a devastating piece, item by item, on just how much highly visible costs to consumers (rent, insurance, electricity, groceries, meals out) have risen since the pandemic began in 2020. Some of these price hikes reflect pure gouging by ever more concentrated sellers; and it helps when Biden goes after them, as he did in this recent speech….

You owe it to yourself to read several recent chilling pieces on Trump’s increasingly open embrace of fascism and the very genuine risk that he could defeat a struggling Biden—especially this one by Robert Kagan, this earlier piece by Tom Edsall, and this one from our own Harold Meyerson.

[TW: There have now been a number of articles exploring why Americans remain so pessimistic and discontented about the economy. None have yet considered that the radical redistribution to the already rich of over $50 trillion in the past half century has created a plutocracy, which has fundamentally corrupted the political system of the country. It’s going to take much more than just some annual wage gains alter what people correctly perceive is a “rigged system.”]

Democracy’s Deserters: How did we get to the breaking point in American politics?

Aziz Z. Huq, December 1, 2023 [The American Prospect]

Reviewed:

Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Crown

….

All this seems true enough, but I’m skeptical it’s the whole story. For one thing, the story has an American accent—but democratic backsliding is a global phenomenon. For another thing, it’s hard to believe that racial resentment can carry the whole explanatory load that Levitsky and Ziblatt want to heft onto it. An obvious blank spot in their account is economic class. In the teeth of lively debate among scholars as to whether racial and cultural change or economic shifts better explain voters’ increasing indifference to democratic norms, Levitsky and Ziblatt appear to side almost completely with the first strain of explanation. Nearly absent from their narrative is the neoliberal turn in American public policy and the subsequent growth of financial and corporate power at the expense of labor, which began under Jimmy Carter and persisted under administrations of both parties.

By omitting that strand of recent history, Levitsky and Ziblatt need say nothing about the fealty of Democratic elites to regressive free-market nostrums. Perhaps there is more than one way, though, of shucking off democratic norms. A shift from listening to the median-earning voter to hearing only the well-off might also result in their erosion. The net effect of these gaps in Tyranny of the Minority is to absolve political elites of responsibility for their abandonment of working-class voters and the opening they provided for figures like Trump. It also closes off reflection on economic policy as an instrument in the pro-democracy tool kit…..

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

The Case That Could Destroy the Government

Noah Rosenblum [Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2023]

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

The case involves garden-variety securities fraud. George R. Jarkesy Jr., a right-wing activist and conservative-radio talk-show host, ran a pair of investment funds with $24 million in assets. But he misrepresented how the funds were run, paid himself and his partner exorbitant fees, and inflated the assets’ value. As punishment, the SEC fined him several hundred thousand dollars and prohibited him from working in some parts of the securities industry—very standard stuff….

Jarkesy’s most far-reaching constitutional argument is built on the “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that there may be some limits on the kinds of powers that Congress can give to agencies. Jarkesy argues that, when Congress gave the SEC the power to decide whether to bring enforcement actions in court or in front of an independent agency adjudicator, it gave away a core legislative function. It thus violated the doctrine and engaged in an unconstitutional delegation….

This is wild stuff. Not long ago, a lawyer would have been laughed out of court for making such nondelegation claims. Today, they’d have a good chance of destroying the federal government’s administrative capacity—taking down its ability to protect Americans’ health and safety while unleashing fraud in the financial markets.

Whether Congress’s grant of authority to the SEC was constitutional should not be a close question. Congress has delegated expansive authority to government agencies since the dawn of the republic.

Supreme Court to consider multi-pronged constitutional attack on SEC

[SCOTUSblog, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-28-2023]

“The argument on Wednesday in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy will present a remarkable spectacle of three entirely distinct constitutional challenges to wholly disparate attributes of the SEC. Ordinarily, the ability of the justices to control their docket would allow them to wait on each question for the development of a circuit conflict and select a suitable case in which to resolve each issue. But in this case a bold (I did not say “rogue”) panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit accepted all three arguments and invalidated three aspects of the SEC’s operations. To leave the decision unreviewed would force Congress to revise substantially the affected portions of the securities laws solely based on the opinion of one divided lower court panel – hence, the Supreme Court’s buffet of constitutional law topics on Wednesday morning…. The first question before the justices is whether Congress constitutionally authorized the agency to adjudicate administrative proceedings that impose monetary penalties. That raises a question under the court’s deeply fraught doctrine of “public rights,” which offers an exception to the Seventh Amendment jury trial requirement. …. The second question is whether Congress can delegate to the SEC the power to decide whether a case should be pursued as an administrative proceeding or as a civil enforcement action – that is, within the agency or in a federal district court. … The third question in the case is whether the Constitution allows Congress to give the SEC’s administrative law judges protection from removal.”

Supreme Court to consider ‘quadrillion-dollar question’ in major tax case

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-28-2023]

“At issue in Moore v. United States is the question of whether the federal government can tax certain types of “unrealized” gains, which are property like stocks or bonds that people own but from which they haven’t directly recouped the value, so they don’t have direct access to the money that the property is worth…. Even if the court limits the scope of its decision to the specific tax referenced in the case, known as the mandatory repatriation tax, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could cost $340 billion over the next decade, according to the Justice Department…. Critics of a blanket constitutional requirement for realization say the idea is trumped up, and it’s really just about the timing of when an asset is allowed to be taxed for accounting purposes. They point to a 1940 decision in Helvering v. Horst finding that ‘the rule that income is not taxable until realized has never been taken to mean that the taxpayer … can escape taxation because he has not himself received payment of it from his obligor.’ This is because the taxpayer ‘has fully enjoyed the benefit of the economic gain represented by his right to receive income,’ the court found. As such, the requirement was considered to be ‘founded on administrative convenience’ and ‘not one of exemption from taxation.'”

The new SCOTUS Code of Conduct

[SCOTUSblog, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-30-2023]

“There are things to like about the Code of Conduct that the Supreme Court promulgated earlier this month. It is a bona fide code of conduct—one that, in the main, tracks the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges. It follows the same structure, features the same five canons, and includes most of the same provisions that are worded in the same way…. And it is not fair to condemn the new code as toothless because it includes no enforcement mechanism. That said, there are some problematic differences between the new SCOTUS Code and the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges…. The new code does not impose a duty to ‘be faithful to…the law,’ as required by Canon 3(A)(1) of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges. It is possible that this duty was thought redundant of the Canon 2(A) obligation to ‘respect and comply with the law’ (which the court retained). The obligation to respect and comply with the law, however, concerns the duty to abide by the law in a judge’s daily life, while the duty to be faithful to the law concerns a duty to uphold and apply the law when deciding cases. For justices under increased fire for ideological, partisan-seeming decision-making, the optics of the court exempting itself from a duty to uphold and apply the law is unfortunate….. The new SCOTUS Code qualifies the statutory duty to disqualify when a justice’s ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned’ by adding language interpreting it to mean that ‘an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant circumstances would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties.’ While consistent with interpretive precedent, this clause is cherry-picked to omit guidance that the ‘reasonable person’ is not a judge but an outside observer, who is less inclined than a judge to credit the judge’s impartiality. ”

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