Not, actually, a surprise, to anyone who isn’t an idiot:
China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing.
Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.
Why is this?
According to James Wilsdon, science policy director at the Royal Society in London, three main factors are driving Chinese research. First is the government’s enormous investment, with funding increases far above the rate of inflation, at all levels of the system from schools to postgraduate research.
Second is the organised flow of knowledge from basic science to commercial applications. Third is the efficient and flexible way in which China is tapping the expertise of its extensive scientific diaspora in north America and Europe, tempting back mid-career scientists with deals that allow them to spend part of the year working in the west and part in China.
Oh. Because you get what you pay for and what you plan for. The US has been starving its scientists and forcing them to rely on private funding, and China has been investing in them, bigtime.
Because China understands leading in science helps you lead in technology and that helps your country be strong and prosperous.
Oh, and that real strength means not prioritizing military research.
The US understood all those things, once upon a time.
A while back I stumbled upon an ex-reader commenting that he quit reading FDL when I was talking about how China was going to eat the US’s lunch in the next couple generations.
He epitomized why the US is going down, because no one can tell Americans they aren’t the center of the universe and the best at everything. And since Americans think they are the best, it never occurs to them that they need to actually, really, fix anything.
A Burlington woman is accused of trying to end her pregnancy by allegedly falling down stairs because police say she was mad at her husband.
Christine Taylor is charged with attempted feticide. She was arrested on Wednesday after receiving treatment at a hospital.
Police were called to a hospital late Tuesday after Taylor reportedly told a nurse she intentionally fell down the stairs of her home because she wanted to end her pregnancy.
If so, I can’t see how abortion is legal.
The Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to use their vast resources to directly influence the political process shifts the business playing field away from competing in the marketplace with products and services, to purchasing government/legal/reguatory advantages, subsidies and monopolies.
The marketplace is now irrelevant – only company size matters. It is just more efficient to beat your competitors by buying legislation than it is by competing in the marketplace. When you can purchase $1 billion in tax breaks, subsidies, mandates, contracts, whatever by spending a few million on candidates/influence, etc. it just makes more sense to do so. The return on investment is just so much higher than building factories, spending on research, paying employees, and other tedious, time-consuming, capital-intensive work.
For some time companies have recognized that the rewards from lobbying outperform the rewards from competing in the marketplace, and this ruling just amplifies that. This 2006 New York Times article, Google Joins the Lobbying Herd, discussed how Google felt it had “no choice but to get into the arena” to start “spreading its lobbying dollars” around to politicians and quotes Lauren Maddox, a lobbyist for Google, saying the “policy process is an extension of the market battlefield.” This supreme court ruling just clinches this shift away from markets.
This has been part of my fundamental critique of the US economy for years. This is why the US is losing its technological lead in area after area, because innovating is less certain than buying government.
Thing is, foreign companies don’t have this “advantage” so have to compete the old fashioned way. And they will continue to eat American companies lunch. As the US gets weaker, and becomes less able to force foreign companies to obey American laws, this strategy will become less and less viable, especially as American citizens will also be losing buying power.
This sort of thing is why I now see the odds of the US turning itself around in the next generation as being miniscule.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.
Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are avaiable anywhere else.
And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions are arrayed against it.
The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have 10 months to do something and ram something through. Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and not rubber-stamp radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.
That is, however, a faint hope.
Add to this the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology or anything else and I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around. The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, and ologopolistic markets and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed”.
Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington. This will put their influence on steroids. Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money. And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.
This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before—and before it was still very unlikely. Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough and corporations weak enough for there to even be a chance.
So, my advice to my readers is this.
If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US: places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who came to America understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than America, and they came to a place where freedom and opportunity reigned.
That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now—it is time to get out.
I am not the only person thinking this. Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.
There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.
But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure: if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure. Because it will be very, very steep.
Guess a kick in the head sometimes knocks some sense into people. I confess I’m surprised. Maybe they can learn.
The White House wants commercial banks that take deposits from customers to be barred from investing on behalf of the bank itself—what’s known as proprietary trading—and said the administration will seek new limits on the size and concentration of financial institutions.
… Banks shielded from risk through federal-deposit insurance, or aided in financial crises by low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve Board, would no longer be allowed to engage in trading unrelated to their customers’ interests, one senior administration official said.
Under the proposed rule, commercial banks would be prohibited from owning, investing in or advising hedge funds or private equity firms. Bank regulators would not be simply given the discretion to enforce such rules. They would be required to do so.
…
Administration officials said they also want to toughen an existing cap on bank market share. Since 1994, no bank can have more than 10% of the nation’s insured deposits. The Obama administration wants that cap to include non-insured deposits and other assets.
This is the right thing to do. I agree with Johnson that they should also launch anti-trust investigations of the banks. I would add, that in addition, they should launch criminal fraud investigations into bank behaviour leading up to the financial crisis. Keep these people so tied up, and get them so scared that they want peace at any cost.
As Johnson notes, it seems unlikely this can pass the Senate. But if Obama wants to not have a disaster in the 2010 elections, he should make these sort of actions the centerpiece of his administration for the next year. Run against the banks, and go hardcore populist. Because if he doesn’t, the Republicans will go faux populist, and win on it.
We’ll see, in the next few months, how serious Obama is about taking. Is this for real and will he pursue it with all his might, making a fight of it, or he will pursue it like everything else he’s done—half-heartedly, and for show? Will he push it hard in the Senate, or when the Senate balks, will he shrug and say ‘whatever Ben Nelson wants?”
I’m not optimistic, but at least, in a pleasing change from most of his behaviour since the election, Obama is talking about doing the right thing.
So, in addition to screwing up healthcare and escalating in Afghanistan, it seems that Obama is set to appoint a deficit reduction panel. Their job will be to come up with a “bipartisan” way of cutting the deficit by cutting Medicare and Social Security. There is no other way to cut the deficit, because the only other large bucket of money, the defense budget, is off the table, and no one is willing to radically raise taxes on the rich.
Despite being called “bipartisan”, cutting Social Security and Medicare will take place under a Democratic President, though probably not a Democratic Congress (since the vote will occur after the 2010 elections.) The Republicans will allow just enough members to vote to get it through, then will run, as a party, blaming Democrats for gutting SS and Medicare.
And people thought my piece yesterday yesterday predicting electoral carnage in 2010 and 2012 was overwrought?
Excuse me while I take time out to laugh.
(Update: I meant Congress, not Senate. I don’t see the Dems losing the Senate in 2012, I do see them losing the House. Oops.)
What does this mean?
First of all, this will be taken as meaning HCR must be passed exactly as the Senate Bill. That’s already clear. The Democratic reaction to losing Kennedy’s seat will be to do exactly what voters were punishing them for.
In 2010 Democrats will be slaughtered, absolutely slaughtered, because Obama and the senior Democratic leadership does not learn.
In 2012 Obama will become a 1 term president, and a right wing populist will get into power. That populist will turn out not to be a populist, and will do even stupider things than Obama economically (and may start a war, too).
The job is to prepare for this, to get new members and leadership in in 2014. Start working on it now.
Because 2014 and 2016 are going to be your last chance. If the US doesn’t elect people who are willing to do what it takes in those two election years, then the US economy is going to be a smoking ruin, far worse even than it is now.
This group of Dems have proved they can’t learn. Fortunately, and yes, I do mean fortunately, they are going to be swept out of power. Yes, they’ll be replaced by Republicans who are marginally worse, but that will give you your one chance to fix America.
Up to you if you’re up for it. Good luck.
The corporations that make money from health care — and want the status quo — know whose side Scott Brown will be on:
An index of health-care companies in the S&P 500 led the advance with a 1.9 percent rally. U.S. Democrats face the possibility of losing a Senate seat held by the late Edward Kennedy as voters in Massachusetts go to the polls. A loss could cost them a 60-vote supermajority needed to help pass a health- care overhaul.
Investors know that Brown winning means the Senate bill passes exactly as is, which is what they want. When the Senate bill passed, the stock market went up.
Partisan instincts are overcoming rationality amongst most progressive bloggers.
And yes, it is a referendum on Obama, and health care. The more Coakley said she was the 60th vote for healthcare “reform”, the worse her numbers became. The more she said “I’m Obama’s 60th vote” the worse her numbers became. Yes, she took the election for granted at the beginning, but let’s be honest: who the hell thought the Democrats could lose Ted Kennedy’s seat?
What people are hearing; what they believe, is that the money for HCR is coming from cuts to Medicare, and not from cuts to the insurance industry, pharma or taxes on rich people. And, actually, they’re right about this. One might argue that the Medicare cuts are “fat” and “justified” but people aren’t buying it.
Win or lose, if Democrats are in trouble even in Kennedy’s seat, then 2010 is looking grim indeed. And while I have been surprised by how close this election has become, I am not surprised by the fact that 2010 is looking grim. I have been warning since the stimulus bill (a horrible mess) that bad policy leads to bad outcomes which leads to voters hating the party in power. I have been warning since Obama pushed through TARP that if Democrats refused to be populist, right wing populism would surge.
No matter the outcome, Obama needs to try fake populism (because we all know he won’t do the real thing) and needs to pray that his economic program, such as it is, produces better economic results than even his own economic advisers think likely. This will be done by faux populist measures such as the bank levy, and on the economic front, by both using the unlimited guarantees given to Freddie and Fannie to reinflate the propery market and through military Keynesian stimulus from the Afghan escalation.
I suspect it’s going to be better than people think, but it’s still not going to be enough. The 2010 elections are going to be ugly for Democrats.
Which, sadly, is exactly what they deserve.
