Month: July 2021 Page 2 of 3

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 18, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

The Epidemic

NEW From CDC: “Community Profile Report July 8 2021” (PDF), “Rapid Riser” counties

[CDC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-16-21]

Five undervaccinated clusters put the entire United States at risk

[CNN, via The Big Picture 7-12-2021]

Clusters of unvaccinated people, most of them in the southern United States, are vulnerable to surges in Covid-19 cases and could become breeding grounds for even more deadly Covid-19 variants: Starting in Georgia and stretching west to Texas and north to Missouri + include parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

There’s A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States’ Vaccination Rates 

[NPR, via The Big Picture 7-13-2021]

But surveys have shown Trump supporters are the least likely to say they have been vaccinated or plan to be. Remember, Trump got vaccinated before leaving the White House, but that was reported months later. Unlike other public officials who were trying to encourage people to get the shot, Trump did it in private.

Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 7-13-2021]

The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. For nearly every U.S. county, both the willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020.

Strategic Political Economy

Newsmax anchor goes full death cult, suggests vaccines go against evolution and nature

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This is what all political efforts to reduce CO2 emissions have accomplished:

Meanwhile:

It is often argued that individuals are not helpless, they can join political movements intended to stop climate change.

I’m sorry, but it’s too late. The time to do that was decades ago. People did do it, and they failed. They didn’t move the needle at all.

We’re done. Climate change is happening. We have broken the old homeostasis and where the new homeostasis is, there is no way of telling. Everything we did doesn’t show up in the CO2 chart, while meanwhile we’re actually accelerating destroying one of the world’s two most important tropical rain forests, as the temperate rain forest of the Northwest burns down, changing the Pacific Northwest into a different ecosystem, one which will fix a lot less carbon. In the permafrost areas, permafrost is literally burning and exploding out of the ground, releasing methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas.

The world’s most powerful state, the US, is ruled by an oligarchy. In 2014, Princeton did a study which found that the opinion of anyone who is not part of the oligarchy (a.k.a., probably you, the reader) has no effect on what the government does. NONE.

This should hardly be a surprise to anyone who was awake during the last 40 odd years.

China is still industrializing and modernizing. More and more cars, more and more power plants, vast use of oil, gas, and coal.

The Paris climate accords, which driveling idiots gushed over, had no enforcement mechanism. None.

Politics is not going to stop climate change. Period.

Climate change is a FACT, it is past the point where it can be stopped. It is happening, now, and catastrophically. The catastrophic period has occured: Lytton, in British Columbia Canada, had Canada’s highest ever temperature, then burned 90 percent down. The fires over B.C were so fierce they were causing their own thunderstorms, complete with lightning strikes starting new fires.

YOU ARE NOT HELPLESS.

When the Titanic is going down, some people survive. When the Roman Empire is collapsing, some people survive.

I’m not saying “don’t engage politically,” at least in countries where it won’t get you dead or locked up or beaten to the point of lifelong disability.

What I am saying is: Don’t count on political action to save you from climate change.

Even if it works, the best it could and can do is slightly mitigate what is going to happen, and convince governments to prepare and maybe help people who aren’t in the top .1 percent of the population.

Your power isn’t in stopping climate change by getting government and corporations to change their behaviour — it is too late. They will change when the oligarchy decides to change, and not before, or when the oligarchy is overthrown.

BUT, you can change how you prepare. Where you live, what your housing is like, who your friends are, what  your skills are, and so on. Perhaps it is time for some people to join a monastery or a mutual aide society (or church that operates as one). Perhaps it is time to migrate to a place where the bottom level aquifers aren’t polluted. Perhaps… well, whatever.

Catastrophes have started. They will continue. Whether you survive and how well will be determined, to a large extent, by you: You must prepare and adapt, and so must your friends and family. You cannot count on government or corporations, though they will give some aid. Helping you will never be a priority unless it serves the interests of the oligarchy (or CCP, or whatever).

In some countries (Vietnam, for example) the well-being of the masses is important to the elites, but in most, and certainly most developed, countries, it is not. Whether it is or not, climate change is now written into our future’s history, past the point of no return.

So don’t be fooled; don’t waste your life and energy trying to stop the Titanic from sinking after it has already been holed.

Instead, this is a self-preservation and triage situation: Decide what you can do to save yourself and some others and do that.

This isn’t an article I take any pleasure in writing. I am one of those who spent a decent chunk of their life trying to change politics to stop climate change. I, and those like me, failed (most people didn’t even try, so I don’t have any real guilt about the failure).

I wasted my life trying to stop climate change from reaching the runaway stage, but it has.

So, now, as one of those who saw this coming for decades and wrote about it repeatedly, listen to me, and do what you can to save your own life and the lives of others you care about.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy

[American Affairs Journal, via The Big Picture 7-5-2021]

Operation Warp Speed was a triumph of public health policy. But it was also a triumph and validation of industrial policy. OWS shows what the U.S. government can still accomplish when it comes to tackling a seemingly unsolvable technological challenge. It demonstrates the strength of the U.S. developmental state, despite forty years of ideological assault.

A nice, timely historical review of one of the apocalyptic horsemen of that forty years of ideological assault. Note the shape-shifting use of political terminology by the horsie set. 

The End of Friedmanomics

The New Republic, June 17, 2021, via Avedon’s Sideshow 6-30-2021]

….All of which makes a contemporary reading of Friedman’s Cape Town lectures a harrowing experience. His first speech was an unremitting diatribe against political democracy—an explicit rejection of, in Friedman’s words, “one person, one vote,” delivered to a nation in which more than half of the population was disenfranchised by race. Voting, Friedman declared, was inescapably corrupt, a distorted “market” in which “special interests” inevitably dictated the course of public life. Most voters were “ill-informed.” Voting was a “highly weighted” process that created the illusion of social cooperation that whitewashed a reality of “coercion and force.” True democracy, Friedman insisted, was to be found not through the franchise, but the free market, where consumers could express their preferences with their unencumbered wallets. South Africa, he warned, should avoid the example of the United States, which since 1929 had allowed political democracy to steadily encroach on the domain of the “economic market,” resulting in “a drastic restriction in economic, personal, and political freedom.”

….That this prescription found political purchase with the American right in the 1960s is not a surprise. Friedman’s opposition to state power during an era of liberal reform offered conservatives an intellectual justification to defend the old order. What remains remarkable is the extent to which the Democratic Party—Friedman’s lifelong political adversary—came to embrace core tenets of Friedmanism. When Friedman passed away in 2006, Larry Summers, who had advised Bill Clinton and would soon do the same for Barack Obama, acknowledged the success of Friedman’s attack on the very legitimacy of public power within his own party. “Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” he declared in The New York Times….

Friedman responded to Brown in 1955 with “The Role of Government in Education,” an essay that called for the ostensibly race-neutral program of privatizing the school system by providing families with education vouchers that could be spent where parents wished. As in his essay on housing nine years before, Friedman appealed to the simple nineteenth-century logic of market competition and equilibrium to make his case. Public schools were a “monopoly” that put private schools at an unfair “disadvantage.” By transitioning from public schools to vouchers, families would enjoy a diversity of education options, and market competition over the quality of education would in time enhance the lot of students everywhere.

It was every bit as neat and tidy as Friedman’s case against rent regulations. But as Leo Casey has detailed for Dissent magazine, Friedman gave away the political game in a lengthy footnote. Though he insisted, “I deplore segregation and racial prejudice,” Friedman nevertheless believed in the right of the private market to develop “exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.”

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