Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: June 2024 Page 1 of 4

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 30 2024

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On June 30, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

 

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

[TW: There were a number of articles and videos in which people complained that “this Supreme Court is out of control.” I do not think such framing is useful. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is very much in control of itself, and is carefully and deliberately implementing the hostile philosophy of government propounded by conservative, anti-republican theorists ever since Thomas Paine clashed with Edmund Burke, after Paine met Burke, and realized Burke may have been sympathetic to the American revolt against corrupt King, Parliament, and ministries, but was actually implacably hostile to the philosophy of self government of civic republicanism.

[Almost all of USA political history includes the background of this clash between the republicanism of Paine and the conservativism of Burke. Conservatism is simply philosophically hostile to the American experiment in republican self government. It is why conservatives argue that the Preamble of the Constitution is a meaningless flourish; that the General Welfare mandate and clause are dangerous mistakes that enable an overpowering “administrative state” and that the powers bestowed by the Constitution on the government are “strictly enumerated” and limited, not broad grants of legitimate power to solve problems not foreseen by the “founding fathers.” The Heritage collaboration with the Center for Renewing America and over 80 other right-wing groups to dismantle the “administrative state” by sharply curtailing government capacity while at the same time misusing executive power to punish political enemies — the infamous Project 2025 plan — is merely the latest development in this centuries-old struggle between conservativism and republicanism.

[There are no Democratic Party leaders I know of — with the notable exception of Representative Raskin (see below) — who discuss these issues of a philosophy for governing. In that sense, all the screaming, hollering, and agonizing over Biden’s awful debate performance is largely meaningless: there is no one in the leadership of the Democratic Party who is even attuned to the conservative / (anti)Republican assault on our government.  ]

‘Gift to Corporate Greed’: Dire Warnings as Supreme Court Scraps Chevron Doctrine

Jake Johnson, June 28, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The high court’s 6-3 ruling along ideological lines in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce significantly constrains the regulatory authority of federal agencies tasked with crafting rules on a range of critical matters, from worker protection to the climate to drug safety.

The majority’s decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts.

“The weight of human suffering likely to arise from this decision should keep the justices up at night,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin of Demand Progress, a watchdog group that called the decision “a gift to corporate greed.”

“The Supreme Court is threatening safeguards that protect hundreds of millions of people from unsafe products, bad medicines, dangerous chemicals, illegal scams, and more,” Peterson-Cassin added. “By handing policy decisions usually deliberated over by experts to lower level judges, the Supreme Court has set off a seismic political shift that primarily serves only the most powerful corporate interests.”

 

The Supreme Court Upends the Separation of Powers

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Open Thread

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On June 29, 2024

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax.

Why Am I Writing About China So Much?

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On June 27, 2024

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Regular readers will have noted that for the past few years I’ve been writing far more about China than I used to.

Why?

The primary purpose of this blog is to explain the world: how it works, how it has worked, and how it will work.

China is probably the most important nation in the world right now: it has the most manufacturing, is about tied for population, is the largest trade partner of the greatest number of nations and leads in most scientific and technological fields.

If you don’t understand China, you don’t understand the world. In the same way that I spent so much time learning about and understanding America, I (and you) need to understand China. I’m so serious about this I’m probably going to learn Manadarin, and if you’re under fifty, I suggest that you should do the same. In ten to fifteen years not speaking Manadarin will be as crippling as not speaking English currently is.

As we move into a multipolar or cold-war period, nations are rising in importance: China, Russia, Iran, Vietnam, and so on. If we don’t understand the internal and external dynamics of those countries, we are ignorant of how the world works in the worst sense of that word.

As this happens, nations are losing importance: all of Europe, America and the Anglosphere, in particular. I live in Canada, I’m a member of the West and the Anglosphere, and of European descent, so I’m concerned with those countries. But maintaining too much of a focus on them would be foolish.

It is also important to understand what other countries are doing and have done right. If China is now the world’s most important nation, why? What is it doing? How are its policies likely to turn out? The same is true of Russia, whose economy is doing better than, say, Europe’s.

Of course, understanding what the West is doing wrong (and the rare things it’s doing right) matters too, but I’ve spent twenty years writing those articles.

The world is changing. To understand it and to operate skillfully within it, we must change with it.

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What Xi Jingping Has Done Right to Preserve CCP Power and Effectiveness

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On June 26, 2024

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I was a doubter about Xi. His early anti-corruption drive seemed most likely to be a way to purge the Party of his enemies, and I assumed he was driven primarily by ambition for personal power.

I was wrong.

If you want to join the CCP, you have to be accepted. It isn’t automatic. Once accepted you undergo training and if you want real power you have to rise: you have to be in charge and deliver.

In this the CCP is similar to the old Roman Republic: high political rank required you to rise up thru the cursus honorum. Doing so required you to gain experience with government: roads, sewage, trade, law and so on. In practice, few people were elected to the highest offices without military experience, and the result was that high elected officials had some actual experience with how both military and civic affairs ran.

The CCP has much the same virtues, minus the de-facto military experience. You can’t get to the top without having risen from the bottom.

There were serious threats to this in the early years of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The first was corruption: the job of officials shouldn’t be to make themselves and their families rich. People shouldn’t rise to the top because they’ve spread wealth to their supporters.

So an actual crackdown on corruption was required to retain the CCP’s policy effectiveness.

The second threat was the “princelings”. Children or grandchildren of high Communist officials, often companions of Mao. They expected office and power without having truly earned it. Xi has sidelined the majority of them. Very few have any real power in the CCP.

The third was the oligarchs. By one calculation the wealth of billionaires declined by 47% between 2021 and 2024. During the same period in America it increased over 70%. More than that, the CCP has prosecuted and imprisoned multiple billionaires, something the West never does.

Wealth=power. Huge concentrations of power outside the CCP were a huge threat to it, especially in combination with internal corruption, since corrupt and rich party members were cooperating with the oligarchs.

This has allowed China to do things like move massively to social housing and crash the housing market, something oligarchs would never allow the government to deliberately do in America. Young people being unable to afford housing was (and still is) a huge threat to the CCP’s legitimacy, but it’s being dealt with.

Weakening oligarchs hasn’t come at the expense of industry and commerce, either: the Chinese economy continues to grow, science and engineering progress is rapid, and they have recently taken control of the majority of the global EV market.

Internal corruption, cliques and external power centers controlling government are the biggest threats to any government and especially to any one party state. Xi has dealt with these problems effectively and relatively quickly and is moving on other policy concerns.

This doesn’t mean the CCP is perfect or doesn’t make mistakes. Zero Covid was done very badly (avoiding Covid was the right policy, but they screwed it up.) It does mean that they retain the ability to implement policy, often effectively.

And that’s a big win for China and the CCP.

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UK’S Reform Party Is Poised To Destroy the Consersvatives, and Deserves To

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On June 24, 2024

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The latest polls show Reform, led by Nigel Farage neck and neck, or slightly ahead of the Tories.

I took some time to read their manifesto and it’s pretty bloody awful.

BUT, and it’s a big but, there’s some stuff Reform is promising that no one else is offering. For example:

  • lower rents through reduced migration
  • free tuition for STEM degrees
  • lifting income tax allowance to £20,000

Farage talks about the housing crisis all the time, and these specific policies are laser-targeted at younger people.

Farage wants to stop all non-essential immigration. Britain is like Canada, there’s vastly more immigration than there is housing being created and rents and house prices have sky-rocketed. (A detailed post on that soon.) Tuition averages about $6,000 pounds a year and young adults tend to be poor and have little income.

He also wants to reduce estate taxes, go all-in on anti-trans policies, get rid of clean energy and so on. He’s still a conservative loon.

But he’s offering what neither Labour nor the Conservatives are, or can.

He has the best chance of breaking the Labour/Conservative duopoly that Britain has seen in generations for the same reason LaPen is surging, Brexit happened & Trump is viable: the status quo sucks for most people and they want radical change. Since radical change to the left was stopped with Corbyn’s defeat and the Starmer’s purge of the left from Labout, it’s now the right’s turn.

Like an animal in a leg-trap who chews its own leg off to escape, people in pain who see their lives getting worse and no hope of improvement will take a chance on something radical. Sometimes, as with Javier in Argentina, that something radical is extremely stupid, but at a certain point people will try anything.

For a lot of people in Britain, as in France and Argentina and America, the risk is worth it.

As with Corbyn, the press is now turning hard against Reform. Any change from the neoliberal status quo will be opposed with their full weight. It worked against Corbyn, but at some point it will stop working.

Reform won’t win the election, but they don’t need to. They need to replace the Tories as the second party, either in this election or the next. Once they are part of the duopoly, power is only a matter of time.

Let us hope the left learns from this and raises its own challenge to Labour, replacing it, because Reform’s policies, overall, are horrid.

Neoliberalism is dying in country after country, who and what replaces it matters.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 23 2024

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On June 23, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Is the 4th Amendment Dead in Cyberspace?

Tracy Mitrano [Inside Higher Ed, via Thomas Neuburger, God’s Spies, June 21, 2024]

Over a year ago former director of both the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden, flat out admitted, “we kill people based on metadata.” He quickly distinguished between the metadata about which the debate was focused, telephone records, and other forms of surveillance metadata upon which covert actions are taken. Not surprised about the actions, I confess I was taken aback when I considered the implications that this disclosure has on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in cyberspace.

Ever since the USA-Patriot Act in 2001, I have been harping on complications of the Fourth Amendment between content and metadata in data networking. For as many years I have hoped for a revision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to correct the discordance. In all that time, I have assumed that a restructuring of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence around these distinctions might be possible.

I no longer believe that is a reasonable fix. The advanced algorithms applied to metadata in government surveillance make metadata the equivalent of content. That is what struck me about Hayden’s remarks. Not just occasional leaks of subject lines or an Internet Protocol address that resolves to a web page found in routing records, but the sorting, combining and redefining of that data into identifiable predictive behaviors that function as the basis of military or law enforcement actions. It is in this sense that I declare the Fourth Amendment dead in cyberspace. The only way to resurrect the Fourth Amendment could be to place all data, both content and metadata, under Fourth Amendment rubric.

[Neuburger: “The Fourth Amendment is gone. It was lost in 1928. So, to the question above, will we see it enforced again — in today’s security-fed state, the answer is no.” ]

 

Why Won’t the US Help Negotiate a Peaceful End to the War in Ukraine?

Jeffrey D. Sachs, June 19, 2024 [Common Dreams]

For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S. over security arrangements, this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations in favor of a neocon strategy to weaken or dismember Russia through war and covert operations. The U.S. neocon tactics have failed disastrously, devastating Ukraine in the process, and endangering the whole world. After all the warmongering, it’s time for Biden to open negotiations for peace with Russia.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance bombed Russia’s ally, Serbia, for 78 days in order to break Serbia apart and install a massive NATO military base in breakaway Kosovo. Leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war against Russia in the early 2000s.

To secure these U.S. advances against Russia, Washington aggressively pushed NATO enlargement, despite promises to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany. Most tendentiously, the U.S. pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, with the idea of surrounding Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea with NATO states….

Brzezinski spelled out a chronology of NATO enlargement in 1997, including NATO membership of Ukraine during 2005-2010….

…In my view, [the February 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine] was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation, of which there have been several dozen around the world, including sixty-four episodes between 1947 and 1989 meticulously documented by Professor Lindsey O’Rourke. Covert regime-change operations are of course not really hidden from view, but the U.S. government vociferously denies its role, keeps all documents highly confidential, and systematically gaslights the world….

 

Global power shift

US reputation on the line at Second Thomas Shoal 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2024]

June 17 saw the most recent and most violent effort yet by the China Coast Guard to prevent the Philippines from resupplying the BNP Sierra Madre, an old navy ship deliberately grounded on Second Thomas Shoal and manned by a detachment of sailors and marines to assert Philippine control of the sea feature.

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Open Thread

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On June 22, 2024

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax.

US Likely To Sanction World’s Largest Drone Manufacturer

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On June 20, 2024

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And, it’s Chinese, of course.

The United States House of Representatives passed a ban on the future sale of DJI drones in the U.S. on Friday, making the DJI ban more likely than not. The “Countering CCP Drones Act” is part of the United States’ 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (FY25 NDAA), a major piece of yearly legislation allotting defense spending for the coming year.

Drone maker DJI is based in China and controls over 70% of the world’s drone market share, a combination that threatens U.S. lawmakers

But…

DJI has 90% market share of the U.S. hobby market, 70% market share of the industrial market and over 80% market share of the first responder market. And their main competitor is Autel Robotics which… is also a Chinese company

(my emphasis)

As I noted years ago, what’s going to happen, er, is happening, is the world splitting into two trade blocs. Problem is the Western bloc is smaller, economically and in terms of land mass, than the one led by China and Russia, which includes a big chunk of Africa and South America, in addition, and which is growing.

Now bans and tariffs aren’t automatically bad. They can give space to domestic industry to compete. China’s “overcapacity” is the result of a lower cost structure and, in many areas, fierce competition. There are twenty-two significant drone manufacturers on this list, for example, and there are hundreds more.

To compete, the US needs to create a competitive market again, and it needs to reduce its cost structure. The simplest ways to do that would be to reduce housing and medical costs; to enforce anti-trust laws vigorously and to reduce barriers to entry for new businesses.

But part of the problem is simple: the US market is no longer as big as the one China has access to. For a long time, access to the American market was what mattered, but that’s no longer the case. The US, and the West in general, has to catch up, and they have to do so in an environment where they are the underdogs. This reality doesn’t seem to have penetrated thru to policy makers—if it had, they wouldn’t still think that sanction after sanction does significant damage to China or Russia, or almost anyone else.

But, with an oligarchy and a commitment to neoliberal “crush wages and workers and embrace austerity” ideology, the West is damaging its internal demand and markets at the same time as it needs those markets to catch up.

The USSR lost to the West for fairly simple reasons, and the main was that the West had more industrial base and more population. Now the shoe is on the other foot. It’s not likely to work out better for us than it did for the Soviets.

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