Author: Tony Wikrent Page 27 of 51

by Tony Wikrent

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

The Expected Financial Crash Is Finally Here 

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 10-4-2022]

Today Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism writes about the now Inevitable Financial Crisis….

The second warning comes from ‘Dr. Doom’ Nouriel Roubini….

The central banks have misdiagnosed the reason for the currently high inflation rates. They were caused not only by too much stimulus provided by governments and the central banks but to a large part by the lack of supplies which is to the consequence of the pandemic and the ‘western’ sanctions following the war in Ukraine. By increasing interest rates the central banks fought against the wrong enemy. They made things worse….

 

New Study: Wall Street Banks Are Doubling Down on Risk by Selling Credit Default Swaps on their Risky Derivatives Counterparties 

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 6, 2022 [Wall Street on Parade]

Last Thursday, while news outlets focused on videos of the devastating impact of Hurricane Ian on the southwest coast of Florida, two researchers at the Office of Financial Research published a breathtaking and almost surreal analysis of how the mega banks on Wall Street are once again doubling down on unprecedented risk with derivatives and threatening the financial stability of the U.S. The report was ignored by mainstream business media.

The Office of Financial Research was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to make sure that Wall Street mega banks could never again ravage the economy and financial system of the United States — as they did in 2008 – by engaging in reckless derivative trades and toxic bets….

 

All Eyes Are on Credit Suisse; But Media Blacked Out Data from the New York Fed Suggest Contagion from Nomura Is Another Threat 

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens, October 7, 2022 [Wall Street on Parade]

Nomura Holdings is tiny compared to the mega banks on Wall Street. According to its website, it had just $384 billion in assets as of March 31, 2021. On the same date, JPMorgan Chase had $3.2 trillion in assets. But for reasons that neither the Federal Reserve nor Congress have yet to explain, a unit of Nomura was allowed to borrow trillions of dollars in emergency repo loans from the Fed beginning on September 17, 2019 – months before there was any COVID crisis anywhere in the world. The chart above shows that in the last three months of 2019, Nomura borrowed $3.7 trillion cumulatively under the Fed’s emergency repo loan program, topping the amount borrowed by JPMorgan Chase by $1.11 trillion.

 

Is This the End of ‘Socialism for the Rich’? 

Yanis Varoufakis [Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 10-6-2022]

Last Thursday, the International Monetary Fund spooked the markets and surprised the commentariat by chiding the U.K. Conservative government for fiscal irresponsibility…. the IMF’s communiqué went so far as to censure the British government for introducing large tax cuts (now partially canceled after the IMF intervention), because they would mainly “benefit high-income earners” and “likely increase inequality.” Tories loyal to Britain’s beleaguered new prime minister, Liz Truss; America’s feistier Republicans; international economic pundits; and even some of my comrades on the left were briefly united by a common puzzlement: Since when did the IMF oppose greater inequality?

 

Bill Mitchell — Two diametrically-opposed approaches to dealing with inflation–stupidity versus the Japanese way

Bill Mitchell [Billy blog, via Mike Norman Economics 10-6-2022]

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

Global power shift as USA and west commit suicide by neoliberalism

The U.S. Is Winning Its War On Europe’s Industries And People 

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 9-27-2022]

The epidemic

“‘Other Places in the Country Didn’t Do This’: How One California Town Survived Covid Better Than the Rest”

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 9-27-2022]

“Even with its world-class technologies, the university’s labs didn’t have equipment with the kind of capacity to test the whole university, let alone the whole community. The machines that could do that — test up to 40,000 samples of human saliva for Covid each week — cost about $450,000 a pop. And they would need two, for backup. The university administration, desperate for a workable plan, agreed to pay for them. And researchers across UC Davis, from the engineering department to the medical school, began to collaborate, searching for ways to solve the enormous logistical challenges. The plant researchers worked to refine the process, using a papaya enzyme to make human spit less viscous and easier to process. A colleague in the engineering department devised a machine to shake the vials, a necessary and laborious step previously done by hand. These scientific innovations — and an anonymous $40 million donation — allowed this college town to do something that few, if any, other communities were able to do during Covid: Starting in the fall of 2020, the university tested its students and staff every week and made free, walk-in testing available throughout the town.” And: “n the end, Davis and the surrounding area experienced a different kind of pandemic than virtually anywhere else in the country. The university itself escaped a wave of outbreaks that swept other campuses like the University of Georgia, the University of Alabama and Ohio State University after they reopened in 2020. Pollock said the plan made so much sense to him when it came together that he expected other universities to do the same. ‘But it turns out,’ he told county supervisors a few months ago, ‘that the other places in the country didn’t do this.’”

 

”New Infectious Threats Are Coming. The U.S. Probably Won’t Contain Them”

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 9-30-2022]

“If it wasn’t clear enough during the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become obvious during the monkeypox outbreak: The United States, among the richest, most advanced nations in the world, remains wholly unprepared to combat new pathogens. The coronavirus was a sly, unexpected adversary. Monkeypox was a familiar foe, and tests, vaccines and treatments were already at hand. But the response to both threats sputtered and stumbled at every step. The United States spends between 300 to 500 times more on its military defense than on its health systems, and yet “no war has killed a million Americans,” noted Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who led the C.D.C. under former President Barack Obama.”

 

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-1-2022]

In case you missed it, some bombshell reporting today revealed that Quebec essentially outsourced our pandemic response to McKinsey. An american consulting firm that was also working for pfizer. Conflict of interest much?https://t.co/8iXzukBAgU

— Dr. Lisa Iannattone (@lisa_iannattone) October 1, 2022

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

The Making Of “LINCOLN” Behind The Scenes

[TW: A enthralling discussion of how they strove to make the film as authentic as possible. The clock ticking heard in the background of some scenes, for example, was a recording made of a watch Lincoln had actually owned. And Daniel Day Lewis describing how he researched and came to love Lincoln as a person is simply marvelous.]

Light Under a Bushel: Eric Foner, interviewed by Nawal Arjini

[The New York Review of Books, September 17, 2022]

My father, Jack Foner, lost his job at the City University of New York because of the legislative investigation of “Communist influence” on the school. This was in the early 1940s, before McCarthy. My mother, who was a high school art teacher and an artist in her own right, was also named and was going to be fired from the city educational system, but the principal of her school allowed her to retire on a medical disability instead so that she could get a pension. My family lived on my mother’s pension while I was growing up. Much later, in the late 1960s, my father was able to get a teaching job for the remainder of his career.

Blacklisting had a devastating impact on the teaching of history. Some of the very best scholars were thrown out of the profession. But I eventually realized that that experience was very educational. I learned something a lot of my college classmates didn’t know and had to learn during the 1960s: the rhetoric of freedom, liberty, and progress in our country does not comport with reality. A person losing his livelihood because someone called him a Communist—what does that tell us about freedom of speech, academic freedom in this country? The principles the country claimed to stand for and the practices it instituted were contradictory, which many young people came to discover in other ways, through the Vietnam War and the way the government lied or the civil rights revolution and the idea that we lived in equality….

“We can’t accept the principle that the way to judge a course of study is by how much money you will make. It’s important to study history if you want to be an intelligent citizen in a democracy…

 

The Complicity of the Textbooks

Eric Foner [The New York Review of Books, September 22, 2022]

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past…..

Like most works of history, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America concludes with a bibliography listing primary and other sources consulted by the author. Most of the groupings are unexceptional—for example, monographs, government reports, and biographies. But Du Bois’s first and largest category comes as a shock to the modern reader: it consists of books by historians who believe African Americans to be “sub-human and congenitally unfitted for citizenship and the suffrage.” Just before the bibliography, Du Bois includes a chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” that indicts the profession for abandoning scholarly objectivity in the service of “that bizarre doctrine of race that makes most men inferior to the few.” This was the state of historical scholarship in the United States when Black Reconstruction was published, in 1935.

 

US is becoming a ‘developing country’ on global rankings that measure democracy, inequality 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 9-21-2022]

In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology – an expansive model of 17 categories, or “goals,” many of them focused on the environment and equity – the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries.

The U.S. is also now considered a “flawed democracy,” according to The Economist’s democracy index.

As a political historian who studies U.S. institutional development, I recognize these dismal ratings as the inevitable result of two problems. Racism has cheated many Americans out of the health care, education, economic security and environment they deserve. At the same time, as threats to democracy become more serious, a devotion to “American exceptionalism” keeps the country from candid appraisals and course corrections.

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

Economics as cultural warfare

Our Ancestors Thought We’d Build an Economic Paradise. Instead We Got 2022 

Brad DeLong [Time, via Naked Capitalism 9-11-2022]

Adapted from DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, published by Basic Books….

…the first half of the Big Story of twentieth-century economic history is a triumphant one. Friedrich von Hayek was a genius. He saw clearly that the market economy, when coupled with industrial research labs, modern corporations, and globalization, was the key to unlocking the cage keeping humanity desperately poor. He thus preached the gospel: “The market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” We should, he thought, be satisfied with the fact that there was a large-enough pie, count our blessings, and ignore the problems of slicing and tasting it properly.

[TW: DeLong’s positive mention of von Hayek is a clear warning sign. As Corey Robin explained in his May 2013 article, “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek,”

But to understand that text and its influence, it’s necessary to turn away from contemporary America to fin de siècle Vienna. The seedbed of Hayek’s arguments is the half-century between the “marginal revolution,” which changed the field of economics in the late nineteenth century, and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918. It is by now a commonplace of European cultural history that a dying Austro-Hungarian Empire gave birth to modernism, psychoanalysis and fascism. Yet from the vortex of Vienna came not only Wittgenstein, Freud and Hitler but also Hayek, who was born and educated in the city, and the Austrian school of economics….

Throughout his writing life, Nietzsche was plagued by the vision of workers massing on the public stage—whether in trade unions, socialist parties or communist leagues. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Basel, the First International descended on the city to hold its fourth congress. Nietzsche was petrified. “There is nothing more terrible,” he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, “than a class of barbaric slaves who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to avenge, not only themselves, but all generations.” Several years after the International had left Basel, Nietzsche convinced himself that it was slouching toward Bayreuth in order to ruin Wagner’s festival there. And just weeks before he went mad in 1888 and disappeared forever into his own head, he wrote, “The cause of every stupidity today…lies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions.”

[TW continued: Robin’s article stirred up vitriolic responses from conservatives and libertarians—and they completely missed the crucial point that since he was a product of an oligarchical society, von Hayek’s economics was based on oligarchical disdain and hostility for working people and their capacity for self government. As Irish socialist James Connolly wrote in 1910:

A people poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings – capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks.

[TW continued: So it’s no surprise that DeLong is a self-professed “Davos Man… a card-carrying neoliberal, a believer in globalization and free trade.” In his new book, DeLong attributes humanity’s 1870s-1880s escape from the grip of Malthusian scarcity to the rise of “industrial research labs, deployed at scale by modern corporations,” while completely ignoring the dirgistic program of neo-mercantalist nation-building enabled by first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s design of the USA economy (including, crucially, the Constitutional mandate that economic activity should “promote the General Welfare” and that the national government is not limited to the powers enumerated in the Constitution, but has implied powers to undertake whatever is needed to fulfill that mandate). Rather than the Marxist model of the means of production determining the political superstructure, what actually happens under Hamilton’s system is government support for new science and technology creates new means of production, forcing and fostering technological phase shifts in the economy. The machine tools and machining techniques developed at the Springfield Armory after the War of 1812, became the basis for the manufacture of interchangeable parts, laying the foundation for industrial assembly lines and mass production. It was the explorations and surveys by the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers that identified and mapped the westward routes followed by the overland pioneers and the railroads. In 1843, Congress directly funded Samuel B. Morris’s development of the telegraph. In the Civil War era, it was US Navy research that applied scientific methodology to steam engine design, creating the science of thermodynamics AND the profession of mechanical engineering. The creation of the Department of Agriculture in May 1862 formalized direct government efforts in fighting agricultural pests and animal diseases, and finding and developing new breeds and strains of plants and animals better suited for conditions of the Great Plains and other areas. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 created an entire system of state colleges and universities that educated and trained the men and women, without whom DeLong’s “industrial research labs, deployed at scale by modern corporations” would have been crippled and barren.

By discussing only the von Hayek’s conservative / libertarian “free enterprise” aspect of economic development, DeLong is engaging in some very insidious and misleading propaganda to help maintain the historically inaccurate anti-statist myths of neoliberalism. ]

Governance for a Healthy Economy 

Dani Rodrik [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 9-11-2022]

There is near-universal skepticism about governments’ ability to lead and achieve positive change…. Moreover, a longer-standing concern about government is that it has neither sufficient information nor the capabilities necessary to achieve positive structural change in the economy. Give governments too much power, the argument goes, and they will direct resources toward the wrong places and become captive tools of special interests. This argument lies at the heart of neoliberalism, and it will have to be overcome for any successor paradigm – like productivism – to succeed….

Just look around, and you can find failures of public governance almost everywhere – locally, nationally, and globally. But, in fact, as Columbia Law School’s Charles Sabel and David Victor of the University of California, San Diego, show in a new book, effective governance models do exist and have already made a big difference…. Sabel and Victor build their argument on the example of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which has succeeded in curbing ozone-depleting substances (ODS) to the point where the ozone layer is now on course to full recovery.

 

The American Welfare State Is Designed Horribly

Ryan Cooper, September 14, 2022 [The American Prospect]

A recent splashy New York Times piece by Jason DeParle, based on a study using data from Columbia University, contained an eye-popping conclusion: American child poverty has fallen by nearly three-fifths over the past quarter-century, from 28 percent in 1993 to 11 percent in 2019. The principal mechanism was expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC), which provide money to some of the working poor. Sounds pretty good!

Unfortunately, these figures are simply inaccurate. As Matt Bruenig explains at the People’s Policy Project, the study assumes perfect uptake of these credits through a tax simulation, and we know for a fact that this isn’t true. Another study using IRS administrative data found that this assumption overstates the actual anti–child poverty effect of the EITC by 67 percent.…

The EITC in particular exemplifies all the pathologies of America’s default mode of policy. The first is the work requirement: The credit “phases in” starting at your first dollar of labor income, meaning if you don’t work that much, you get very little, and if you don’t work at all, you get nothing. That means for the very poorest people in the country—typically single mothers who only have access to jobs that don’t pay enough for child care—it is no help at all. And contrary to neoliberal notions of poor people being largely able-bodied adults who refuse to look for jobs, about 86 percent of people who don’t work are children, students, the elderly, or disabled—that is, people who either can’t work, or shouldn’t be working.

The second pathology is complexity and concomitant administrative burden. The EITC has a different phase-in schedule depending on whether you are single or married, or whether you have zero, one, two, or three or more children—eight different calculations may be required of applicants. That adds a large bureaucratic headache for both low-income tax filers (who often struggle to fill out complicated forms) and the IRS. That obstacle in turn prevents about 22 percent of eligible people from actually getting the benefit, and fuels a purely parasitic sector of tax prep firms, which about 60 percent of EITC recipients use. As Bruenig points out, the resulting fees eat up something like 13 to 22 percent of the average EITC benefit.

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

Chile rejects new “progressive” constitution

Chile votes overwhelmingly to reject new, progressive constitution 

Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 9-6-2022]

Chilean voters resoundingly reject a new ‘ecological’ constitution 

[Science, via Naked Capitalism 9-8-2022]

Lambert Strether: Here is the very first sentence from WaPo’s Editorial Board, urging rejection. “Lithium is a key input in batteries that run millions of laptops and upon which the United States is basing its electrified automotive future.” Clarifying!

The Egalitarian Rift Which Doomed The New Chilean Constitution

Ian Welsh, September 6, 2022

….Let’s bring this back to Chile: indigenous people’s have been badly treated and deserve restitution, but to give them permanent rights that others in Chile don’t have based on their ancestry means that some people have rights that they didn’t earn legitimately from an egalitarian point of view….

For this to work it would have to be a legitimate way for people without the ancestry to gain the status, and a legitimate way for people wit the status to lose it.

If it was based on ancestry combined with “you’ve been treated badly”, then the harm would have to be quantified, and the status lost when the harm has been rectified. “The harm has been made substantially whole.” People could join the status by proving similar harm had been done to their ancestors and/or them and was still effecting them.

If, on the other hand, the status is justified by “indigenous people are better stewards of the land” then a duty would have to be set up to take better care of the land, and those who did not do so would lose the status, while those who are willing to do so (and to learn indigenous methods) would be allowed to gain the status.

 

Strategic Political Economy

What is to be done about the US death crisis? 

[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 9-9-2022]

Adam Tooze and Edward Luce have rightly drawn attention to the unattended health crisis in America. Tooze notes that the Chinese can now expect to live longer than Americans; not just because Chinese life expectancy continues to grow, but more alarmingly because US life expectancy has been falling in absolute terms — an “extraordinary and shameful fact.”….

“Americans live almost five years less than the wealthy country average,” Luce notes. The numbers are so concerning that “even the Pentagon has to sit up.” American elites in general, and its political elites in particular, really do need to pay attention.

Life expectancy contains the strongest signal of the general well-being of a population. It is a vital statistic — akin to an organism’s resting heart rate. Declines in life expectancy outside of wars are glaring signs of a society in deep trouble. Indeed, Emmanuel Todd predicted the imminent fall of the Soviet Union in the early-1970s based precisely on his reading of Russia’s life expectancy. Even the CIA concluded that the Soviets were in trouble from the same vital statistic….

What has gone wrong? Case and Deaton, who uncovered the rise in deaths due to drug overdose, suicides and alcohol poisoning since 2000, agree that the larger structure of the US socioeconomic system since the neoliberal counterrevolution is to blame (although they reserve special blame for the catastrophe of US healthcare in particular). They have shown that the mortality crisis is identical to the crisis of the working class family.

Medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending: Report 

[CBC, via Naked Capitalism 9-9-2022]

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

US Life Expectancy Continues To Plunge Below China’s

[ZeroHedge, 9-1-2022]

Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second consecutive year as Covid-19 and overdoses increased mortality rates. An empire’s death may start with its people, and as the world shifts, China, an emerging power, has a life expectancy that is above the US and widening.

According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans’ life expectancy fell .9 years to 76.1 years in 2021 – the lowest since 1996.

The year prior, life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years. The combined figures were the largest two-year decline since the 1920s.

 

The Real Student Debt Debate 

Zachary D. Carter [In The Long Run, via Naked Capitalism 9-1-2022]

In the United States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage. People without college degrees aren’t just excluded from a lot of jobs that pay well. They’re more likely to be laid off and less likely to be hired during recessions. They’re less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have a disability (the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even have shorter life expectancies than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting activities. A college degree confers respect and prestige.

In a better world, the simple fact of being human would command equal respect for everyone. That is not our world, but we can imagine such a place and work toward realizing it. Prestige, by contrast, is inherently exclusive….

After World War II, millions of new college students arrived on campuses around the country to receive an education funded by the G.I. Bill. Suddenly, an experience that had once been restricted almost exclusively to the very rich became open to infantrymen. And though the vast majority of colleges and universities continued to exclude Black students, millions of white people who had never dreamed of going to college eventually earned degrees. For many prior graduates, this step toward democratization was threatening. Their credential was being diluted….

Student debt allows a certain kind of prestige-hoarder to pay lip service to the ideal of universal education, while also looking down on some graduates as, well, not quite the real thing. “Technically, you have a degree, but we all know you don’t truly belong up here, dear.” Erase that debt, and this distinction disappears. College graduates are all just college graduates again. A little bit more equality has entered the picture, and a little bit of prestige has departed.

I suspect this is what most people really mean when they say student debt relief is “unfair.”

[TW: As I excerpted last week from Forrest A. Nabors’ book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, quoting West Virginia Senator during the Civil War, Waltman Willey, explaining why the South had no system of free public education: “Sir, the true reason of this hostility to popular education is hostility to democratic institutions.” ]

[YouTube,

Historian Nicole Hemmer’s latest book “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” focuses on the conservatives who remade U.S. politics in the 1990s. Hemmer speaks with Walter Isaacson about how that decade’s politics paved the way for Donald Trump’s presidency.

From the transcript:

You grow up believing … the thing that everyone believes… Democracy as a form of government. What you begin to see over the course of the 1990s is a real questioning of that… Not just of whether democracy is the best form of government,  but whether everyone in the U.S is actually fit for democracy…. In the 1960s, when the United States really opened up in terms of voting rights, in terms of immigration, and by the 1990s you have books like The Bell Curve, that argue for genetic differences in intelligence based on race; books like Alien Nation that say that only white people should be allowed to immigrate to the United States because only they are fit for democracy…

 

Why Obama-Era Economists Are So Mad About Student Debt Relief

Lindsay Owens, David Dayen, August 31, 2022 [The American Prospect]

Moments after the announcement, former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman took to Twitter with a dozen tweets skewering the proposal as “reckless,” “pouring … gasoline on the inflationary fire,” and an example of executive branch overreach (“Even if technically legal I don’t like this amount of unilateral Presidential power.”). Brookings economist Melissa Kearny called the proposal “astonishingly bad policy” and puzzled over whether economists inside the administration were “all hanging their heads in defeat.” Ben Ritz, the head of a centrist think tank, went so far as to call for the staff who worked on the proposal to be fired after the midterms.

Histrionics are nothing new on Twitter, but it’s worth examining why this proposal has evoked such strong reactions. Elizabeth Popp Berman has argued in the Prospect that student loan forgiveness is a threat to the economic style of reasoning that dominates Washington policy circles. That’s correct. But President Biden’s elegant and forceful approach to tackling the student loan crisis also may feel like a personal rebuke to those who once worked alongside President Obama as he utterly failed to solve the debt crisis he inherited.

Let’s be very clear: The Obama administration’s bungled policy to help underwater borrowers and to stem the tide of devastating foreclosures, carried out by many of the same people carping about Biden’s student loan cancellation, led directly to nearly ten million families losing their homes. This failure of debt relief was immoral and catastrophic, both for the lives of those involved and for the principle of taking bold government action to protect the public. It set the Democratic Party back years. And those throwing a fit about Biden’s debt relief plan now are doing so because it exposes the disaster they precipitated on the American people.

 

Global power shift

The China-ASEAN rail map takes shape

[Asia Media Centre, via Naked Capitalism 9-2-2022]

China’s plan to build a pan-regional railway is gaining speed. This unfolding story combines infrastructure investment, trade logistics and strategic diplomacy with travel, tourism and potential challenges for shipping and aviation….

Since it inaugurated the first line in 2007, China has built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, totalling 40,000km at the end of 2021. It provides fast, punctual train transport nationwide, and China plans to expand the network to 75,000km by 2035.

Now, with China and South East Asia seeking new growth drivers after the economic dislocations of the pandemic, China wants to accelerate the connection of its high-speed rail system with a series of railways that will open trade routes through South East Asia.

In contrast: After a decade of hype, Dallas-Houston bullet train developer faces a leadership exodus as land acquisition slows.

[Texas Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 9-2-2022]

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

The pandemic

”Individual freedoms versus collective responsibility: immunization decision-making in the face of occasionally competing values”

[Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]

From 2006, still germane: “There are situations where there can be a real or perceived divergence between individual and community benefits of vaccination. This divergence may occasionally be based upon current scientific evidence and may exemplify the need for overriding individual autonomy. Use of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the US in the early 1990s is such an example. The sustained use of OPV led to the elimination of polio in the US, with the last cases of wild polio reported in 1979. While OPV is extremely safe and effective, the vaccine very rarely caused vaccine associated paralytic polio (VAPP) resulting in 5–7 cases of VAPP annually with near universal use of OPV in the US. Once polio had been effectively controlled in the US, preventing the indigenous transmission of polio, the risks of the vaccine (VAPP) may have been greater than the risk of disease. Assuming the individual does not travel to a region where polio is still endemic, a roughly one in a million risk of VAPP is highly unlikely, but still greater than the risk of wild polio. Yet, if a substantial number of individuals were not vaccinated because of this individual risk/benefit analysis, polio would likely have been reintroduced into the US, as the disease is only a plane ride away, leading to a tragedy of the commons [7]. While this divergence in individual versus community benefits was short-lived (the US switched to the inactivated polio vaccine that can not cause VAPP), such a situation can cause a dilemma for parents, health care providers and policy makers.”

 

“Barriers to Air Purifiers in Schools Rebuttal Matrix”

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-22-2022]

Presenting v4.0 aka the "I can't believe we're still doing this in August 2022" version.
Additions: new concerns addressed, pdf with hotspot links to references. Interactive pdf link here: https://t.co/Rdup91LOMO https://t.co/PIUEDgkcxN pic.twitter.com/tFaLkPB6Qn

— Amanda Hu (@amandalhu) August 22, 2022

.

”How a $100 box is changing the way people protect themselves against coronavirus”

[Dallas Morning News, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]

“Enter the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, a do-it-yourself air filtration system with North Texas ties that has taken the internet by storm. Each box typically costs under $100 to make and is more effective than other, pricier options like High Efficiency Particulate Air filters. The simple contraption consists of a box fan, four MERV13 furnace filters that can be purchased online or in store, some cardboard and strips of tape. It’s the brainchild of air quality researcher Richard Corsi, dean of engineering at the University of California, Davis, and Jim Rosenthal, CEO of Texas-based company Tex-Air Filters. …. The White House recognized the need for better ventilation and launched the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge in March to call on building operators, like schools and companies, to up their inside air quality. But interest in such investments has been weak, even with billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 funding for schools that can be used to upgrade ventilation systems. Portable air filters can make up for outdated ventilation systems, although they tend to come with hefty price tags. Standalone devices that use HEPA filters can cost upwards of $300 to $400, and that doesn’t include the price of filter replacements. So when the DIY air filter prototype – designed by Corsi and first constructed by Rosenthal in the summer of 2020 – worked, the two were elated. With MERV13 filters making up each side of the cube, the box fan on top pulls air through the filters and blows clean air out of the top. In a 700-square-foot classroom with nine-foot ceilings, a Corsi-Rosenthal Box on the highest fan setting can add the equivalent of about seven-and-a-half to eight air changes per hour, Corsi said. ‘If we started at two air changes per hour and we added eight air changes per hour, we’re roughly getting about an 80% reduction in inhalation dose with that single Corsi-Rosenthal Box,’ he said. ‘That’s a huge reduction. That’s like everybody wearing pretty decent masks in the classroom.’”

 

Restoring balance to the economy

by Tony Wikrent

Kenneth Mack | The 14th amendment: its radical past (YouTube)

[Harvard Law School, Nov. 16, 2016, via YouTube]

[TW: Law Professor Kenneth Mack chronologically summarizes the terrorizing events that prompted the writing and passage of the 14th Amendment, and the reactions against it, including:

• the Memphis riot of May 1-3, 1866, in which black Union troops being demobilized were confronted by a white mob that killed 46 local
  
• the New Orleans riot of July 30, 1866, in which 34 African Americans were killed and another 119 wounded, by a white mob composed largely of former Confederate soldiers
  
• the horrifying ax murder of a black family in rural Kentucky in the summer of 1868, by two white men, John Blyew and George Kennard. When officials in Kentucky refused to prosecute the two white murderers, federal officials tried and convicted them in the U.S. Court for the District of Kentucky. The state of Kentucky then appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, arguing Kentucky’s laws prohibiting African Americans from testifying against whites invalidated the convictions. The Supreme Court rejected the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and ruled that victims were not entitled to protection from violations of their rights perpetrated under the laws of the “sovereign” states.
  
• The massacre of over 100 black militia men by a group of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan in Colfax, Louisiana, April 13, 1873. ]

.

Eric Foner: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (YouTube)

[National Constitution Center, November 19, 2019, via YouTube]

31:11
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” What are the privileges or immunities of citizens?  Nobody knows… Bingham [US Representative from Ohio John A. Bingham, who drafted the 14th Amendment] had a clear idea — he said those are the liberties protected in the Bill of Rights. Bingham said what this clause will do is require the states to respect the Bill of Rights. Before the Civil War the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights only apply to the federal government. What are the first words of the First Amendment? “Congress shall make no law…” Look at freedom of speech: try to give a speech against slavery in South Carolina — you can’t, there’s a law against it. Doesn’t that violate the First Amendment? No, because the First Amendment is about the federal government. But now Bingham says the now the states are going to have to abide by it.

33:18
There was a tradition of sharp distinctions among different kinds of rights: political rights, the right to vote, but you can be a citizen and not have that  — women were citizens but they couldn’t vote. That’s up to the states to determine who votes, at least before the Civil War. Civil rights, you mentioned a lot of them a minute ago those are the rights that really make it possible to compete in the labor market: the rights of signed contracts, to sue and be sued, to testify in court, have basic equality before the law…. Republicans by this time thought blacks orught to have all of those civil rights that  — that’s what the Civil Rights Act of 1866 says….

33:57 — The language is interesting… citizens have to enjoy these civil rights the same as enjoyed by white persons. That’s a very interesting way of putting it. Before the Civil War, the word “white” in law was a boundary, a barrier: only white people can vote… Now they use whiteness as a baseline: if white people enjoy this right, than everybody else has to enjoy it. So it’s amazing… what’s going on here is a complete rewriting of the legal structure of the United States in terms of race. One of the things I used a tell my students, “you know what they are trying to here,  if you wonder what their original intent is, it’s what we would call today “regime change.” They are trying to change a regime based on slavery into a regime based on freedom.” That’s what they are trying to do in reconstruction, with these laws and these amendments.

Read More