Author: Tony Wikrent Page 29 of 48

by Tony Wikrent

How to Prepare for Climate Change’s Most Immediate Impacts 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 1-18-2022]

Strategic Political Economy

1/25 Live Chat: The Author Of “Davos Man”

David Sirota [The Daily Poster, January 7, 2022]

New York Times reporter Peter Goodman will talk to Daily Poster subscribers about his new book on billionaires conquering the world….

In his new book Davos Man — How the Billionaires Devoured the World, Goodman delivers a searing exposé of how the global billionaire class has engineered a bottom-up transfer of wealth that has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. The book lays bare the roots of Trump, Brexit, and anti-democratic movements sweeping the globe, exposing how wealthy executives perpetuated the agony of the pandemic by monopolizing the benefits of COVID vaccines and laying the groundwork for the rise of Omicron.

 

RICH AMERICANS’ OUTSIZED ROLE IN ELECTING REPRESENTATIVES

[Public Citizen, January 18, 2022, via The Daily Poster, January 19, 2022]

A new report finds two-thirds of all “maxed-out” campaign donations to members of Congress came from the richest 10 percent of zip codes across the U.S., and 25 percent of all maxed-out contributions were from the wealthiest one percent of zip codes. The study, authored by consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, also shows that zip codes with mostly white residents gave five times the amount of maxed-out contributions per capita as zip codes with mostly Black residents. “This study confirms that the very wealthiest Americans play an immensely greater role than regular voters in choosing our elected officials, and that members of Congress have a strong incentive to align their positions with wealthy donors’ interests,” said Taylor Lincoln, Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division research director and author of the study. The Freedom to Vote Act — one of two federal bills under debate that creates stronger protections for voters — would offer a six-to-one match on political contributions of $200 or less and allow congressional candidates to raise campaign cash without relying on the wealthiest donors, as long as they agree to forgo donations over $1,000.

 

‘Time for Citizens United to Go’: US Oligarchs Poured $1.2 Billion Into 2020 Elections

Jake Johnson, January 21, 2022 [Common Dreams]

The figure represents a 39-fold increase compared to spending in 2010, the first election held after the widely decried ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 16, 2022
by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

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

World's greatest democracy pic.twitter.com/Hmnmhptxiv

— Mary Tracy 🍉 (@MaryTracy) January 9, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson, January 14, 2022 [Letters from an American]

Yesterday, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s requirement that businesses with more than 100 employees address the coronavirus pandemic by making employees either get vaccines or, if they choose not to be vaccinated, to test weekly and wear a mask at work….

In his opinion, Gorsuch explicitly raised the concept of the “nondelegation doctrine” and the related concept of the “major questions doctrine.” The nondelegation doctrine relies on our government’s separation of powers. It says that, as its own branch of government, Congress cannot delegate regulatory authority to the executive branch, where agencies like OSHA live.

But, since Congress has, in fact, been delegating authority to the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington, those who want to reduce federal authority sometimes rely instead on the more limited major questions doctrine, which says that although Congress can delegate minor authority to administrative agencies, it cannot delegate major questions (although just how to define a major question is unclear).

A recent study by University of Southern California professor of public policy Dr. Pamela Clouser McCann and University of Michigan professor of social science Dr. Charles R. Shipan, both experts on intergovernmental delegation, found that 99% of today’s federal laws involve delegation. Unwinding them and requiring Congress to make all its own regulatory decisions would paralyze the modern government.

Those who support the idea of nondelegation argue that it guarantees government by the people rather than by an unelected bureaucracy, and this is a worthy thought. But unfortunately, it depends on the goodwill of those elected to state legislatures, and because those lawmakers also get to decide who votes in their states, that goodwill can be thin on the ground.

At heart, this is the same states’ rights argument that the U.S. has grappled with since the 1830s. Since that time, while some state legislatures have used their power to reflect the will of the people, others have limited the vote, putting a small group of people into power. Once in power, they have used the state government to promote their own interests. States’ rights advocates have consistently said that any federal interference with a state’s unfair laws is tyranny…

Since the 1930s, though, lawmakers have used the federal government to combat unfair state laws. They have regulated businesses when state lawmakers wouldn’t, protected civil rights from discriminatory state laws, and, ultimately, guaranteed the right to vote in states that kept their citizens from the polls, with the expectation that if everyone could vote, they would, indeed, create state governments that reflected the will of the majority..

TW: “lawmakers have used the federal government to combat unfair state laws.” In other words, guarantee to each state a [civic] republican form of government.

The Republicans’ Death Panel Finally Emerges! The Supreme Court’s Republican Six rule that the government lacks the power to fight a pandemic.

Harold Meyerson, January 13, 2022 [The American Prospect]

For a bunch of jurists who claim to adhere to textualism, the six Court right-wingers gave no indication that they’d actually read the act that established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which was signed into law by left-winger Richard Nixon. That law gives OSHA the authority to protect workers “exposed to grave danger” from “substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.”

 

The Supreme Court can’t get its story straight on vaccines — The Court is barely even pretending to be engaged in legal reasoning.

Ian Millhiser,  January 15, 2022 [Vox]

The Court is fabricating legal doctrines that appear in neither statute nor Constitution.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 9, 2022
by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Yes, Maggie, There Is Such a Thing as “Society”

by Tony Wikrent

[Youtube,

Happy new year!

Y0utube Squirrel Maze 2.0

Now do lobbyists. Though the results will probably be about the same.

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Strategic Political Economy

“The collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it”

Heather Cox Richardson, December 26, 2021 [Letters from an American]

…the collapse of the USSR gave the branch of the Republican Party that wanted to destroy the New Deal confidence that their ideology was right. Believing that their ideology of radical individualism had destroyed the USSR, these so-called Movement Conservatives very deliberately set out to destroy what they saw as Soviet-like socialist ideology at home. As anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home. Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn’t have nuclear weapons.”

In the 1990s, they turned their firepower on those they considered insufficiently committed to free enterprise, including traditional Republicans who agreed with Democrats that the government should regulate the economy, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. Movement Conservatives called these traditional Republicans “Republicans in Name Only” or RINOs and said that, along with Democrats, such RINOs were bringing “socialism” to America.

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.

In the 1990s, as well-connected businessmen began to gather wealth and power in the former Soviet republics, that deregulation made the US and the UK attractive places for these oligarchs to place their illicit money. According to a fascinating new study from Chatham House about the UK, that investment ultimately weakened the rule of law. The study concerns the UK alone, but since the UK and US are by far the world’s top exporters of financial services, many of the report’s findings are suggestive for the US as well….

The financial deregulation that made the US a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, after the September 11 attacks on the US, Congress in 2001 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.

In the years since, the United States has become one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Experts say that hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the US every year. As Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted last year, “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns, but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”

….

In some ways, the collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it. In the past thirty years, we have torn ourselves apart as  politicians adhering to an extreme ideology demonized their opponents. That demonization is escalating now as Republican radicals who were born after the collapse of the USSR and who therefore see their primary enemies as Democrats, are moving the Republican Party even further to the right. North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn, for example, was born in 1995.

That demonization has also helped to justify the deregulation of our economy and then the illicit money from the rising oligarchs it attracted, money that has corrupted our democratic system.

“Academic research is falling apart in slow motion over the last two years”

Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 12-28-2021]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Twitter

The role of government should not just be to fix market failures but to do what's not been done at all. Read my interview with Danish @weekendavisen https://t.co/rDkJEPD1fX

— Mariana Mazzucato (@MazzucatoM) December 22, 2021

Capitalism Didn’t Make the iPhone, You iMbecile

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The creation of the entire new era of computers and information technology can be precisely traced back to one event, when U.S. Army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory and the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research convened a seminar to deliberately share the technologies developed by various government programs and projects during World War Two:

August 1946: The Moore School Lectures

[Wikipedia]

The Moore School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was at the center of developments in high-speed electronic computing in 1946. On February 14 of that year it had publicly unveiled the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, developed in secret beginning in 1943 for the Army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory. Prior even to the ENIAC’s completion, work had begun on a second-generation electronic digital computer, the EDVAC, which incorporated the stored program model. Work at the Moore School attracted researchers including John von Neumann, who served as a consultant to the EDVAC project, and Stan Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis of the Manhattan Project, who arrived to run one of the first major programs written for the ENIAC, a mathematical simulation for the hydrogen bomb project…. The 8-week course was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Army‘s Ordnance Department and the U.S. Navy‘s Office of Naval Research, who promised (by verbal authorizations) the $3,000 requested to cover lecturer salaries and fees and $4,000 for travel, printing, and overhead. ($1,569 over this figure was ultimately claimed.)

 

Another Crisis Surrounds Us: Life expectancy drops almost two years in the U.S., and it’s not just from COVID-19.

[The American Prospect, December 23, 2021]

According to the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, the largest single-year drop since national statistics were made available in 1933. The U.S. totaled 3,383,729 registered deaths, more than 500,000 higher than the year before. And that’s not even the worst statistic from the newly released mortality data.

Death rates for every age group 15 years and over increased from 2019 to 2020. The increase continues across men and women, regardless of race. However, rates sharply rose most among Black and Latino men.

 

Strategic Geo-Politics

Russia’s ultimatum to the West

[The Saker, via Naked Capitalism 12-20-2021]

Because most of the “international community” which “supports” (well, obeys) the USA is the EU, which itself is in a terminal crisis on too many levels to count here!

Compare the red and the grey zones on the map, and ask yourself these questions: which zone has the most powerful military? which zone has the most natural and human resources? which zone has the most promising trading routes? which zone has a real GDP, as opposed to a purely FIRE one?  Which one is literally dying spiritually under the trans-national “Woke” ideology and which one has retained the willingness and ability to fight for its spiritual, cultural, and civilizational values?  Finally, which zone has a viable vision of the future?

I could go on and on with many more such questions, but I think that you see my point: the USA is not only losing militarily, but it is also losing on all fronts!

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

… the playing fields of Eton:

An entire ruling class raised on pure cruelty and abuse really does explain a lot, doesn’t it https://t.co/ibcMK0Rdxv

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) December 4, 2021

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The Pandemic That Capitalism Made

Umair Haque, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-2021]

It Would Cost Less to Vaccinate the World Than Big Pharma Earns in Vaccine Profits. If That Doesn’t Make Sense…That’s Because It Doesn’t

Do you ever wonder about those pharma TV commercials, and why any company would pay millions to have a speed-talker drone on about bad side-effects for 30 seconds? The intended result is what Haque writes about former CDC Director Tom Frieden’s comments in Europe that “Big Pharma is war profiteering” off COVID: 

Why does he say that? Well, first note that he had to head to the UK, to say it on Dispatches, which is one of the nation’s finest and most hardest-hitting news programs. In other words, nobody in America would even run the story.

 

Normalizing Corruption: The Biden White House purports to be worried about corruption — just not the kind now dominating American politics.

Andrew Perez, December 9, 2021 [Daily Poster].

“Corruption robs citizens of equal access to vital services, denying the right to quality health care, public safety, and education,” the Biden administration wrote Monday [report], adding that corruption ‘has been shown to significantly curtail the ability of states to respond effectively to public health crises.’ The Biden administration, as it turns out, is a perfect example of this: Every policy solution they propose involves some sort of corporate giveaway. This is the kind of institutionalized and legalized bribery that’s almost never discussed — the corruption that’s responsible for high health care costs and poor health care outcomes in the U.S., and that has made it effectively impossible for lawmakers to rationally respond to the COVID-19 pandemic here and around the globe. As if to drive the problem home, within hours of releasing their corruption report, the Biden White House was flailing on TV trying to defend an overly complex COVID testing plan that will keep Americans paying inflated retail prices for at-home tests with the hope that their health insurer will agree to reimburse them at some later point. This plan is wildly impractical, but it would be a boon for the same testing manufacturer that just so happened to start paying Biden’s former top aide shortly after Biden was elected president.”

 

Insulin’s deadly cost: Ultrahigh prices in the U.S. mean many diabetics can’t afford the medication they need to survive

[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-2021]

“Billionaire Koch-Backed Group Sues FTC Over Antitrust Enforcement” 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-9-2021]

“A nonprofit backed by billionaire Charles Koch sued the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to obtain documents related to a series of policy changes that have been criticized by the country’s biggest business lobbying group as an attack on American companies. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation filed a complaint on Wednesday in federal court in Washington seeking an order requiring the FTC to produce records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request the group filed with the agency. ‘The FTC’s aggressive agenda on antitrust enforcement is out of step with mainstream legal thinking and is best regarded as anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and harmful to economic growth and prosperity,’ it said.”

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by Tony Wikrent

The pandemic and (de)population policy

Background: Henry Kissinger’s December 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200, Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM 200)

“Omicron’s Message”

[Nonzero, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-2-2021]

“[T]he acceleration of global vaccination… is something the world’s most powerful leaders aren’t focused on. If they were focused on it, we’d be seeing the unfolding of a project that looked something like this: (1) loosening the intellectual property rights enjoyed by vaccine makers; (2) compelling them to share the know-how that would allow factories around the world to take advantage of this loosening and ramp up vaccine production; and (3) making sure, with subsidies if necessary, that (a) the vaccine makers who thus sacrifice profits are rewarded amply enough to preserve their incentive to innovate; and (b) the newly abundant vaccines are inexpensive, especially in low-income countries. So incompetent are the world’s leaders that they can’t even get to step 1 of this project.”

Lambert Strether: “Incompetence is the charitable explanation.” 

2.5 Million Nurses Demand UN Probe Into ‘Covid-19 Criminals’ Blocking Patent Waiver

[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2021]

More than two million nurses from 28 countries across the globe filed a complaint Monday calling on the United Nations to investigate the rich countries that are blocking a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, an appeal that came as public health experts raced to understand the newly detected Omicron variant.

In a detailed letter addressed to Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Physical and Mental Health, dozens of nursing unions noted that “the end of this pandemic is nowhere in sight” as “Covid-19 cases continue to soar in numerous parts of the world, while pharmaceutical companies and governments have failed to ensure that critical treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably in order to respond to the pandemic.”

 

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-30-2021]

I’m a parent and a scientist. The fact that we had a White House summit yesterday on the toy supply chain but not on the testing supply chain, & that NPR gave it significant airtime vs nothing on virus testing & sequencing tells you all you need to know about our priorities.

— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) November 30, 2021

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