Author: Tony Wikrent Page 30 of 51

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Godless Empire: Evil Cannot Create Anything New, Only Corrupt What Good Created

[The Reading Junkie, via Mike Norman Economics 4-18-2022]

Analysts in Washington study a culture and find its most primal, barbaric roots, and create a cartoonish caricature of it. With that caricature as a false god, that whole society is turned into a death cult, the perfect, self-destructing weapon against Washington’s rivals. The suicidal nature of Washington’s pawns is deliberate. After Russia is destroyed, there would be no use for a Ukraine anymore, so it is actually better for Ukraine to be destroyed in the process too…. The West loves “blood harvests” and projects that idea onto other cultures like Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine, but it originated on our own shores. Look at modern movies and shows like 300 and Vikings. Why do our filmmakers dream so much of mass killings, rapes, and blood gods? Why do they love depicting barbarians raping and massacring weak and pathetic Christians? It’s weird.

TW: This is why it is a tragedy that contemporary scholars of civic republicanism such as Pettit sand Rawls are misleading people by defining civic republicanism as “freedom from domination.” What makes civic republicanism a superior philosophy of political economy and governance is its insistence on promoting the human capacity to “do good,” by striving toward perfection.

Samuel Scolnicov, “An Image of Perfection: The Good and the Rational in Plato’s Material Universe” (Revue de Philosophie Ancienne, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1992)

Matt J. Rossano, Seeking Perfection: A Dialogue About the Mind, the Soul, and What it Means to be Human (Routledge, 2015)

This idea is, of course, reflected in the Preamble of the USA Constitution (“a more perfect union”) , but the philosophical importance of its inclusion is today all but forgotten. 

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-20-2022]

NEW: GOP Rep Mo Brooks says prime committee chairmanships cost a minimum of $1 million and are paid by special interest groups as "a quid pro quo" for favored legislation#ALsen pic.twitter.com/SswSObhpf7

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) April 15, 2022

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The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers 

[Palladium, via Naked Capitalism 4-22-2022]

Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan: A History is the first history to adequately capture this story. Malkasian deployed as a civilian officer in Kunar and Helmand provinces in the aughts, and then returned to Afghanistan as an advisor to General Joseph Dunford in 2013, and stayed at Dunford’s side through his tenure on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Malkasian speaks Pashto fluently, traveled widely across Afghanistan conducting interviews, and participated in the Trump era negotiations with the Taliban.

Malkasian’s account of American error builds on these personal experiences. His catalog of American mistakes and miscalculations is long….

Most accounts of the conflict are one-sided portrayals of the American experience in Afghanistan. Malkasian’s fluency in Pashto allows The American War in Afghanistan to escape the limitations of the genre. Entire chapters are built on Afghan sources that other histories of the war ignore. From their perspective, the U.S. war in Afghanistan was not really American at all. Over the last two decades, it was Afghans, not Americans, who have done the majority of the killing, bleeding, and dying. The war in Afghanistan was first and foremost a civil war. Any account of the Taliban’s victory must start with what each side of this civil war was fighting for.

Mexico nationalises lithium in populist president’s push to extend state control 

[FT, via Naked Capitalism 4-212-2022]

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“The policy of the USA has always been to prevent Germany and Russia from cooperating more closely” 

[Swiss Standpoint, via Naked Capitalism 4-12-2022]

We forget that Crimea was independent, even before Ukraine became independent. In January 1991, while the Soviet Union still existed, Crimea held a referendum to be managed from Moscow and not from Kiev. It thus became an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Ukraine did not get its own independence referendum until six months later in August 1991. At that point, Crimea did not consider itself a part of Ukraine. But Ukraine did not accept this. Between 1991 and 2014, it was a constant struggle between the two entities. Crimea had its own constitution with its own authorities. In 1995, encouraged by the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine overthrew the Crimean government with special forces and abrogated its constitution. But this is never mentioned, as it would shed a completely different light on the current development.

Liberalism, conservatism and the lack of discussion of civic republicanism

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid It’s not just a phase.

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 4-16-2022]

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past….

Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society….

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

Russia / Ukraine

The Economics of the Russian Victory
Sergey Glazyev, March 18, 2022 [StalkerZone

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Jerks

Michael Brenner [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 4-9-2022].

…it is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.  At a more personal level, this impression is reinforced by messages from persons whom I’ve known and respected telling me that I’m in the pay of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “mad,” “too clever by half,”

…Third, it is self-evident that our national leaders, elected or appointed, are equally incapable of sober deliberation, of intellectual honesty (with themselves as well as us), of elementary logic, even of acknowledging factual realities. Consequently, the resulting behavior defies rational analysis.

NATO to target China – Stoltenberg 

[RT, via Naked Capitalism 4-6-2022]

The West is losing its mind:

NATO plans to deepen its cooperation with partners in Asia as a response to a rising “security challenge” coming from China, which refuses to condemn Russia’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine, the US-led bloc’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg revealed during a press conference on Tuesday.

Bill Clinton: “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path”

Bill Clinton [[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-8-2022]

“I did everything I could to help Russia make the right choice and become a great 21st-century democracy.”

Comments were savagely on target:

Darthbobber April 8, 2022 at 4:11 pm

Clinton makes it all the way through that Russia screed without so much as mentioning the October ’93 Russian constitutional crisis, the shelling of parliament, suppression of the opposition press, end of the independence of the high court. Or of our considerable efforts at reelecting Yeltsin under-err–less than democratic conditions.

Sacrificing the fledgeling democracy of the Gorbachev constitution on the altar of shock therapy was pretty decisive in terms of Russia’s evolution since, also in terms of creating the oligarchs in the first place. Odd how none of this is worth even a passing mention. Priorities, I guess.

40 Years of the Reagan Revolution’s Libertarian Experiment Have Brought Us Crisis & Chaos

[Hartmann Report, via The Big Picture 4-3-2022]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Nearly 1 in 3 food companies forced to reduce or shutdown production 

[Brussels Times, via Naked Capitalism 4-2-2022]

Yves Smith added: “From IM Doc, independent of above story, by e-mail:”

2 interesting patient conversations this week…The other was the retired CEO of one of our big Ag corps. He told me in no uncertain terms to begin to do everything I could to prepare. All kinds of problems are brewing with the nation’s food supplies and supply chains and the real pain will not start until later this summer or fall – but it is going to be really ugly. He rates the likelihood to be somewhere between “epic and biblical”

Child poverty spiked by 41 percent in January after Biden benefit program expired, study finds 

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 3-29-2022]

‘Their Inflation Strategy Is Working’: Corporate Profits Soared to Record High in 2021

Jake Johnson [Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 3-31-2022]

The US Empire’s Ultimate Target Is Not Russia But China 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Mike Norman Economics 3-31-2022]

Ukraine / Russia

Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War 

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 3-28-2022]

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark.

Just where is Joe Biden going to find gas for the EU?

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 3-28-2022]

A senior U.S. official clarified that the promise of 15 bcm this year is actually a commitment to try and help convince companies in Asia or elsewhere that were expecting cargoes this coming winter to agree to send them to Europe instead. That would be a repeat of what happened this past winter, the official said.”

Global commodity shifts in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine 

[Splash 247, via Naked Capitalism 3-28-2022]

Shifting global commodity patterns in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are proving seismic.
On Friday, the US agreed to attempt to deliver an additional 10m tonnes of LNG to Europe in 2022, equivalent to around 14% of total US LNG exports last yea,r as Europe weans itself off its dependence on Russia, the world’s largest energy producer. In the longer term, the US has agreed to supply a further 35m tonnes of LNG to Europe per year out to 2030, should the additional LNG consumption remain consistent with existing European decarbonisation plans.

Russian Oil Is Too Cheap To Resist For China And India 

[OilPrice, via Naked Capitalism 4-2-2022]

Russia’s Gazprom exits German business amid crisis in energy ties 

Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 4-2-2022]

Follows a raid on Gazprom offices in Germany.

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

Bill McKibben [New Yorker, via The Big Picture 3-26-2022]

The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels….

…the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

“Beauty and wonder of science boosts researchers’ well-being”

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-21-2022]

“Scientists’ ability to experience wonder, awe and beauty in their work is associated with higher levels of job satisfaction and better mental health, finds an international survey of researchers. Brandon Vaidyanathan, a sociologist at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, and his colleagues collected responses from more than 3,000 scientists — mainly biologists and physicists — in India, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. They asked participants about their job satisfaction and workplace culture, their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of aesthetics in science. The answers revealed that, far from the caricature of scientists as exclusively rational and logical beings, “this beauty stuff is really important”, Vaidyanathan says. “It shapes the practice of science and is associated with all kinds of well-being outcomes.’”

Fed headed for crack up?

Mike Norman [Mike Norman Economics 3-26-2022]

Mike doing some projections this week on by how much or perhaps how fast the Fed can increase its policy rates while avoiding insolvency, ie a situation where their current interest income would be exceeded by their current interest payable…

You can see here current UST yields are less than the Fed’s overnight rates (inverted) out to 8 weeks … no bueno…

To be safe they may want to somehow pivot from the current perhaps implied policy of an acceleration in the increase in their policy rates to a policy of acceleration in their rate of asset/liability reduction… keep an eye out for this pivot…

(the not-so-hidden agenda. reassertion of unquestioned American primacy in the world. Not that this is anything new.)

Starving a People, Committing a Genocide: Biden’s Sanctions on Afghanistan

[Counterpunch, via Naked Capitalism 3-20-2022]

Developing Countries Strained by Rich-World Monetary Tightening

[The American Prospect, March 25, 2022]

A new report shows how rising commodity prices, on top of macroeconomic tightening by the Fed, could spark riots in low- and middle-income countries.

The epidemic

Italian study shows ventilation can cut school COVID cases by 82%

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 3-23-2022]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Orwell Was Right (excerpt)

Matt Taibbi [TK News, via Naked Capitalism 3-14-2022]

The ideal citizen of Orwell’s Oceania bubbled with rage a mile wide and a millimeter deep and could forget in an instant passions that may have consumed him or her for years. We just did this, with a pandemic that had the country steaming with indignation until it was quietly declared over the moment Putin rolled over Ukraine’s borders. We switched from “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” to “Putin’s price hikes” in a snap. National outrage moved a few lobes over with zero fuss, and now we hate new people; instead of “anti-vax Barbie,” we’re barring Russian and Belarussian kids from the Paralympics.

“At least NINE House Democrats test positive for COVID after party held maskless retreat in Philadelphia”

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-18-2022]

I include this under “Strategic Political Economy” because it illustrates the extreme arrogance and stupidity of USA ruling elites — including Democratic Party elites. The have failed completely to confront an epidemic by refusing to even consider major expenditures such as reworking the ventilation systems and air filters of all buildings. As Lambert Strether noted: “Closed, close-contact, crowded, lots of talking, probably shouting and singing, no masks. What did they think was going to happen? The outcome they all worked so hard to create; that’s what happened.” 

Say hello to Russian gold and Chinese petroyuan 

Pepe Escaobar [Vineyard of the Saker, via Mike Norman Economics 3-15-2022]

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday, after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.

“Saudi Arabia Considers Accepting Yuan Instead of Dollars for Chinese Oil Sales”

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-15-2022]

“Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia…. China buys more than 25% of the oil that Saudi Arabia exports. If priced in yuan, those sales would boost the standing of China’s currency. The Saudis are also considering including yuan-denominated futures contracts, known as the petroyuan, in the pricing model of Saudi Arabian Oil Co. , known as Aramco.” • Since the dollar is now evidently a pure form of power projection by the United States, it’s not surprising that other sovereign states would want to get out from under it, if they can.

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Eric Helleiner ─ The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History

Eric Helleiner interviewed by Mark Blythe [Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University]

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How the World Works

James Fallows [The Atlantic, December 1993]

Americans persist in thinking that Adam Smith’s rules for free trade are the only legitimate ones. But today’s fastest-growing economies are using a very different set of rules. Once, we knew them–knew them so well that we played by them, and won. Now we seem to have forgotten….

The more I had heard about List in the preceding five years, from economists in Seoul and Osaka and Tokyo, the more I had wondered why I had virtually never heard of him while studying economics in England and the United States. By the time I saw his books in the shop beneath the cherry trees, I had come to think of him as the dog that didn’t bark. He illustrated the strange self-selectivity of Anglo-American thinking about economics.

TW: There is a simple answer to why Henry Carey and Friedrich List are unknown in USA today: the economics profession was corrupted. Michael Hudson explains what happened at Wharton to suppress and eventually bury the economic thought of Simon Patten. 

From the Archives: ‘How the World Works’

James Fallows, December 26, 2021

The United States knows how to help foster advanced, high-wage, high-employment, globally successful businesses. But it has forgotten how to talk about that process honestly, and instead sinks into familiar political and media slogans.

TW: For Carey and his followers, political economy included a moral dimension, including strong opposition to slavery and to Britain’s opium trade. The aim of political economy was not the allocation of scarce resources, but the building of civilization and the continual improvement of the human condition. As John Quincy Adams explained in “Society and Civilization” [American Whig Review, July 1845]:

Unceasing labor is not suitable to the nature or condition of man. Hours of relaxation and repose are necessary to relieve the labors of every day…. all the powers of the body and all the faculties of the mind of every individual, from the cradle to the grave, should be exercised to the utmost extent of which they are capable, in improving the condition of his kind. The duties of man consist in alternate action and meditation, mutually aiding and relieving each other; and both, directed with undeviating aim, to the progressive improvement of himself and his fellow creatures. Heaven has given him in charge, to promote the happiness and well-being of himself, his wife, his children, his kindred, his neighbors, his fellow citizens, his country, and his kind; and the great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community, that this gradation of duties, may be made to harmonize in all its parts—that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same.

“Vertically Challenged”

Cory Doctorow [Locus Magazine, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-9-2022]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-1-2022]

never seen weaponization of money on this scale before…you only get to play the card once. china will make it a priority to need no USD before going for Taiwan. it’s a turning point in monetary history: the end of USD hegemony & the acceleration towards a bipolar monetary order

— Dylan Grice (@dylangrice) February 27, 2022

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[Twitter, via Avedon’s Sideshow 4-6-2022]

Forget the macho hawkish bleating, here's how the West directly helped Russia invading Ukraine. First, we refused to invest in renewable energy FOR DECADES. Second, we turned the USSR into an oligarchy. Third, we made a world safe for those oligarchs. Fourth, we expanded NATO.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 2, 2022

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Putin the Apostate. We thought he would be our bastard. Then, he became his own bastard.

Matt Taibbi, February 28, 2022

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there…. I’ve been bitter in commentary about Putin in recent years because I never forgot the way the West smoothed his rise, and pretends now that it didn’t. It’s infuriating also that many of us who were critical of him from the start are denounced now as Putin apologists, I think in part because we have inconvenient memories about who said what at the start of his story. The effort to wipe that history clean is reaching a fever pitch this week. Before they finish the job, it seemed worth getting it all down….

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