Author: Tony Wikrent Page 32 of 48

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 8, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

This is the best time all year to see the ringed magnificence of Saturn

[Syfy Wire, via The Big Picture 8-5-2021]

Saturn takes 29 years to orbit the Sun once. Earth is closer to the Sun and moves much more rapidly, completing an orbit in one year. If Saturn didn’t move then opposition would occur once every Earth year. But Saturn does orbit around the Sun, in the same direction as Earth does, so we have to spend a little bit of extra time catching up to it.

The pandemic

Vaccine Mandates Are as American as Apple Pie

[Portside, via Naked Capitalism 8-1-2021]

Opinion: Require the vaccine. It’s time to stop coddling the reckless.

Ruth Marcus, WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 8-2-2021]

“The C.D.C. Needs to Stop Confusing the Public”

Zeynep Tufecki [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-4-2021]

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 1, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

U.S. Population Growth, an Economic Driver, Grinds to a Halt

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 7-26-2021]

America’s weak population growth, already held back by a decadelong fertility slump, is dropping closer to zero because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In half of all states last year, more people died than were born, up from five states in 2019. Early estimates show the total U.S. population grew 0.35% for the year ended July 1, 2020, the lowest ever documented, and growth is expected to remain near flat this year.

Some demographers cite an outside chance the population could shrink for the first time on record. Population growth is an important influence on the size of the labor market and a country’s fiscal and economic strength.

I placed this under “Strategic Political Economy” because it exemplifies everything that is wrong with how almost everyone thinks of political economy. “How many people you have” is a holdover from feudalistic mercantile zero-sum economics. The real important measure of the health of a country is the productive power of human labor to sustainably transform nature into needed goods and services. This is Hamiltonian political economy in its essence. Science and technology. 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 25, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

The Pandemic

US sees COVID-19 cases surge by 224% in last three weeks as CDC director says the Indian ‘Delta’ variant now makes up 83% of all new infections

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 7-21-2021]

‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’: Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients

[AL.com, via Naked Capitalism 7-22-2021]

In the United States, COVID is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated, according to the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Alabama, state officials report 94% of COVID hospital patients and 96% of Alabamians who have died of COVID since April were not fully vaccinated….

“I try to be very non-judgmental when I’m getting a new COVID patient that’s unvaccinated, but I really just started asking them, ‘Why haven’t you gotten the vaccine?’ And I’ll just ask it point blank, in the least judgmental way possible,” she said. “And most of them, they’re very honest, they give me answers. ‘I talked to this person, I saw this thing on Facebook, I got this email, I saw this on the news,’ you know, these are all the reasons that I didn’t get vaccinated.

“And the one question that I always ask them is, did you make an appointment with your primary care doctor and ask them for their opinion on whether or not you should receive the vaccine? And so far, nobody has answered yes to that question.”

Republicans freak out because the delta variant they fostered is killing … Republicans

Dartagnan, July 21, 2021 [DailyKos]

Let’s be clear on something: Variants to the COVID-19 virus are caused by allowing the virus to continue spreading among the unvaccinated, giving it more time and opportunity to mutate. The more unvaccinated people there are, the better the chance of a variant developing and spreading. That’s what led to this delta variant that’s now ravaging the vaccine-refusing Republican population in this country. In simpler terms, Republican intransigence and political pandering created and abetted the conditions that led to the spread of the delta variant and encouraged an environment that allowed it to flourish. And now that it’s disproportionately killing “their” people, in red-leaning states, Republican elected officials are desperately seeking—once again—to avoid the blame.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-23-21]

You have to click through to see the math and the assumptions behind 80,000 Republican voters dying of COVID in Florida over the coming year.

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

by Tony Wikrent

The Epidemic

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

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

Five undervaccinated clusters put the entire United States at risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategic Political Economy

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

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy

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

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

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

The End of Friedmanomics

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

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

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

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

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

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over

Yanis Varoufakis [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2021]

Then, after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.

That central banks’ balance sheets, not profits, power the economic system explains what happened on August 12, 2020. Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: “Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us. Time to buy shares!” All over the West, central banks print money that financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their shares (whose prices have decoupled from profits). Meanwhile, digital platforms have replaced markets as the locus of private wealth extraction. For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free the capital stock of large corporations. That is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps.

“Democrats Raise Ethical Concerns Over GOP Donor’s $1 Million Funding of Border Deployment”

[Military.com, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-1-21]

“A billionaire’s $1 million donation to fund a South Dakota National Guard mission to the U.S.-Mexico border has raised questions of whether the military is effectively for hire, and Democrats in the state are investigating the legality of the issue, Military.com has learned. Willis and Reba Johnson’s Foundation, helmed by billionaire Willis Johnson, pledged $1 million to South Dakota to cover the estimated cost of deploying some 50 guardsmen to the border for up to two months, according to a state government email reviewed by Military.com.”

This is exactly why I advocate replacing liberalism with civic republicanism, which is compelling in its clarity and simplicity: the rich are as much a danger to a republic as a standing army.

As James Madison wrote in his notes preparing for the Constitutional Convention: “If the minority happen to include all such as possess the skill and habits of military life, & such as possess the great pecuniary resources, one third only may conquer the remaining two thirds.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 27, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

THE 50-100 PAY GAP: These 20 Harsh Facts About Income and Wealth Inequality Will Shock You

[Capital & Main, via Naked Capitalism 6-22-2021]

Fourteen shocking facts on inequality and working Americans

● Worker hourly compensation increased just 17% from 1979 to 2019, while worker productivity increased more than 72% over the same time period.

● Had the income of the bottom 90% of Americans kept up with GDP growth, they’d have collectively taken home $2.5 trillion more in 2018. Over the 43 years since 1975 combined, the figure is $47 trillion.

● The wealth of the bottom half of families — roughly 64 million families — adds up to only 1% of total U.S. household wealth.

● The median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median Black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family.

● In 2016, 72% of white families owned their home, compared to just 44% of Black families and 45% of Latino families.

● For the average American consumer, the share of their expenditures spent on health doubled from 1980 to 2018.

● Half of U.S. adults with lower incomes skipped necessary medical care such as doctor visits, recommended tests, treatments, follow-up care or prescription medications in the past year because of the high cost.

● Between 2008 and 2018, the number of states in which health insurance premiums and deductibles consumed at least 10% of median income increased from seven to 42.

● The price of education increased 600% more than incomes from 1980 to 2018.

● One in four Americans have no retirement savings — and those who do aren’t saving enough. The median retirement savings account of $120,000 for those approaching retirement (ages 55 to 64) will likely provide less than $1,000 per month over a 15-year retirement span.

● Social Security benefits have lost 30% of their buying power since 2000.

● Nearly 83 million adults — 34 percent of all adults in the country — reported that their household found it somewhat or very difficult to cover usual expenses such as food, rent or mortgage, car payments, medical expenses or student loans in the last seven days, according to survey research in November 2020.

● Nearly half of Black adults reported it was somewhat or very difficult to pay usual household expenses, nearly twice the rate among white adults and Asian adults (28%). A similar share (47%) of Latino adults reported such difficulties.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 6-23-2021]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Lords Of Hell (And Their Slaves)

Ian Welsh

Homelessness, despair and so on are required: without them people will not work at bad jobs. Indeed, without them many people would not work any more than required to feed and house themselves.

Now, understand clearly, rip a hole in your skull, and put this in: there is more food than needed and way more homes than homeless people in all developed countries and more food than needed to feed everyone in the world. We could easily feed and house everyone in the world. It is almost a trivial problem. We simply have to do it.

Industrialization plus modern agriculture produces more than we need, easily. Automation should mean that less and less hours needed working. We should be living in a paradise of free time and choice.

We do not because a small minority has captured power and enslaved the rest of us.

These people are monsters on every possible level, including their depraved indifference to what will happen to their children and grandchildren under environmental collapse and climate change.

We have a surplus, but it is generated in the stupidest ways possible: with planned obsolesence, soil degradation and pollution causing environmental collapse.

Matt Stoller: A Society Designed to Incentivize Criminal Behavior at the Highest Level

Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on China (not paywalled)

Bernie Sanders [Foreign Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 6-18-2021]

The deck: “Don’t Start Another Cold War.”

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Many Americans moved to less pricey housing markets in 2020

[AP, via The Big Picture 6-15-2021]

Many Americans who moved last year relocated to areas where homes were, on average, bigger and less expensive. On average, people who moved to a different city in 2020 ended up in a ZIP code where average home values were nearly $27,000 lower than in their previous ZIP code.

“Biden Could Cancel Student Loan Debt Right Now By Signing an Executive Order” [Teen Vogue, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-16-21]

“When the Department of Education was first given the power to issue student loans, it was also granted the power to “compromise, waive, or release any right” to collect on them, an authority known as “compromise and settlement.” Essentially, the Biden administration can suspend the collection of student debt altogether, and poof!, tens of millions of Americans would be student loan debt-free! It’d be like waving a magic wand, except the wand isn’t magic, it’s a legitimate legal authority vested in the Department of Education by Congress.”

Why Buffalo is a hub for illegal debt collectors who scam thousands across the country

[The Buffalo News, via Naked Capitalism 6-15-2021]

Inflation Is Here: Fast Food Bosses Make $5,460 An Hour

[Investor’s Business Daily), via The Big Picture 6-15-2021]

Chipotle’s CEO Brian Niccol is in a class of his own — and his paycheck shows it. Niccol pulled down more than $38 million in total reported compensation in 2020. That’s more than double what he made the prior year. It’s also $18,286 an hour, if you assume 40-hour weeks for 52 weeks.

ProPublica’s Release of Leaked Tax Return Data for Billionaires: Why Wall Street’s Mega Banks Are Freaking Out

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, June 14, 2021 [Wall Street on Parade]

For Student Debtors, Time’s Running Out

[The American Prospect, 6-17-2021]

In just three months, the student loan payment moratorium is scheduled to come to an end. Borrowers are starting to panic….

Through interviews with nearly a dozen student loan borrowers, it’s clear how much student debt weighs on Americans. Currently, 45 million people owe $1.7 trillion in student debt, and the average monthly payment is $393. Student loans are one of the greatest debts of any type in the country, surpassing national credit card and auto debt. A few borrowers told me that they expect to die with their student loans….

The burden of student debt isn’t equal across borrowers; it disproportionately impacts Black Americans, making it one of the key mechanisms exacerbating systemic economic inequality. On average, Black borrowers owe $25,000 more in student loans than their white counterparts….

The administration does have options. While Biden’s Education Department got off to a slow start on reforming borrower relief programs, student loan advocacy groups cheered when he appointed Richard Cordray, formerly in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as chief of federal student loan programs. Cordray has a record of protecting borrowers, and he could be part of the department’s enabling of more loan forgiveness and fixing current systems, while cracking down on unscrupulous student loan companies that often deny borrowers relief to which they’re entitled.

The administration could also extend the moratorium, or bring it back with a phased restart, only requiring a portion of payments to start. And of course, they could cancel the debt, a legal recourse under the Higher Education Act that doesn’t require additional legislation.

Restoring balance to the economy

How America’s Weirdest Guidebooks Were Funded by the Government

[New York Times, June 15, 2021]

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