Author: Tony Wikrent Page 37 of 48

by Tony Wikrent

See something? Report voter suppression and obstacles to voting.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-8-20]

“State Fact Sheets”

[Georgetown University, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-30-20]

“[F]act sheets for all 50 states explaining the laws barring unauthorized private militia groups and what to do if groups of armed individuals are near a polling place or voter registration drive.”

The Pandemic

Mark Meadows: U.S. ‘not going to control’ COVID-19 as nation adds 83,718 new cases

[UPI, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-20]

“An Oral History of the Day Everything Changed”

Garrett Graff [Wired, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-29-20]

“On March 11, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic seemed to crystallize in the national consciousness. Americans look back on the turning point.” • Interviews with Mark Cuban, Carolyn Maloney, Elise Stefanik, Douglas Brinkley, Scott Van Pelt, Dan Pfeiffer, Claudia Sahm, Peter Tuz. Gabriella Orr, Philip Rucker, Liz Cheney, and Royce Young, among others; PMCs and upwards. However, Our elites obviously don’t read Naked Capitalism:

• January 23: China Coronavirus Watch: Updated – Another Chinese City Locked Down to Prevent Spread.
• January 28: Coronavirus: Not Looking Good
• January 29: Dr. Victor Shih: Coronavirus MUCH Worse Than SARS

So, arguably, for the truly alert, March 11 was not the day everything changed, but January 23. (And our elites don’t read Taleb either; Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb published Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens – Coronavirus: A note on January 26, 2020.) So the question becomes: Why were our elites so oblivious?

Strategic Political Economy

What’s at stake? A short text on US elections

Branko Milanovic [globalinequality, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-20]

Serbian economist Milanovic originally wrote this for the Toronto Globe and Mail, but “They got what they apparently did not expect and wanted me to revise the text substantially. I am always happy to accept all factual and English-language corrections… But I do not accept changes in content. So I post the original text here.]

What are the stakes in the forthcoming US presidential election? I would put them in one word: “normalcy”. But as I write that word, I feel very uneasy…. The United States prior to Trump could hardly be described as having been in a desirable state of affairs. Not only that: it is that very “normalcy”  that brought Trump to power in the first place. It is useful to refresh one’s memories. Under George W Bush, the  US created endless wars that destabilized the Middle East and killed, according to some estimates, half a million  people. Under the same president, it also produced the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. And then under the next president it bailed out those responsible for the crisis, sowed chaos in Libya, and ignored the decimation  of the American middle class….

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by Tony Wikrent

VOTE!

See something? Report voter suppression and obstacles to voting.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-8-20

Strategic Political Economy

The Enemies Briefcase
Andrew Cockburn [Harpers, November 2020, via Wall Street on Parade 10-18-20]

At some point in the first term, however, experts surmise that an even more secret briefing occurs, one that has never been publicly acknowledged. In it, the new president learns how to blow up the Constitution.

The session introduces “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties. In the words of a rare declassified official description, the documents outline how to “implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations”—by imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives, among other repressive measures. “We know about the nuclear briefcase that carries the launch codes,” Joel McCleary, a White House official in the Carter Administration, told me. “But over at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department there’s a list of all the so-called enemies of the state who would be rounded up in an emergency. I’ve heard it called the ‘enemies briefcase.’ ”

These chilling directives have been silently proliferating since the dawn of the Cold War as an integral part of the hugely elaborate and expensive Continuity of Government (COG) program, a mechanism to preserve state authority (complete with well-provisioned underground bunkers for leaders) in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Compiled without any authorization from Congress, the emergency provisions long escaped public discussion—that is, until Donald Trump started to brag about them. “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about,” he boasted in March, ominously echoing his interpretation of Article II of the Constitution, which, he has claimed, gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” He has also declared his “absolute right” to build a border wall, whatever Congress thinks, and even floated the possibility of delaying the election “until people can properly, securely, and safely vote.”

Rochester AFL-CIO Calls for General Strike if Trump Steals Election

[Payday Report, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-20]

Evo Morales’s Party’s Massive Victory Is a Rebuke to US Elites Who Hailed the Coup

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-20]

How an Aversion to Masks Stems From ‘Toxic Masculinity’ 

New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-24-20]

When President Trump returned to the White House on Oct. 5, after spending three days hospitalized with Covid-19 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, he stepped out onto the balcony and ripped off his face mask to greet his supporters. He was sending a clear signal: He had gone to war with a ruthless enemy and come out unscathed, still standing strong.

“I’m better and maybe I’m immune, I don’t know. But don’t let it dominate your lives,” he said in a video later that day, minimizing the danger of the virus that has now killed more than 220,000 Americans.

That same day, when the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., posted a video of himself on Twitter wearing a face mask, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren suggested that he “carry a purse with that.” The implication: No strong, powerful man would resort to mask wearing.

I know some people who get angry at everyday people for not wearing masks. I think their anger is misplaced and misdirected. I get angry at the conservative / libertarian leaders such as Trump and the management of Fox News, who have created a political environment that celebrates and encourages selfishness.

Economic Armageddon: The COVID Collapsed Economy

Time’s up: After a reprieve, a wave of evictions expected across U.S.

[Reuters, October 19, 2020, via The American Prospect]

September’s reprieve by the CDC, which protected many, but not all, renters will expire in January.

At that point, an estimated $32 billion in back rent will come due, with up to 8 million tenants facing eviction filings, according to a tracking tool developed by the global advisory firm Stout Risius and Ross, which works with the nonprofit National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. The nonprofit group advocates for tenants in eviction court to secure lawyers.

In a typical year, 3.6 million people face eviction cases, according to the Princeton University Eviction Lab, a national housing research center.

How The Fed Rescued Corporations And Let Everyone Else Suffer 

[The Daily Poster, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-20]

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by Tony Wikrent

VOTE! 

See something? Report voter suppression and obstacles to voting.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-8-20]

The Epidemic

Steps for Reducing COVID Transmission

[GoogleDoc) Cyrus Maher [UCSF, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-20]

Lambert Strether’s intro: “This is the must-read for the week. It’s not only a review of the literature, it’s packed with useful, pragmatic information, and very simply and clearly written. Slide 11: Aerosol FTW; slide 20: the “Swiss Cheese” model; plus a series of slides on preventing exposure, reducing exposure, and improving your odds if you are exposed starting at slide 24; see especially slide 48. (Caveat lector: There is a pitch to enroll in UCSF’s clinical trial.)”

Inside the Fall of the CDC

[Pro Publica, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-20]

Lambert Strether notes: “ the first real explanation, nine months after the fact, of the CDC Covid testing debacle* (originally blamed on contractors, IIRC). My preference for coverage priorities would be: 1) Neoliberal hollowing out; 2) the testing debacle; and 3) political interference, because the first two corrode the clout of the CDC and lead to the third, and this article reverses that order, but it’s nevertheless very good. NOTE * Casting doubt on the ability of the PMC to regulate itself, exactly like the ObamaCare MarketPlace launch debacle. PMC professional associations also have this issue.”

Strategic Political Economy

How Deep Will the Depression Get? – Paul Jay interview of Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth

[thenanalysis.news, October 8, 2020, via comments on Ian Welsh 10-12-20]

…do the elites get it? Yeah, they absolutely get it. And let me give you a couple of examples. They get it, and they think they’re going to be able to weather the storm….  But the idea was in their minds that the biggest companies, the Googles, the Facebook’s, the Buydo’s, the Alibaba’s had become so big that they were like the East India Company now. They are sort of sovereign international states that float above the nation-state, . . . and that they actually kind of formed their own consensus… these corporations now have so much control and big tech does have way more control even than big finance did because it can actually influence our behavioral patterns because of surveillance, capitalism, and algorithmic behavioral manipulation….

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy –  October 11, 2020
by Tony Wikrent

Dear Readers — I had no choice but to abandon Blogger this past week. The workaround to the miserable new version of Blogger, suggested by a reader two weeks ago, simply would no longer work. So, sorry that this post comes a good bit later in the day than past posts.  

VOTE!

See something? Report voter suppression and obstacles to voting.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-8-20]

Strategic Political Economy

“Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of The Holy Father Francis On Fraternity And Social Friendship”

[The Vatican, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-7-20]

From the section “Re-envisaging the social role of property”:

119. In the first Christian centuries, a number of thinkers developed a universal vision in their reflections on the common destination of created goods.[91] This led them to realize that if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it. Saint John Chrysostom summarizes it in this way: “Not to share our wealth with the poor is to rob them and take away their livelihood. The riches we possess are not our own, but theirs as well”.[92] In the words of Saint Gregory the Great, “When we provide the needy with their basic needs, we are giving them what belongs to them, not to us”.[93]

120. Once more, I would like to echo a statement of Saint John Paul II whose forcefulness has perhaps been insufficiently recognized: “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone”.[94] For my part, I would observe that “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property”.[95] The principle of the common use of created goods is the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order”;[96] it is a natural and inherent right that takes priority over others.[97] All other rights having to do with the goods necessary for the integral fulfilment of persons, including that of private property or any other type of property, should – in the words of Saint Paul VI – “in no way hinder [this right], but should actively facilitate its implementation”.[98] The right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods. This has concrete consequences that ought to be reflected in the workings of society. Yet it often happens that secondary rights displace primary and overriding rights, in practice making them irrelevant.

The Socialist Moment, and How to Extend It

Harold Meyerson, October 9, 2020 [American Prospect]

Sanders has always made it plain that socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was his hero, but in Judis’s telling, the key to Sanders’s zeitgeist-changing success was his move away from the socialist insularity that Debs espoused. While nominally remaining a political independent, Sanders won election to Congress on a social democratic platform of greater regulation of capital, greater power for workers, an expansion of social welfare and economic rights, and a pledge that he’d caucus with the Democrats. When he began running for president in 2015, Sanders made clear his model of socialism was the Scandinavian mixed economy. But as Judis recounts, after Columbia University historian Eric Foner sent him an open letter that emphasized a more American pedigree for socialist initiatives, Sanders took the hint. As I recounted in the Prospect, in Sanders’s two speeches that he billed as his definition of socialism—one given at Georgetown University in 2015, the second at George Washington University in 2019—he cited Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King as his forebears in the struggle for socialist reforms.

Yanis Varoufakis: How Progressives Could Still Win the 21st Century
[Naked Capitalism, October 8, 2020]

NC’s Yves Smith introduces Varoufakis’s article by excerpting from Richard Kline’s 2012 essay, Progressively Losing:

In my considered view, ‘progressives’ lose because they do not have it as a goal to win. Their principal concern is to criticize the moral failings of others in society, particularly the moral failings of those in power.

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by Tony Wikrent

The Pandemic

Donald Trump Personally to Blame for 37 Percent of the World’s COVID-19 Misinformation, Study Finds

by Tony Wikrent

After Democrats spent the weekend signaling surrender on the Supreme Court vacancy and suggesting they have no appetite to fight over the judiciary or threaten to expand the court, Trump on Wednesday declared that he may not agree to a peaceful transfer of power, and he openly admitted that he is trying to rush through a judicial nominee so that the court can give him a second term. He suggested that he will “get rid of the ballots” and “there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

‘Everyone sees the train wreck coming’: Trump reveals his November endgame
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 9-25-20]

by Tony Wikrent

If this is the last Wrap for a while, this is the reason:
“Google, nobody asked for a new Blogger interface” 
[TenFourFox Development, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 9-17-20]  

“I’m writing this post in what Google is euphemistically referring to as an improvement. I don’t understand this. I managed to ignore New Blogger for a few weeks but Google’s ability to fark stuff up has the same air of inevitability as rotting corpses…. 

When I copy and paste an entire post, such as from RealEconomics (where I write it using Blogger) to IanWelsh or into email for distribution ALL THE LINKS ARE DESTROYED ! ! ! !  They still appear as links, but the URLs all go to the Blogger page I am writing on. HOW DID THIS MAJOR PROBLEM GET THROUGH QUALITY CONTROL? Is there any Quality Control? This is beyond crappification. This renders the new Blogger useless! 

Strategic Political Economy

Frederick Soddy’s Debt Dynamics
[Economics from the Top Down, via Naked Capitalism 9-13-20]

In the field of ecological economics, Frederick Soddy looms large. Born in 1877, Soddy became a chemist and eventually won a Nobel prize for work on radioactive decay. Then he turned his attention to economics. Between 1921 and 1934, Soddy wrote four books that looked at how money relates to the physical economy. For his ground-breaking work, Soddy was rewarded with deafening silence….

Like a good natural scientist, Soddy insisted that human society is constrained by the laws of physics. Humans survive, he noted, by consuming natural resources. Exhaust these resources and we’re done for.

Think of humans (and our economy), says Soddy, like a machine. We transform energy into physical work. Like all machines, we’re bound by the laws of thermodynamics, which say that you can’t get something for nothing. Energy output requires energy input. That means humans are forever dependent on natural resources.

Now comes the problem. Our biophysical stock of resources — what Soddy called ‘wealth’ — is bound by the laws of thermodynamics. But money — which Soddy called ‘virtual wealth’ — is bound only by the laws of mathematics. Money can grow forever. Natural resource extraction cannot. This mismatch, Soddy claimed, is the root of most economic problems.

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Some graphs and comments for LABOR DAY
Tony Wikrent September 7, 2020 [Real Economics]