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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 13 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 13 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters 

Zoë Schlanger, October 5, 2024 [The Atlantic]

…This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense. Over time, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on disasters in an ad hoc way, outside its main disaster budget, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School….

The U.S. is facing a growing number of billion-dollar disasters, fueled both by climate change and by increased development in high-risk places. This one could cost up to $34 billion, Moody’s Analytics estimated. Plus, the country is simply declaring more disasters over time in part because of “shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution….
…A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that every dollar of disaster preparedness saves communities $13 in damages, cleanup costs, and economic impacts. But since 2018, the government has set aside just 6 percent of the total of its post-disaster grant spending to go toward pre-disaster mitigation….
Meanwhile, costs of these disasters are likely to balloon further because of gaps in insurance. In places such as California, Louisiana, and Florida, insurers are pulling out or raising premiums so high that people can’t afford them, because their business model cannot support the current risks posed by more frequent or intense disasters. So states and the federal government are already taking on greater risks as insurers of last resort. The National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, writes more than 95 percent of the residential flood policies in the United States, according to an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania. But the people who hold those policies are almost all along the coasts, in specially designated flood zones. Inland flooding such as Helene brought doesn’t necessarily conform to those hazard maps; less than 1 percent of the homeowners in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the city of Asheville was badly hit, had flood insurance….
But some of these measures, such as adopting stronger building codes, tend to be unpopular with the states that hold the authority to change them. “There is a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government in terms of how to do this,” Schlegelmilch said. The way things work right now, states and local governments would likely end up shouldering more of the cost of preparing for disasters. But they know the federal government will help fund recovery.
Plus, spending money on disaster recovery helps win elected officials votes in the next election. “The amount of funding you bring in has a very strong correlation to votes—how many you get, how many you lose,” Schlegelmilch said. But the same cannot be said for preparedness, which has virtually no correlation with votes.
[TW: “a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government,” which the rich are exacerbating by their lavish funding of the stridently anti-government conservative and libertarian movements, and, more importantly the corruption of the judiciary so that it provides judicial legitimacy and bite to these anti-government ideas and policies, as in Loper-Bright. As tragic as these disasters are, progressives should be planning beforehand how to use the inevitable public clamor for disaster relief as climate change worsens, and direct that clamor against the anti-government conservative and libertarian movements that are the root cause of unprepardeness. As Stoller writes below: “we are entering a world beset by climate change, which will require a different political order [but] the bulk of our leadership class is still in thrall to a finance-friendly model of industrial fragility.]
Matt Stoller, October 08, 2024 [BIG]
…All of that is a way of saying that hurricanes are really dangerous, and involve massive sums of money and important questions of market power and shortages. And that’s especially true today, with our monopolized and thus fragile supply chains. For instance, when North Carolina got hit with immense rain from Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago, it killed hundreds of people, and also knocked out a mine making 90% of the key pure quartz on which the semiconductor industry depends. To take another example, the American Hospital Association has already asked the President to declare a national emergency due to a shortage of IV fluids as a result of the disaster….
((One factory about 35 miles east of Ashville supplied 60% of the nation’s IV fluids…))

….So what’s the right approach to addressing the resulting crisis?

The response will require more state capacity. Clearly there’s search and rescue and immediate crisis response, which requires a lot more funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We’re going to need a permanently larger FEMA, since climate change has dramatically increased the pace of natural disasters. The government should probably just rebuild and then make all cell phone service free in the area for the next two months, and find a way of extending Medicaid to everyone so no one has to deal with billing. Or they could just temporarily nationalize hospitals.

What we can learn from the Covid crisis and the CARES Act is that we should immediately be sending resources to individuals and small businesses in the area. A quick disbursal of cash to everyone in the region, as well as a revival of the Paycheck Protection Program for small business loan/grants, would help people afford basic necessities, and keep businesses alive. Bank regulators should also freeze credit reporting and student debt payments for people in affected counties.

Given the potential crisis of Florida property values and all the financing attached to those, we need to think about bank solvencies. To address the possibility of a financial crisis, Congress should stop working through the Federal Reserve, which is too focused on helping private equity and large banks and far too opaque. Instead, the government should structure a new public bank called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It should be run by the FDIC, and be allowed to use the Fed balance sheet for loans, which would all be publicly posted.

We can also learn some lessons from the post-Katrina moment, as well as what happened during Covid, and the CARES Act. What we can learn from Katrina is that it’s important to do as much within the government as possible, instead of through contractors….

… we are entering a world beset by climate change, which will require a different political order. Last July, I wrote a piece on how we are forgetting the lessons from Covid. We are still highly dependent on China, and the fragility of our supply chains hasn’t improved. And that’s because, while there are some good policymakers in positions of authority like Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra, the bulk of our leadership class is still in thrall to a finance-friendly model of industrial fragility. And this dynamic is as much an ideological problem as anything else….

Who Helps and Who Hinders the Climate Conversation

Chapter 3 of A Climate of Corporate Control: How Corporations Have Influenced the US Dialogue on Climate Science and Policy [Union of Concerned Scientists, 2012), pp. 20–30, via JSTOR Daily 10-06-2024]

Thomas Neuburger, October 09, 2024 [God’s Spies]

Davos Man votes. The rich who run the world, who own all the governments Washington isn’t bombingdroninghating on or disrupting, those people vote. Davos Man, his boards, his bankers, enablers, bought politicians, that’s who reaps the wealth from all those emissions. That’s who decides whether they stop or continue.

Humanity’s just a passenger on this train. If you don’t want what the rich already want, your wishes are dreams. If you depend on the favor of the great, your dreams are empty, entertainments at best.

And so with the climate crisis: To blame “humanity” hides both cause and solution. The rich are running this world into the ground — because they can, because it keeps them in charge, because they want total control more than they want any kind of future for the cattle we call “humanity.”

To the super-rich — and I don’t say it lightly — “humanity,” people, are things, tools to be used. Humanity holds no more value in the eyes of our lords than the people of Gaza hold for Tony Blinken….

 

The Ukrainian Endgame: Winter is coming. Is peace-or-collapse what’s left?

Thomas Neuburger, October 04, 2024 [God’s Spies]

From an excellent Substack site by Nicolo Soldo, impishly named Fisted by Foucault, comes this dispassionate Ukraine War piece called “Towards the Endgame.” Here he’s descriptive only, which is its value.

Poking the Bear
First, the piece confirms what may or may not be the result of Lawrence Wilkerson’s thesis that the U.S. military, through Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, has drawn a line in the sand regarding military support for Ukraine. If Wilkerson isn’t right, it’s as if he were.

Soldo (emphasis mine):

“President Zelensky has just returned from an important trip to the USA, with reports informing us that he has come away empty-handed. An $8 Billion USD cheque was cut to support Ukraine’s continued defense, but that is nowhere near what he requested as part of his so-called “Victory Plan”. The Americans also rejected the other key element of that plan, denying Ukraine the right to use US arms to hit targets deep within Russia.”

Whether this is Biden finding the limit to what he will do for Ukraine, or whether Lloyd Austin said to Biden “This far and no farther,” is immaterial to the result. The U.S., at least this week, won’t poke the bear by attacking (or allowing Ukraine to attack) deep targets in Russia.

Global power shift

Biden’s Intent Is To Sow Chaos – Netanyahoo And Zelensky Are Working For Him

Moon of Alabama [via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2024]

It is in fact the Biden administration which is using the Israeli (and Ukrainian) government to serve its foreign policy purposes. As I remarked:

This has been the general theme of a media campaign for a while. “Natanyahoo is steamrolling Biden and the poor guy can do nothing about it.”I do not buy it. One phone call from the White House to the Pentagon would hold resupply flights from the U.S. to Israel. Without constant supply renewal the Israeli Air Force would have to stop its bombing campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen within days if not within hours.

But instead of calling the Pentagon, the whole Middle East team around Biden, Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk and IDF soldier Amos Hochstein, has been urging Israel to extend its campaign.

They are hoping, like the neoconservatives in 2006 during the Bush administration, for the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, which will forever change the strategic situation on the ground.

The conclusion from this is that Netanyahoo is largely doing exactly what the Biden administration wants him to do.

Gilbert Doctorow, the well known historian and journalist, is of similar opinion:

More on tails wagging dogs and vice versa

Some viewers/readers support my contention that the United States is using Israel as its proxy in the Middle East and is not just enabling but even directing Israel’s rampage in the region to ‘kick ass’ generally and to reinforce American dominance there in line with American global hegemony. Far from being outraged by the Israeli atrocities, the U.S. government is satisfied to see Israel take revenge for the many humiliations that the United States has suffered in the Middle East, most recently in the disorderly and disgraceful pull-out from Afghanistan but going back, say, 40 years to the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran by the new revolutionary Iranian leadership there that overthrew the American backed Shah.

 

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Gaza Doctor Corrects CNN Anchor: ‘This Is Not a Humanitarian Crisis… This Is Genocide’ 

Brett Wilkins, October 11, 2024 [CommonDreams]

 

What did Al Jazeera’s investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza reveal? 

[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 10-07-2024]

 

Historic ICC War Crimes Complaint Names 1,000 Israeli Soldiers 

Brett Wilkins, October 09, 2024 [CommonDreams]

“This complaint is not only the largest ever submitted to the ICC, but it is also a milestone in documenting Israeli war crimes for future generations.”

 

How Netanyahu stole defeat from the jaws of victory 

[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2024]

 

Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel 

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]

[Instagram via X]

Meet Matthew RJ Brodsky, a so-called U.S. foreign policy expert who just publicly called for the carpet bombing and napalming of Irish peacekeepers in South Lebanon. This is a man who’s briefed U.S. officials, advised the White House on the Palestinian-Israeli “peace” process, and helped shape the communications strategy of the Trump administration.

Are these the people we trust with international peace and diplomacy? Calling for war crimes on social media is not only reckless—it’s dangerous.

 

Rashid Khalidi, America’s foremost scholar of Palestine, is retiring: ‘I don’t want to be a cog in the machine any more’​ 

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-10-2024]

As the Columbia University professor steps down, he addresses student protests, links between Ireland and Palestine and how ‘higher education has developed into a hedge fund’

 

UN says no food has entered northern Gaza since start of October, putting 1 million people at risk of starvation 

[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2024]

 

Oligarchy

The Alarming Growth Of Extreme Wealth & The Enabling Political Influence It Affords The Ultra-Rich — Billionaires Should Not Exist

Howie Klein, October 7, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

According to political scientists Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page, the political influence of the 400 richest Americans is 22,000 times that of the average member of the bottom 90%. Needless to say, Timothy Mellon is one billionaire that’s proving Winters and Page right.”

 

Pluto-Populism Comes To America— No Tariffs Charged

Howie Klein, October 9, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

…“Many of us saw, pretty early on,” wrote William Kristol (AKA “Dan Quayle’s brain” when he was the then-Vice President’s chief of staff) on Monday, “the dangers of demagogic populist nativism, bigotry, and grievance-mongering. That’s why we were Never Trump. We had a sense of the damage Trump as president could do. But we also had a sense of the damage Trumpism, unleashed as a movement, could do… [W]e probably underestimated how much damage Trumpism could do to our political system, to our legal order, to our civil society, to our country.”

His essay, though was about something he regrets having missed: “I didn’t see clearly enough that oligarchic arrogance and entitlement would eagerly join forces with populist demagoguery. The photo of Elon Musk leaping on stage to exultantly join Donald Trump Saturday night in Butler, Pennsylvania, captures the phenomenon that I’m describing. It’s not that I had an excessively high opinion of the virtues or judgment of the super-wealthy. But I assumed that, having done well in America over the last few decades, they’d be a ‘conservative’ force in more or less upholding the current political and economic order. I assumed they’d be wary of, even opposed to, someone like Trump, who was unleashing forces that could ultimately turn against them. I assumed they wouldn’t want to put their success at risk… I didn’t expect was the unbridled arrogance and the authoritarian zeal that we’ve seen from the new oligarchs. I should have remembered the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt in his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic convention: ‘It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself.’”

 

It’s Good to Be the King: The ins and outs of how the mega-rich wall themselves off from government’s prying eyes

Helaine Olen, October 3, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism

By Brooke Harrington

Norton

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Riverhead

The greatest observers of how money influences people and corrupts institutions are not, as a general rule, those who possess it. They are instead those who, as F. Scott Fitzgerald recognized a century ago, live and work in close proximity to them. This is the insight that both inspires and informs sociologist Brooke Harrington’s trenchant new book Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism.

…Harrington quickly and unsurprisingly runs into brick walls attempting to learn more about this secretive system of wealth, until she recalls something she first noted about the rich families she encountered as a child: They rarely do anything for themselves. They need help, even with something as mundane as changing a light bulb….

 So Harrington gets credentialed in wealth management, specializing in her target, offshore finance. She’ll study the rich by studying their financial consiglieres and enablers.

As an academic, Harrington is granted no access. As a peer, even though she isn’t working in wealth management and informs everyone she is doing academic fieldwork, she’s viewed as not just an equal, but someone with whom secrets can be shared. In sociological terms, she performs immersive fieldwork, gaining the trust of wealth managers so she can reveal this world to the rest of us.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Have We Finally Turned The Corner On The Neoliberal Consensus?

Project Democracy, October 6, 2024 [via downwithtyranny.com]

A brilliant, progressive, forward thinking first term member of Congress, Rep Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, has proposed new economic legislation that addresses both taxes and wages, to create a more just economy and lift millions of people out of poverty. It’s called the American Stability Act. Its basic features are:

  • Replace the minimum wage with a stability wage, which would assure that everyone who works full time would earn at least a livable wage, according to the annual MIT Study
  • Increase the current personal exemption with the livable wage exemption, so that no person earning less than a livable wage would pay federal income taxes, and we would stop taxing people into poverty (the increased exemption would gradually phase-out for people with higher incomes)
  • Replace the tax revenue that would be lost as a result of the higher personal exemption with surtaxes on very high incomes, 3% on annual incomes over $1 million and an additional 5% on annual incomes over $15 million
  • Index the Stability Wage to inflation or average wage growth, so the stability wage would adjust periodically to reflect actual economic conditions; without congressional intervention

GRAPH — Wealth distribution in the United States

 

After Gorging on Stock Buybacks for Years, Boeing Announces Mass Layoffs

Jake Johnson, October 12, 2024 [CommonDreams]

 

Predatory finance

Monopoly Round-Up: The Fed Took $3k From You and Gave it to Jamie Dimon

Matt Stoller, October 6, 2024 [BIG]

…We’ll start with this story on Fed Chair Jay Powell’s choice to transfer $1.1 trillion to large financial institutions over the past two and a half years when he helped raise interest rates, which is about $3000 from every single American.

How did this transfer happen? “Lenders got higher yields for their deposits at the Fed but kept rates lower for many savers,” wrote the FT, with subsidies higher for big banks than small ones. There’s a lot of discussion in the media about whether rates should go up or down, but for some reason, the trillion dollar transfer doesn’t come up….

Most of our bank regulators operate the way Powell does, harming business by concentrating money in the hands of banks who steward it poorly. It’s not just the Fed, the other main bank regulator, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, is often worse. Earlier this week, for instance, Acting OCC chief Michael Hsu – a Janet Yellen disciple – had his agency file a brief with a court asking a judge to invalidate an Illinois law restricting the right of credit card companies to charge certain fees. “The Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act,” it said, “is an ill-conceived, highly unusual, and largely unworkable state law that threatens to fragment and disrupt this efficient and effective system.”

That is a remarkable legal statement, considering the fact that a few weeks ago, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division sued Visa for monopolization, over high fees, no innovation, and coercive behavior towards business….

 

A Bank Regulator Provides a Frightening Look at the Trading Casino Jamie Dimon Has Built Inside His Federally-Insured Bank

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, October 7, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

On September 24, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities for the second quarter of this year. The OCC is the federal regulator of banks that operate across state lines, which are known as “national banks.”

Restoring balance to the economy

A Means to Live: The past and future of debt resistance

Astra Taylor, September 25, 2024 [The Nation]

The Political Development of American Debt Relief, a fascinating new book by Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, seeks to recover this history. It is not a full account of how we got into the overleveraged bind that now sees Americans carrying a collective $17 trillion in household debt. Nor does it document every movement seeking to give the indebted relief. But it does provide some critical episodes in the story of both. As Zackin and Thurston show, the ongoing battle between the owing and owning classes has deep roots in American history—from Shays’s Rebellion in the 1700s, to Dust Bowl farmers radicalized by predatory mortgages, to the more recent campaigns against student loans, back rent, and carceral fines and fees. Ordinary people have struggled under the burden of personal debt since the founding of the country in 1776, and they have struggled against that burden for just as long….

Consistently attentive to the power struggles that inform public policy, The Political Development of American Debt Relief shows how laws are shaped and reshaped by citizen action—and, just as critically, by its absence. Laws are written, thrown out, reinterpreted, and enforced (or not enforced) depending on how much, or how little, debtors are involved in politics and how much leverage they can muster and wield.

 

The Best Tool to Solve the Housing Crisis

Sam Russek, October 11, 2024 [The New Republic]

To improve conditions and lower prices, tenants should start withholding rent….

This pipeline to lifelong housing insecurity, which exists with varying degrees of barbarity across the country, is often called the “housing crisis.” In this framing, the central problem is merely a shortage of housing, meaning high demand for a limited supply, driving prices up and making affordable units ever more scarce. The proposed solution is more construction, on the theory that more housing (even the luxury condos that typically get built) decreases demand on cheaper units. But as Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis point out in their new book, Abolish Rentthis approach ignores many of the issues tenants face. “Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are.” While there is indeed a shortage of cheap units, the housing system is working exactly as designed: It maximizes the profits of landlords, developers, and real estate speculators at the expense of people who need homes. Current efforts to increase construction “do not produce lower rents, but rather rents that rise less quickly,” effectively kicking the can down the road. The “housing crisis” framing also obfuscates the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, and suggests that to “solve” the crisis, we should focus on building more, rather than on giving tenants a voice in their homes.

 

Disrupting mainstream economics

New CA QSR Min Wage Study. A Victory Lap.

[The Big Picture, October 7, 2024]

If you’re not aware of the brouhaha that was stirred about a year or so ago when CA Gov Gavin Newsom signed into law (taking effect April 1, 2024) a new $20 minimum wage for so-called “limited service” (a/k/a fast food or QSR) restaurant workers, read up herehere, or here.

In a nutshell, the usual suspects’ heads exploded well before the legislation even took effect, claiming it would lead to widespread devastation in the fast food space: job losses, restaurant closures, extreme price hikes, etc. We have seen this happen every time the minimum wage rises—lots of sound and fury that, in the end, signified nothing.

It began with some shoddy reporting at the Wall St. Journal, which seemed to unquestioningly reprint industry press releases… The mistake then spread to the Hoover Institution, then a CA group called CABIA, the NY Post and, of course, Fox News.

We know that numerous academic studies have shown that most dire forecasts that are made about raising the minimum wage do not come to pass. And now comes the first such study about the hike in California. Cut to the chase:

“We find that the sectoral wage standard raised the average pay of non-managerial fast food workers by nearly 18%, a remarkably large increase when compared to previous minimum wage policies. Nonetheless, the policy did not affect employment adversely. It did increase fast food prices, on a one-time basis only, by about 3.7%, or about 15 cents for a $4 item. Consumers, therefore, absorbed about 62% of the cost increases. These effects are benign. However, restaurant profit margins likely fell, and the royalty fees restaurant operators pay to franchisors likely increased.”

 

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

AI Is Threatening the Social Safety Net

Ami Fields-Meyer, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez October 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Across the country, state and local governments have turned to algorithmic tools to automate decisions about who gets critical assistance. In principle, the move makes sense: At their best, these technologies can help long-understaffed and underfunded agencies quickly process huge amounts of data and respond with greater speed to the needs of constituents.

But careless—or intentionally tightfisted and punitive—design and implementation of these new high-tech tools have often prevented benefits from reaching the people they’re intended to help.

In 2016, during an attempt to automate eligibility processes, Indiana denied one million public assistance applications in three years—a 54 percent increase. Those who lost benefits included a six-year-old with cerebral palsy and a woman who missed an appointment with her case worker because she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. That same year, an Arkansas assessment algorithm cut thousands of Medicaid-funded home health care hours from people with disabilities. And in Michigan, a new automated system for detecting fraud in unemployment insurance claims identified fivefold more fraud compared to the older system—causing some 40,000 people to be wrongly accused of unemployment insurance fraud.

 

Smart TVs Are Like ‘a Digital Trojan Horse’ in People’s Homes 

[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2024]

 

Hillary Clinton Declares ‘We Lose Total Control’ If We Don’t ‘Moderate and Monitor’ Social Media Content More 

[Mediaite, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]

 

Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2024]

 

Climate and environmental crises

Percent of global ocean with September sea surface temperatures (SSTs) of at least 30C (86F)

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2024]

Percent of global ocean with September sea surface temperatures (SSTs) of at least 30C (86F). It’s as if something has changed.

GRAPH

 

How satellite data has proven climate change is a climate crisis 

[Space.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]

 

Clean Energy Transition Faces Looming Metal Supply Crunch 

[OilPrice, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2024]

 

Democrats’ political malpractice

I Worked for Democrats for Years. Billionaires Have Unfettered Influence

[Newsweek, via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2024]

Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America

Cory Doctorow, 11 Oct 2024 [Pluralistic]

On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election – that’s true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters.

In part, that’s because US antitrust laws have broad “private rights of action” that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It’s true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free “continuing education” antitrust training to 40% of the Federal judiciary:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down ….

…another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is global. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses….

But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden’s top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get ugly.

A new, excellent long-form Bloomberg article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-09/lina-khan-on-a-second-ftc-term-ai-price-gouging-data-privacy

The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who’ve gone an all-out, public assault on Khan’s leadership – billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency’s principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB’s Barry Diller, who called her a “dope” and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC….

…Khan’s FTC banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year:

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban

Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America’s oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told Bloomberg that she’s a “close student” of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan’s legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America.

Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US – and global – movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC’s noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters – not “the economy” or “the forces of history” – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble….

If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be more nihilism, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP….

 

Harris’s Chance on Trade

Zephyr Teachout, October 13, 2024 [The New York Review]

Kamala Harris has a chance to outflank Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs—and lay out her own vision of fair, green, worker-first global commerce….

..And yet the people I met at county fairs and chicken dinners and parades also cared deeply about trade. If you asked them their top priorities, they wouldn’t say “trade policy,” necessarily. But if you heard them tell a story of their lives, their work, and the towns they lived in, they’d invariably say jobs were being lost to Mexico and China, or mention NAFTA. Our internal polling backed up what I was hearing at the Ellenville Blueberry Festival. Of seven “profile” messages we tested, the strongest was: “[Candidate] believes we need to bring jobs home, make things in America again, and support local farming and manufacturing.” A net 93 percent supported it.

People I met associated Trump with being against NAFTA and trade deals like the then-pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an initiative Obama was selling as a way to remove barriers to export and investment in the Pacific Rim.

 

Kamala Could Still Blow This Whole Thing—There Are No Cheney Democrats & Very Few Cheney Republicans

Howie Klein, October 7, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

On Friday, The Nation published an essay by Dave Zirin, Behind the Harris Campaign’s Quest for the Mythical “Cheney Democrats”.

”The Democratic consultant class— the immortal swamp things of DC— only ever seem to have one idea: pitch your campaign to the political center. In 2024, this means trying to win over what are being called “Cheney Democrats”— whatever the hell that means. This strategy apparently requires ignoring your base on domestic issues and horrifying it on foreign policy by funding Israel’s genocide. In our polarized political moment, this is electoral suicide.

“The Harris-Walz ticket is running a campaign rooted in the fantasy that there is a centrist wing of the GOP appalled by Donald Trump. For this to work, Trump would need to be an outlier, and a significant section of the GOP would need to be looking for an alternative….

“I have no doubt the Harris-Walz team knows that it is repelling many young people and Arab American voters. And we know now that Biden says in private what so many critics have been saying in public: that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing a ceasefire and launching a regional war in part to hand Trump the presidency. And yet, a Democratic administration still arms him. Netanyahu is humiliating Biden for the world to see, and Harris won’t break from Biden’s Israel policy. Facing such an obvious sucker punch, the Harris campaign insists on sticking out its chin.

”This is not incompetence. As Dan Denvir of the podcast The Dig tweeted, “What we’re seeing is not so much Democratic Party elites ignoring the anti-war demands of their constituents so much as a coordinated reaction against the party’s anti-war base. They want to silence and demobilize their base so party elites can pursue endless Israeli war abroad.”

 

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-10-2024]

it was kinda cool those three weeks Kamala campaigned on “Republicans are weird and we’re not going back” before deciding to pivot to “Republicans are my friends and they’re good and we can do Republican policy even better than they can,” the strategy that already lost to Trump

Harris Rails Against Corporate Landlords While Taking Donations From Blackstone Billionaire

[Sludge, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-10-2024]

“In late July, speaking to a crowd of more than 10,000 people at her first campaign rally in Atlanta, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris vowed to go after corporations that buy up homes and jack up rent. ‘We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases,’ Harris said to great applause. The Harris campaign has made taking on corporate landlords a major plank of its plans to help make life more affordable for the middle class, and it has become a common theme at her rallies. In her Aug. 16 plan for an ‘opportunity economy,’ the campaign outlined the steps Harris would take to go after these real estate investors during her first 100 days in office…. While she campaigns on the issue, the Harris campaign is being backed by the president of the largest corporate landlord in the country, a company that her longtime political advisors are currently helping to defeat a California ballot measure that would expand rent control. Jonathan Gray, the billionaire president and chief operating officer of investment firm Blackstone, donated $413,000 to the Harris Action Fund in late July, just after President Biden dropped out of the race. Gray also donated $50,000 to the fund last June, while Biden was the nominee, plus $6,600 to the Biden campaign—funds that are now controlled by the Harris campaign…. Blackstone, a massive alternative investment management company with over $1 trillion in assets under management, is the largest landlord in the country, owning and managing almost 350,000 units of rental housing, according to a report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP).”

Who’s Going To Save Us From An Undead Confederacy Risen From The Grave— In Service To Billionaires?

Howie Klein, October 12, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

Writing for The Atlantic yesterday, Renée DiResta noted that Twitter’s flood of conspiracy theories now define reality for the far right. These crazy, baseless “stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on Twitter carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost— and offers considerable political gain.” ….

“History shows that the weaponization of rumors can lead to devastating consequences— scapegoating individuals, inciting violence, deepening societal divisions, sparking moral panics, and even justifying atrocities. Yet online rumormongering has immense value to right-wing propagandists. In the 2020 election, Trump and his political allies set the narrative frame from the top: Massive fraud was occurring, Trump claimed, and the election would be stolen from him. The supposed proof came later, in the form of countless online rumors. I and other researchers who watched election-related narratives unfold observed the same pattern again and again: Trump’s true believers offered up evidence to support what they’d been told was true. They’d heard that impersonators were using other people’s maiden names to vote. A friend of a friend’s ballot wasn’t read because they’d used a Sharpie marker. These unfounded claims were amplified by influencers and went viral, even as Twitter tried to moderate them— primarily by labeling and sometimes downranking them. None of them turned out to be true. Even so, today, 30 percent of the public and 70 percent of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. This simmering sense of injustice is powerful— it spurred violence on January 6, 2021— and continues to foster unrest….”

”…Conservatives have reframed fact-checking as a censorship technique by “woke” tech companies and biased journalists….”

…So… are young people going to save us from ourselves? Polling from John Della Volpe is optimistic on the question. Dave Weigel interviewed him recently and he said he thinks “that many folks underestimated the degree to which younger people were looking for political leaders they could connect with….

Weigel asked “how does Harris’ position now compare to the Democrats who’ve won and lost? And Della Volpe responded “It best compares to Obama 2012 and Biden 2020. Obama won 66% of the under-30 vote in 2008. He won 60% in 2012, and Biden got 60% in 2020. The feel of this campaign is a mash-up of 2008 and 2018. It’s the hopefulness and the energy of Obama’s first run, and it’s the focus, organization and determination of 2018 when young people got serious. People got organized after Parkland. That’s the year Joe Crowley lost his primary to AOC, for example. One difference is that Trump is doing somewhat better with men than he did four years ago. He’s been introducing himself to a new group of voters for the first time. That is paying off to some degree. Today’s 20 year olds were 11 when he came down the escalator. They were 12 or 13 when he appointed Steve Bannon to the NSC, when he pulled out of the Paris accords, when he tried to end the ACA. These kids didn’t see him as a villain. They saw him as an anti-hero. They saw him standing up to authority. They tell me they thought it was funny. Then they enter high school with COVID. They’re discovering Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and conspiracy theories about the government. The only sport they could watch for an extended period of time was UFC and Dana White. And when Biden becomes president, post-COVID, the cost of living spikes and it’s really expensive to do the simple things young people want to do. Many young people connect the feelings of being five years old during the Great Recession and worried about whether their parents would stay in their house to fear of inflation and potential recession today; that’s where a Trump-curious young voter is coming from.”

Jill Stein: The Grifter Who May Hand Trump the White House Again

Thom Hartmann, October 10, 2024 [The New Republic]

Not only is she helping Trump win—she’s destroying a once-noble party that could be doing good in this country….

In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.

 

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

The Political Violence Spilling Out of Red States

Jon D. Michaels, David Noll October 10, 2024 [The American Prospect]

State-supported vigilantism remained a central feature of American political life throughout the long decades of Jim Crow. Only after the civil rights movement gained momentum did the tide turn. But to the surprise and horror of practically everyone who understood state-supported vigilantism to be gone for good, the ignoble practice is now making a roaring comeback. Equally inspired and chastened by the chaos of January 6, 2021, MAGA strategists recalled that for private violence and intimidation to work well, it would have to be normalized, and even legalized.

To carry out this plan, MAGA lawmakers backed by a loose network of lawyers, dark-money groups, and right-wing advocacy shops like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America have repurposed Jim Crow–era strategies to advance the dual objectives of prosecuting today’s Christian nationalist culture wars and entrenching MAGA political power.

In our forthcoming book Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, we term the first of these strategies dissenter vigilantism. By reconfiguring what used to be a right to opt out, lone dissenters are given the de facto right to impose their policy views on their communities.

The second strategy, courthouse vigilantism, encourages MAGA foot soldiers to surveil members of their communities and bring legal proceedings to punish deviations from MAGA orthodoxy, even if those deviations take place outside their jurisdictions. Pioneered in Texas’s infamous anti-abortion bounty hunter law, it has become a key mechanism for policing the gender of high school athletes and pushing LGBTQ+ families out of public life.

The next strategy, street vigilantism, involves the use of violence and threats of violence to control who exercises rights and how. Through immunities from criminal prosecution, an exorbitant conception of “self-defense” that allows for the use of deadly force when heavily armed vigilantes feel “threatened,” kid-glove exercises of prosecutorial discretion, and Trumpian uses of the pardon power, MAGA politicians telegraph that violence against their political enemies is welcome and will not be punished.

Lastly, electoral vigilantism involves the use of dissenter, courthouse, and street vigilantism to take and hold political power. In locales like Shasta County, California, and Clallam County, Washington, it has propelled right-wing government takeovers, creating a vicious circle in which vigilante-backed officials further empower the foot soldiers who put them in office, all in the hope of creating a Jim Crow–style lock on political power. But this is not preordained; in Shasta County, frustration with the incompetence and maladministration of the militia-backed officials has enabled some of the community’s old-school conservatives to regain their footing. Control of county government is now closely divided between MAGA die-hards and their opponents….

Already, some numbers of Americans are seeking to leave vigilante-enabling jurisdictions, principally to obtain access to medical services. But the same MAGA lawyers and activists who deployed vigilantes to stamp out access to legal abortions in Texas (and surveil high schools to prevent transgender children from competing in women’s sports) are now targeting interstate travel.

Under the guise of regulating “abortion trafficking,” Texas cities have enacted local ordinances that unleash vigilantes against individuals who use public highways to secure out-of-state abortions. Taking a page from Texas, Idaho has endeavored to make it a crime to help a minor cross state lines to seek an abortion or obtain abortion medication.

 

Trump Found Another Way To Turn Americans Against Each Other— Will He Ever Reap The Whirlwind?

Howie Klein, October 11, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

Yesterday, Joe Gould, Connor O’Brien and Paul McLeary reported that Members of Congress from both parties are  vowing to fight back if Señor T wins and tries to make good on his pledge to put the name of failed Confederate general Braxton Bragg back on North Carolina’s Fort Liberty, “undoing the work of a bipartisan congressional renaming commission.”

 

Meteorologists Get Death Threats as Hurricane Milton Conspiracy Theories Thrive 

[Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-10-2024]

As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, meteorologists are staying awake for days at a time trying to get vital, life-saving information out to the folks who will be affected. That’s their job. But this year, several of them tell Rolling Stone, they’re increasingly having to take time out to quell the nonstop flow of misinformation during a particularly traumatic hurricane season. And some of them are doing it while being personally threatened…. ‘It affects our mental health,’ he adds, saying he’s spoken to the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore and other meteorologists about it a lot this week. After [Alabama meteorologist James Spann] posted a FEMA website about rumor control, he got multiple private messages telling him to retire or personally threatening him. ‘You’re working with two to three hours of sleep for multiple weeks under a high stress situation and then you deal with these threats that come in, it’ll beat you down.’”

 

Trump’s Legacy Will Be A GOP Held Hostage by Lies— Deceit Has Become The Party Line

Howie Klein, October 4, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

…a column by Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, What I Didn’t Understand About Political Lying. “For American politicians,” he wrote, “this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful. I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: ‘The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.’) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it.”….

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on authoritarians wrote that Trump backing out of the 60 Minutes interview he had agreed to because he couldn’t get a guarantee he wouldn’t be fact-checked, “reminds us that the ‘strongman’ is nothing without his fortress of lies. Falsehoods about the leader’s competence, power, and efficiency prop up personality cults, and are integral to his identity as the only man who can lead the nation to greatness. In an extreme case, one Big Lie— for example, that you are the winner of a presidential election— may become essential for a leader’s legitimacy. Then that leader might even make recourse to violence to make reality fit his fabrications, as Trump did with the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Who would Trump be if he admitted he lost the 2020 election? By democratic standards, he would be just another president who failed to convince the electorate that he was the best choice given his record. But Trump is an authoritarian: defeat is associated with weakness, and leaves him vulnerable to prosecution.”

 

Trump has long blasted China’s trade practices. His ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles were printed there

Richard Lardner and Dake Kang, October 9, 2024 [Associated Press, via The American Prospect]

Thousands of copies of Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible were printed in a country that the former president has repeatedly accused of stealing American jobs and engaging in unfair trade practices — China.

Global trade records reviewed by The Associated Press show a printing company in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou shipped close to 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States between early February and late March.

The estimated value of the three separate shipments was $342,000, or less than $3 per Bible, according to databases that use customs data to track exports and imports. The minimum price for the Trump-backed Bible is $59.99, putting the potential sales revenue at about $7 million.

 

Breaking the Public Schools

Jennifer C. Berkshire, October 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Red states are enacting universal education vouchers, threatening budget calamity and potentially degrading student achievement…. As one school district leader stated, “It feels like to me that there’s a desire to suffocate traditional public schools to justify their demise.”

 

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Here’s How Loper Bright is Stripping Away Workers’ Rights 

[On Labor, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]

The Supreme Court May Use Dobbs to Take Down Trans Rights—and Beyond

Susan Rinkunas, October 11, 2024 [The New Republic]

The overturning of Roe was always going to affect more than just abortion, and we’re about to find out how bad it can get.

 

Civic republicanism

MASTER PLAN, Ep 9: The Swing Vote That Changed America

[The Lever, October 06, 2024]

Once the master planners’ Federalist Society machine started cranking out conservative lawyers, Republican presidents did their part to get them installed on the U.S. Supreme Court. Ronald Reagan had no problem with one of his Federalist Society-affiliated appointments, Antonin Scalia. But he had more trouble filling the next vacancy when Lewis Powell retired in 1987. After his first candidate Robert Bork got borked, and a second nominee’s chances went up in flames thanks to a pot-smoking past, Reagan finally found a more palatable selection in Anthony Kennedy.

Carefully watching this appointment was an Indiana lawyer who’d made it his life’s mission to outlaw abortion and gut campaign finance laws. James Bopp knew that Kennedy had a moderate reputation after siding with liberal justices on social issues, but his rulings on campaign finance cases began to signal that he could be open to helping the master planners further open the floodgates of dark money.

Bopp got a chance to test his theory when the political advocacy group Citizens United planned to release Hillary: The Movie. Knowing that a film criticizing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would likely violate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law’s restrictions on electioneering, Bopp challenged the constitutionality of the law.

A hidden drama at the Supreme Court began as Chief Justice Roberts proposed a narrow ruling in the Citizens United case, while Justice Kennedy pushed for a far-reaching decision. Behind the scenes, a scathing dissent has since vanished from the record — and the final ruling would live in infamy, reshaping campaign finance law for years to come….

DAVID SIROTA: So Roberts and the other conservatives then compare drafts, and they love Kennedy’s idea so much that Roberts withdraws his more narrow opinion and lets Kennedy write the majority

ULA CULPA: Exactly. And this is where the drama hits after Justice Souter sees what Roberts and Kennedy are planning to do. He gets pissed and writes a dissent, and it has become infamous in legal circles because it was this Full Tilt bridge burning attack on the logic of his fellow justices, which is something that almost never happens, and definitely not like this. Reportedly, Souter berated not only the conclusions that Roberts and Kennedy had come to, but the like intellectual depravity to step outside of and way beyond what this case was asking in the first place.

DAVID SIROTA: Finally, someone was calling bullshit. Okay, so read us some excerpts.

ULA CULPA: Well, I can’t.

DAVID SIROTA: Wait. Why?

ULA CULPA: Because very few people have actually ever seen Souter’s dissent, and that’s because not long after he drafted it, just as David Souter has informed the White House, he will retire at the end of a Supreme Court term in June. God,  it’s exactly like that scene from half baked….

ULA CULPA: Totally and then John Roberts basically makes sure Souter’s dissent never gets published as part of the official record….

…Read Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s paper, which argues that the Supreme Court has overstepped its role by engaging in flawed fact-finding — traditionally a trial court function — resulting in biased, partisan decisions in cases like Citizens United, Shelby County, and Dobbs.

How Justice Souter Almost Left the Supreme Court in a Blaze of Glory

John Hudson, May 14, 2012 [The Atlantic]

Before retiring from the Supreme Court in 2009, liberal Justice David Souter penned a dissent so critical of the court’s conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts went to great lengths to prevent it from being published.

 

The Moment of Truth: The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.

Tom Nichols, October 09, 2024 [The Atlantic]

Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments—his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington’s most important contribution to the nation he liberated.

“He went home,” Kelly said….

Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment….

For decades, I taught Washington’s military campaigns and the lessons of his leadership to military officers when I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. And yet I, too, have always felt a distance from the man himself. In recent months, I revisited his life. I read his letters, consulted his biographers, and walked the halls at Mount Vernon. I found a man with weaknesses and shortcomings, but also a leader who possessed qualities that we once expected—and should again demand—from our presidents, especially as the United States confronts the choice between democracy and demagoguery.

The votes cast in November will be more consequential than those in any other American election in more than a century. As we judge the candidates, we should give thought to Washington’s example, and to three of Washington’s most important qualities and the traditions they represent: his refusal to use great power for his own ends, his extraordinary self-command, and, most of all, his understanding that national leaders in a democracy are only temporary stewards of a cause far greater than themselves….

Most American presidents have had some sort of military experience. A few, like Washington, were genuine war heroes. All of them understood that military obedience to the rule of law and to responsible civilian authority is fundamental to the survival of democracy. Again, all of them but one.

During his term as president, Trump expected the military to be loyal—but only to him. He did not understand (or care) that members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, and that they are servants of the nation, not of one man in one office. Trump viewed the military like a small child surveying a shelf of toy soldiers, referring to “my generals” and ordering up parades for his own enjoyment and to emphasize his personal control.

Trump was more than willing to turn the American military against its own people. In 2020, for instance, he wanted the military to attack protesters near the White House. “Beat the fuck out of them,” the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. “Just shoot them.” Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper (a former military officer himself) talked their boss out of opening fire on American citizens….

In 1783, Washington was camped with most of the Continental Army in Newburgh, New York. Congress, as usual, was behind on its financial obligations to American soldiers, and rumbles were spreading that it was time to take matters into military hands. Some men talked of deserting and leaving the nation defenseless. Others wanted to head to Philadelphia, disband Congress, and install Washington as something like a constitutional monarch.

Washington allowed the soldiers to meet so they could discuss their grievances. Then he unexpectedly showed up at the gathering and unloaded on his men. Calling the meeting itself “subversive of all order and discipline,” he reminded them of the years of loyalty and personal commitment to them. He blasted the dark motives of a letter circulating among the troops, written by an anonymous soldier, that suggested that the army should refuse to disarm if Congress failed to meet their needs. “Can he be,” Washington asked, “a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country?”

Then, in a moment of calculated theater meant to emphasize the toll that eight years of war had taken on him, he reached into his pocket for a pair of eyeglasses, ostensibly to read a communication from a member of Congress. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Some of the men, already chastened by Washington’s reproaches, broke into tears. The Newburgh conspiracy, from that moment, was dead.

The presidential historian Stephen Knott told me that Washington could have walked into that same meeting and, with a nod of his head, gained a throne. “A lesser man might have been tempted to lead the army to Philadelphia and pave the way for despotism,” Knott said. Instead, Washington crushed the idea and shamed the conspirators.

Nine months later, Washington stood in the Maryland statehouse, where Congress was temporarily meeting, and returned control of the army to the elected representatives of the United States of America. He asked to be granted “the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country” and handed over the document containing his military commission. Washington, in the words of the historian Joseph Ellis, had completed “the greatest exit in American history.”

Decades ago, the scholar S. E. Finer asked a question that shadows every civilian government: “Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise.” The answer, at least in the United States, lies in the traditions instituted by Washington. Because of his choices during and after the Revolution, the United States has had the luxury of regarding military interference in its politics as almost unthinkable. If Trump returns to office with even a handful of praetorians around him, Americans may realize only too late what a rare privilege they have enjoyed….

Thomas Neuburger, October 09, 2024 [God’s Spies]

I brought up David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 book Albion’s Seed. The bulleted link is to an excellent article on who and what our main British colonists were: the Puritan Yankees, Virginia farmers and plantationists, Appalachian fighters and herders, Quakers of Pennsylvania. Each added its colors to the American tapestry.

A sample:

“As [author David Hackett] Fischer has pointed out, people everywhere in British America embraced the ideal of liberty (freedom) in one form or another; however, it would be a mistake to think that liberty had the same meaning to New Englanders as it did to Virginians. New Englanders believed in ordered liberty, which meant that liberty belonged not just to an individual but to an entire community. In other words, an individual’s liberties or rights were not absolute but had to be balanced against the public good. […]

“The Virginians, in contrast, embraced a form of liberty that Fischer has described as hegemonic or hierarchical liberty. According to Fischer, freedom for the Virginian was conceived as “the power to rule, and not to be overruled by others. … It never occurred to most Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone.” Moreover, the higher one’s status, the greater one’s liberties. […]”

And:

“The Quaker’s view of liberty was different from that of both the Puritans and the Royalists. While the Puritans embraced ordered or bounded liberty for God’s chosen few, and the Royalists embraced a hierarchical view of liberty for the privileged elite (and who saw no contradiction in the keeping of slaves), the Quakers believed in reciprocal liberty, a liberty that they believed should embrace all of humanity. The Quakers were the most egalitarian of the three colonies discussed so far, and they would be among the most outspoken opponents of slavery.”

 

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 6 2024

by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Kamala Harris’s Wall Street charm offensive begins to pay off

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-04-2024]

“Two finance executives close to Harris said she had reassured them that she could appoint new officials to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission who would take a less aggressive stance than current respective chairs Gary Gensler and Lina Khan.”

 

Rev. William Barber II demands focus on poverty, proposes debate format to ‘put facts out’

James Powel, October 3, 2024 [USA TODAY, via Common Dreams]

As the nation reviewed the vice presidential debate between Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Tuesday night, Rev. William J. Barber II noticed one group of people missing from the conversation: the poor.

The founder of Repairers of the Breach, The Poor People’s Campaign and the Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale told USA TODAY in an interview Wednesday that the presidential race, and by extension the vice presidential debate, was not revealing solutions for the nearly 38 million people living in poverty in the country….

 

Progressives Must Act Now to Shape Kamala Harris’s White House

Jeff Hauser, Kenny Stancil October 2, 2024 [American Prospect]

Now is the time for progressives to weigh in on jobs that don’t require Senate confirmation….

…But beyond independent agencies and the Cabinet, there are many influential White House positions for which Senate confirmation is not required. Harris has no excuse for not taking her best swings here. In the same vein, progressives have no excuse for not advocating for the best possible nominees—and preparing to register disapproval if warranted.

As a general principle, Harris should appoint individuals who have a demonstrated commitment to furthering the public interest, rather than entrenching corporate power or seeking personal advancement. This means appointees’ résumés should reflect careers spent advocating for the common good—including experience in federal, state, or local governments as well as other public-sector or nonprofit work—as opposed to careers spent working on behalf of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other nerve centers of corporate America. Moreover, given the need for an all-of-government approach to solving our myriad and overlapping crises, the people Harris names should also have the ability to creatively leverage available power to drive change.

What follows is a brief overview of key jobs and some lessons on what to look for—and look out for.

 White House chief of staff, deputy chiefs of staff, and special assistants: The chief of staff is a Cabinet-level official who exercises a tremendous amount of influence, as both adviser to the president and manager of the Executive Office of the President. The chief of staff’s duties range from selecting and supervising White House personnel to directing policy development and negotiating legislation with congressional leaders, Cabinet secretaries, and advocacy groups.

The night-and-day difference between Ron Klain and Jeff Zients, Biden’s first and second chiefs of staff, underscores the importance of getting this pick right. For two years, Klain worked constructively with the left wing of the Democratic Party—securing significant investments in clean energy and domestic manufacturing along with provisions to lower prescription drug costs and more resources to ensure the top 1 percent pays the taxes it owes—and he empowered progressive regulators to crack down on corporate wrongdoing. Since February 2023, super-rich former management consultant Zients has overseen a comparatively anemic Biden administration. Although losing the House in the 2022 midterms no doubt made the legislative side of Zients’s job tougher, that’s no excuse for failing to (a) tell a compelling story about Biden’s domestic accomplishments (including those that made Zients’s fellow plutocrats sad), and (b) convince voters that the Democratic Party has concrete plans to improve working people’s lives….

 National Economic Council….

 National Security Council….

 White House Counsel….

 Domestic Policy Council….

 Senior Communications Staff: Biden’s comms team has been dreadful, to put it mildly. Most of the electorate is completely unaware of the steps the Biden administration has taken to push the economy in a greener and more equitable direction. Kate Bedingfield and Ben LaBolt, the former and current White House communications director, respectively, deserve a lot of the blame for the disconnect between Biden’s policies and voters’ perceptions. So does Anita Dunn, former senior adviser to the president for communications. These figures decided that the best thing to do when the Biden administration fights corporate power is to not let people know about it. (Or, if it is discussed, do so in the most abstract way possible designed to reduce the chance of a fight that might, God forbid, draw attention.)

Given the popularity of cracking down on corporate crime, that’s exactly the opposite of what should be done. And Biden’s senior comms staff hasn’t only failed to convey the president’s domestic achievements; they’ve also failed to adequately explain the extent to which profiteering corporations have fueled the cost-of-living crisis, allowing Biden to unfairly take heat for inflation. For example, the Biden White House has yet to publicly condemn Scott Sheffield, the Republican mega-donor who colluded with U.S. drillers and OPEC officials to limit the global supply of oil, which ultimately increased gasoline prices and augmented fossil fuel industry profits at the direct expense of working households. (The FTC cited a second public official for similar behavior this week.) What’s more, the White House has remained silent about Sheffield’s price-fixing conspiracy even as the Trump campaign courts Big Oil donors with pledges to repeal Biden’s climate and environmental policy rulemakings. Harris can and must do better.

If Harris wins, her transition team will be making decisions about these jobs in November. Progressives ought to weigh in now!

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 29 2024

by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America — EXCERPTS

Mehrsa Baradaran (New York, W.W. Norton, 2024)

Introduction

Ideologies that have developed memelike qualities, like race and religion, have been some of the most potent forces shaping human history, especially when they have fused with the law. Racial hierarchy began as ideology to justify plunder and slaughter—those who murdered unjustly, like the Spanish conquistadors or British slave traders, blamed their crimes on their victims’ “inherent” inferiority and a meme was born in the world. Before the wholesale theft of indigenous land, the law justified it. In the early nineteenth century, Chief Justice John Marshall deemed that the indigenous tribes in America could not own or sell their land on account of their inherent “savagery.” The law thereafter demarcated property rights as the exclusive domain of white men, paving the way for manifest destiny, the seizure of 1.5 billion acres of land for private ownership, and the genocide of millions of indigenous people. Marshall built his legal opinion on precedent and theory provided by the British philosopher John Locke, whose theory of property law was popular in Great Britain in the late 1600s at the height of the British slave trade. It was “natural” and just, noted Locke, that “the creator” had endowed only “the industrious and rational” white men with the right to own land and people. It was also expedient. Ideologies persist through replication exactly because they evade detection, and through the process of replication, they evolve. For example, the ideology of patriarchy once reinforced itself through property laws like coverture and primogeniture that prohibited women from owning property. Once an ideology is embedded in legal code, its silent perpetuation is guaranteed.

Patently immoral practices like colonial subjugation, slavery, land theft, Jim Crow, segregation, and forced labor lasted so long that the theories that once justified them—like divine decree—no longer did the job. Instead of addressing the injustices that racist ideologies had created, often, those with the most to lose went looking for new ideologies Ito justify their unfair position at the top: first, Christianity; then Darwinian science; then the pseudo-scientific babble of “human IQ” testing; then, as was the case at the end of the 1960s, economics.

xxx
As John Adams once wrote to Thomas Jefferson (20 June 1815), ‘Power always sincerely, conscientiously… believes itself Right. Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God’s Service, when it is violating all his laws.” 19 Such was the object of the neoliberal revolution in legal theory: to infuse raw power with a soul—and snuff out the discretion that is law’s dynamic living heart.

The law is the most powerful engine through which ideologies can become self-replicating engines. John Locke’s theory of property as the endowed right of white men to use and to produce worked like witchcraft—the natural world, which had sustained societies for thousands of years, could suddenly be taken by force, enclosed, and tilled for the sole profit of one man, with trespassers punished. The conversion of land into one person’s permanent property was not permissible under the indigenous populations who had long occupied it, nor was such a thing permissible anywhere in the world except Europe—and even there, only after the enclosure movements of the 1600s. The brilliant and prolific philosopher Locke happened to be under the patronage of Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the richest men in England (who later became the First Earl of Shaftesbury); he was first hired as Cooper’s personal doctor, but as the earl entered politics to advocate for more property rights, Locke’s star rose alongside his. And property laws were passed in legislatures and handed down over time, carrying memes from men long dead with ideas long denounced.

Law codified land into assets and has been extending the market into new frontiers ever since—from corporate shares and derivatives to NFTs—transforming abstract ideas into tradable assets. A similar alchemy transformed gold into money by smelting an image onto a coin, then transformed gold coins into bank notes emblazoned with the image of a king, queen, or president. Initially, it was gold’s malleability that made it ideal for coinage. But with the rise of empire and Great Britain’s dominance of the global trade in gold, the gold standard became yet another ideology to preserve power. Locke’s theories about gold being the highest source of value on account of its scarcity have been as impossible to dislodge from monetary theories as his ideas about race have been from property laws. But Locke was wrong—gold was not valuable. Then, as now, money’s value derived from the image on the coin. Money is a symbol of people’s trust in the government that issued it. Gold’s scarcity was not the source of its value, but it was one of the causes of hundreds of years of wars in Europe over the scarce metal. While empire based on the gold standard and justified by white supremacy fell to the global horror of World War II, the underlying logic of both lingered. Unaddressed and unexamined, these bad ideas continue to breed distrust in our societies and scarcity in our economies. The greatest villains of our modern times are rarely human beings but the zombie ideas of dead men that continue to shape our societies.

FAR FROM BEING a battle between capitalism and communism, as so many historians have painted the era’s conflict, the global revolutions of the 1960s were the only world wars that involved the entire world. Truly, the world had turned upside down as a globe dominated by a handful of empires became a world with over a hundred independent nations—each demanding equal sovereignty on the world stage. The possibilities were breathtaking and the 1960s saw the first worldwide conversation between and among peoples speaking to one another. Neoliberalism was the successor ideology of empire. Gone were the gunboats, colonial governments, and talk of civilizing savages. Instead, development loans, sovereign debt markets, and transnational corporations became the face of power in the Global South. The guns did not disappear of course, but were traded on global markets from distributors to trade-friendly governments.

After decades of relentless activism by Black Americans across every legal domain, the American South’s chokehold on the law finally broke and the Constitution’s promise of equality was secured for all Americans. The last stages of the civil rights movement forced the quiet oppression of southern law to show its teeth and claws

[TW: I am greatly encouraged that Baradaran identifies John Locke as one of the major causes of bad political economy. As I have noted a number of times, it was Locke’s ideas of private property that made liberalism so insidiously destructive of the founding philosophy of civic republicanism, leading us to our present megacrises.

[Baradaran’s book is an excellent accompaniment to The Lever’s epic and important series on The Master Plan (see below). She discusses some people who The Lever series has not mentioned yet, such as Ayn Rand acolyte and neoliberal enforcer Alan Greenspan, who played a central role in Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, and the development of conservative economics as a cloak for outright racism.]

 

The Secret Plot To Buy American Democracy (podcast)

[The Lever, September 20, 2024]

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground.

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh talks to David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher about their deep-dive investigation into this 50-year plan in the hit new Lever podcast Master Plan. Then, Arjun sits down with journalist David Daley to discuss his latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.

Daley’s book centers on Chief Justice John Roberts, whose ascent to the high court — and the conservative rulings he’s handed down — were the culmination of decades of work that began with Powell and Horowitz’s memos.

 

Master Plan, Ep 5: How Corporations Became People (podcast)

Corporations Are People, My Friend (YouTube video)

[The Lever, September 10, 2024]

In Master Plan’s fifth episode, we explore how an unlikely catalyst — Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination — created an opportunity for his Senate replacement to manufacture the first and perhaps most important blow against America’s new campaign finance laws: Buckley v. Valeo. With a supporting cast including James Buckley, John Bolton, Charles Koch, and Robert Bork, this U.S. Supreme Court case was the first to frame the fight against campaign finance regulations as a crusade for free speech and third-party rights.

MASTER PLAN, Ep 6: The Maverick Vs. The Corruption Machine (podcast)

[The Lever, September 17, 2024]

In the 1980s, the U.S. government was anything but clean. After the landmark Supreme Court cases we told you about in Episode 5 turned money into “speech” in the 1970s, cash began flowing into elections unchecked. Big donors also expected big favors.

It wasn’t such a surprise, then, when five U.S. senators got caught in 1989 for allegedly trying to pressure a federal bank regulator to go easy on savings and loan magnate Charles Keating. But what no one expected was that one of the so-called “Keating Five,” a relative newcomer named John McCain, would do far more than apologize for his mistakes; he’d transform into the staunchest campaign finance reformer since Watergate.

McCain would need his unpredictable “maverick” energy for the fights ahead. Because once he set his sights on wrangling the dark money out of politics, he’d find himself butting heads with two powerful members of his own party — a senator who’d been called the “Darth Vader of campaign finance reform,” and a governor-turned-president backed by big donors.

Jared Kushner declares victory

Sharing Kushner’s tweet in full because it has to be seen in toto to be believed and it’s important to remember he will no doubt once again be the architect of Trump’s ME policy should Trump retake office.

And also because of this observation from Mohammad Alsaafin of AJ+:

It’s darkly funny that every stupid thing Kushner is saying here reflects the actual strategy and position of the Biden administration.

Ok, here’s Kushner’s victory lap:

September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.
I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.
This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.
Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent. President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.”
The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.
Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind.
As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike. Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north.
It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end.
Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong.
There is no going back for Israel.
They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned.
Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated.
Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.
I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives.
But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible.
This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city.
The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together. The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job.
It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight. More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers. And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines.
There’s nothing less reassuring than bipartisan neocon war mongers declaring victory in the immediate aftermath of their latest atrocity.

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 22 2024

by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

What is the deep state? (YouTube video)

(Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, YouTube, via Thomas Neuburger, God’s Spies, 09-20-2024]

This video segment is taken from a symposium at which Sach and Mearsheimer offered their views on U.S. foreign policy. The whole thing is worth a listen, but I’ve cued this to start at the point where the question, “What is the deep state?” is asked and answered.

Note: The answer relates to foreign policy only, not the broader question of “Does the Establishment State try to influence domestic politics?”

“Sachs: My experience … is that there’s a deeply entrained foreign policy. It has been in place in my interpretation for many decades. But arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992. I got to watch some of it early on because I was an adviser to Gorbachev and I was an adviser to Yeltsin, and so I saw early makings of this though I didn’t fully understand it except in retrospect.

“But that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn’t really matter whether it was Bush Senior, whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush Jr., whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump.

“After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, duh, pretty deep state. That was the end of … they told, you know, he [Bolton] explained this is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs, when Trump didn’t agree we figured out ways to trick him basically.”

….

“MEARSHEIMER: When we talk about the ‘Deep State,’ we’re really talking about the Administrative State. It is very important to understand that starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop — and this is true of all Western countries — a very powerful central state that could ‘run the country.’ And over time, that state has grown in power.

“Since World War Two, the United States has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community — you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.

“That particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. That’s why we talk about tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum with regard to the two parties. You could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions….”

[TW: This is an important glimpse into the thinking of USA ruling elites. But just as important as what was said, is what was not said. There was no discussion of cooperation between nations on solving global problems, in line with what I have identified as a core principle of civic republicanism: one major role of government is to encourage people to do good by increasing humanity’s power over nature. There was no mention whatsoever of climate change, which absolutely will require global cooperation, probably on an unprecedented level. How about an international effort to help Mexico build a second Panama Canal? Or a crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, now considered an insurmountable engineering challenge. Wouldn’t it be much better to focus energies and resources on such projects?

[Increasing humanity’s power over nature: that’s what sewer systems and water distribution systems did — projects which are probably the single largest factor in tripling average human life expectancy in the past three centuries. Sewer systems and water distribution systems are primary examples of increasing humanity’s power over nature. Not just power over flows of water, but power over the spread of bacteria and viruses.

[The “realism” discussed by Sachs and Mearsheimer emphasizes competition — just like neoliberal “free market” economics. The real way to avoid nuclear war is to emphasize the cooperation of the human family in solving the problems we call face. The old paradigms of thought must be banished and replaced. For example, the idea that economics is about how “society allocates scarce resources” (taught in all “classical economics” texts and courses in the West), must be replaced by the understanding of civic republican political economy that the foremost economic task of any society is to overcome scarcity and provide abundance by increasing the power of humanity to understand and prudently control natural resources, then to distribute that abundance equitably to all of humanity. One major international cooperative project that cries out for attention and support is to build sewer systems and water distribution systems throughout the entire world, most especially areas in Africa and South American which do not now have them. There should not be any people anywhere on the globe who are forced to spend large parts of their day filling the basic need of securing enough clean water to drink, bathe, and cook.

[Eight years ago, China proposed an international $50 trillion project to build an electric power grid to bring solar and wind generated electricity from the polar and equatorial regions of the world, to the more populated regions that use the electricity. It is a great strategic mistake to ignore such proposals. ]

 

Global power shift

China leads world in 57 of 64 critical technologies; up from 3 just 20 years ago 

[Hacker News, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]

 

ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker 

[ASPI, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax.

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