Category: Uncategorized Page 23 of 100

On November 4, 2023

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 29, 2023

On October 29, 2023

Is There a New Left Stirring Within The New Right?

by Tony Wikrent

John Judis [The Liberal Patriot, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-24-2023]

“[T]here is a segment of recent politics that is sometimes identified with the ‘new right’ but in reality offers a much more heterodox—and interesting—approach to politics and policy, one that’s well worth considering by liberals and left-wingers alike. This new tendency can be found in the policy group, American Compass, the online magazine Compact, and the journal American Affairs. Its leading intellectuals are Oren Cass of American Compass, Julius Krein of American Affairs, Sohrab Ahmari of Compact, and author Michael Lind. What distinguishes these thinkers from others is their engagement with what used to be called ‘the labor question’ namely, how America can fulfill its original promise of political and economic equality in a society where the owners and managers of capital have inordinate power over labor and politics. These thinkers consider questions that were once confined to the left: how to revive the American labor movement and now to tame the power of multinational corporations and global banks. They often cite left-wing and liberal writers like John Kenneth Galbraith and Karl Polanyi. The most recent and noteworthy examples are Lind’s Hell to Pay, Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc., and Oren Cass and American Compass’s Rebuilding American Capitalism.”

33 States Sue Meta and Instagram Over Harms to Teen Mental Health

October 24, 2023 [Mother Jones]

On Tuesday, 33 states filed a 233-page complaint against Meta and Instagram. The bipartisan lawsuit, in federal district court in California, alleges that Meta knew more about the mental health impacts of Instagram on teenagers—including addiction—than it had publicly acknowledged.

According to the complaint, Meta—which owns Instagram, Facebook, and now Threads—”created a business model focused on maximizing young users’ time and attention.”

Meta “has ignored the sweeping damage these Platforms have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth,” the complaint reads. “In doing so, Meta engaged in, and continues to engage in, deceptive and unlawful conduct in violation of state and federal law.”

Behind the Curtain: Rattled U.S. government fears wars could spread

[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2023]

“Not one of the crises can be solved and checked off. All five could spiral into something much bigger.” Not a good time for a collapse of executive function in our governing class.

Open Thread

On October 28, 2023

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 22, 2023

On October 22, 2023

Deb Chachra’s ‘How Infrastructure Works’

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2023]

“Infrastructure isn’t merely a way to deliver life’s necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it’s a shared way of delivering those necessities. It’s not just that economies of scale and network effects don’t merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It’s also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project. The dream of declaring independence from society, of going ‘off-grid,’ of rejecting any system of mutual obligation and reliance isn’t merely an infantile fantasy – it also doesn’t scale, which is ironic, given how scale-obsessed its foremost proponents are in their other passions. Replicating sanitation, water, rubbish disposal, etc to create individual systems is wildly inefficient. Creating per-person communications systems makes no sense – by definition, communications involves at least two people. So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It’s a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance. Infrastructure is vital and difficult. Its amortization schedule is so long that in most cases, it won’t pay for itself until long after the politicians who shepherded it into being are out of office (or dead). Its duty cycle is so long that it can be easy to forget it even exists – especially since the only time most of us notice infrastructure is when it stops working.”

In the Nineteenth Century, Scientists Set Out to Solve the “Problem of American Storms”

[Humanities, via The Big Picture 10-21-2023]

[In the 1830s, telegraph] operators had discovered something both interesting and paradoxical, the writer Andrew Blum observes in his book The Weather Machine. The telegraph had collapsed time but, in doing so, it had somehow simultaneously created more of it. Now people could see what the future held before it happened; they could know that a storm was on its way hours before the rain started falling or the clouds appeared in the sky. This new, real-time information also did something else, Blum points out. It allowed weather to be visualized as a system, transforming static, localized pieces of data into one large and ever-shifting whole….

Morse’s invention promised to finally help shed light on what Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the newly founded Smithsonian Institution, called in the 1847 annual report the “problem of American Storms.” Henry was referring to an ongoing scientific spat known as the “storm controversy,” which had been raging in the pages of journals for nearly two decades….

The Smithsonian’s weather “crusade” would become the institution’s first major scientific undertaking, and it consisted of two parts. The first involved recruiting the telegraph companies to provide daily, nationwide weather updates. Starting in 1849, instruments were sent out to several offices around the country with a request that operators pause traffic on the lines in the morning to submit brief descriptions of local conditions. A few years later, Henry installed a map in the lobby of the Smithsonian Castle, where the collected information was displayed using a series of color-coded cards and arrows. Any time after 10:00 a.m., members of the public could stroll in and see for the first time “one view of the meteorological condition of the atmosphere over the whole country.” ….

The Smithsonian’s volunteer weather project would not officially end until 1874, but after the war, Henry continued to face significant funding constraints, as well as larger questions about who should be tracking weather in the United States and how they should be doing it. Science was shifting toward professionalization in the post–Civil War era, and an era of amateur meteorologists—of statesmen tinkering with hygrometers in the fields of their plantations, of businessmen arguing about the atmosphere in scientific journals—was coming to an end.

The country did need weathermen, however. That much was now apparent. And those weathermen had to come from someplace. Congressman Halbert E. Paine, a Republican from Wisconsin’s first district, thought that place should be the War Department. In 1869, he introduced a piece of legislation to that effect. “Military discipline,” he wrote, “would probably help secure the greatest promptness, regularity, and accuracy in the required observations.” ….

As the Signal Corps grew, the focus on tracking storms expanded to incorporate forecasts (which were referred to as “probabilities.”) Daily weather maps and bulletins produced by the Signal Office were displayed in post offices and observer-sergeants submitted their information to local newspapers. The work of the Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce was no longer benefiting just commercial interests—ranchers and sailors and farmers—but the public at large. At least one-third of households in the United States, Myer estimated at one point, were receiving weather information from the Signal Corps in one form or another.

By 1880, the Army’s weather service was “flourishing,” writes Raines. The state of the country’s military communications systems, however, was another story. The man-hours and money being siphoned away from the Army’s signaling work and into its storm intelligence efforts only continued following Myer’s death from nephritis in August of that year. The new chief signal officer, Colonel William B. Hazen, would go on to pour more of his office’s resources into weather-related research, rolling out new scientific projects—the development of a meteorology textbook, “aerial investigations” conducted in hot-air balloons, studies of atmospheric electricity—taking the Signal Corps’s meteorological work to new heights, literally, while the Division of Military Signaling tried and failed to catch up with the technological advances being made by its European counterparts.

In 1887, writes Raines, “the question of the status of the Signal Corps . . . finally came to a head” when Secretary of War William C. Endicott “stated in his annual report that because of its concentration on weather duties the Signal Corps could no longer be relied upon for military signaling.”….

Young Morality and Old Morality

Hamilton Nolan [How Things Work, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2023]

“Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the f*ck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.”

Samuel Huntington’s Great Idea Was Totally Wrong

Jordan Michael Smith, October 19, 2023 [The New Republic]

His “Clash of Civilizations” essay in Foreign Affairs turned 30 this year. It was provocative, influential, manna for the modern right—and completely and utterly not true….

…Huntington’s argument is so antiquated that it has already gone through several afterlives and been resurrected, like a horror movie villain. As the twentieth century ended and liberal capitalist democracy seemed unrivaled, it appeared as though The Clash of Civilizations was unduly pessimistic and perhaps irrelevant to the international arena. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Huntington’s book became a bestseller for a second time, as conservatives across the United States and Europe cited its arguments for why Islam was fundamentally incompatible with Western society. When refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East attempted to find stability in white-majority countries, Huntington’s ideas were invoked as a reason for opposing such ventures. Right-wingers like Steve Bannon have utilized the Clash of Civilizations thesis to reject immigration to the United States. Perhaps most surprisingly, thinkers around Russian leader Vladimir Putin have argued that their country is the leading defender of a Christian civilization that the rest of Europe has largely abandoned, providing yet another lifeline to a 30-year-old essay….

How a Maneuver in Puerto Rico Led to a $29 Billion Tax Bill for Microsoft

[ProPublica, via The Big Picture 10-16-2023]

In the largest audit in U.S. history, the IRS rejected Microsoft’s attempts to channel profits to a small factory in Puerto Rico that burned Windows software onto CDs

Open Thread

On October 19, 2023

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (aka. no Palestine.)

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 15, 2023

On October 15, 2023

US science agencies on track to hit 25-year funding low

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2023]

The Smart Corporate Tax Idea That Might Have Prevented the UAW Strike

Jessica Church, October 9, 2023 [washingtonmonthly]

Targeting out-of-control CEO pay by using the tax code is the right policy for this moment. Here’s how it works….

Indeed, this strike could have been avoided were company profits shared more equitably among workers and management. But despite taxpayer largesse that not only rescued the auto industry during the Great Recession but led it to thrive, that has not been the case. Under the Barack Obama-era bailout, workers and company executives were supposed to make sacrifices. But while unions accepted that two-tier wage system that the UAW is fighting, executive compensation has soared.

A situation where executive compensation shoots up like a missile while workers’ wages flatline was not inevitable. In 2021, Congress debated a measure that might have made the strike unlikely and unnecessary. Both chambers considered versions of the Tax Executive CEO Pay Act, introduced by Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont.

The clever and potentially revolutionary legislation (discussed extensively in Washington Monthly) aimed to rein in excessive executive compensation by levying a tax on companies that pay their CEOs 50 times or more than their median employee earns. The tax came as a surcharge on corporate income tax, meaning that it only applied to profitable companies with federal corporate income tax liability. That surcharge increased as the CEO-to-median worker pay ratio worsened (0.5% for ratios between 50-100:1, 1% for ratios between 100-200:1, 2% for ratios between 200-300:1 and so on, up to 5% for ratios more than 500:1)….

How red-state politics are shaving years off American lives

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 10-09-2023]

Americans are more likely to die before age 65 than residents of similar nations, despite living in a country that spends substantially more per person on health care than its peers. Many of those early deaths can be traced to decisions made years ago by local and state lawmakers over whether to implement cigarette taxes, invest in public health or tighten seat-belt regulations, among other policies, an examination by The Washington Post found. States’ politics — and their resulting policies — are shaving years off American lives.

Africa’s revolt against Net Zero

Thomas Fazi [UnHerd, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2023]

For the past two centuries, human prosperity has correlated with one factor: energy, released through the burning of fossil fuels. This is a self-evident global truth. Europe and North America, the wealthiest regions on the planet, are also those with the highest per capita CO2 emissions (along with the oil-producing Gulf states); Africa, on the other hand, has the world’s lowest levels of per capita energy use — the average African consumes less electricity than a refrigerator and around 600 million people live without access to to electricity. In this sense, it’s the “greenest” continent on the planet. It’s also the poorest, with almost half a billion Africans living in extreme poverty.

More than any other resource, Africa is starved of the energy it needs for economic development. This isn’t for lack of natural endowment. Africa possesses vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. But extracting those resources and using them for domestic development requires money, infrastructure, expertise and institutional capacity — which Africa’s poorest nations, especially in the sub-Sahara, sadly lack. One solution is partnering with foreign energy companies — until recently, mostly European and American firms — but that means that much of the domestically produced gas and oil is then exported rather than used for local development….

Global power shift

You’re not going to like what comes after Pax Americana

Noah Smith [Noahpinion, via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2023]

Open Thread

On October 14, 2023

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (i.e. no Gaza/Israel stuff.)

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 8, 2023

On October 8, 2023