Category: Uncategorized Page 37 of 103

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World

Paul Krugman [New York Times, via The Big Picture 1-3-2023]

…the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.

When an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.

The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch….

Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology that writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public….

[TW: Montesquieu wrote (see below)]

“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury….” [emphasis by TW]

 

SBF and the Injustice Democrats: How SBF, AIPAC and pro-Trump billionaires coordinated to crush the left 

Max Berger [via Naked Capitalism 1-4-2023]

When I looked into SBF’s political giving to write a follow up to last week’s piece, I thought I knew what I was looking for. It’s a subject I’ve written about before.

But, when I looked at the end-of-cycle FEC data, the results were truly shocking.

I found more evidence SBF was collaborating with AIPAC and Trump supporting billionaires to stop the growth of the squad and the electoral left.

Five billionaire funded PACs were coordinating closely on a strategy to defeat progressive candidates in Democratic primaries — a kind of Injustice Democrats.

Mark Mellman, a long-time operative and AIPAC ally, appears to be at the center of the effort and likely spearheaded the shared campaign. He was hired by four of the five groups this cycle, who collectively paid his firm $476,016.67… According to FEC data, over 75% of the money SBF contributed to Democrats in 2022 went to groups that spent nearly all their money on competitive primaries in the Democratic Party.

SBF personally contributed $29,250,000 to Protect Our Future and DMI PAC (which later contributed the money to Web3 Forward). Both of these groups spent the vast majority of their money on Democratic primaries. They also worked closely with two AIPAC affiliated SuperPACs called the United Democracy Project (UDP) and the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and a group called Mainstream Democrats which aimed to defeat the “far-left.”

Conservative Political Parties Embody The Politics Of Nihilism

Howie Klein [DownWithTyranny 1-6-2023]

Yesterday public intellectual Umair Haque took a stab at explaining why democracy is broken in the U.S. and Britain to the point where both countries appear ungovernable. He began by asking why the Tories and the GOP are so incredibly incompetent that their nations are falling apart. And his answer goes back to the old truism about conservatives not believing in public goods. “If you don’t believe in public goods,” he wrote, “you are basically saying that the there is no job of governance to be done. Because there’s nothing to administer, oversee, nurture, invest in, shepherd, keep ship-shape for the next generation.”

Now the crux of his argument: “Neither the GOP nor the Tories believe in public goods. Not believing in public goods, they can’t do the job of governance. Because of course, to them, the task they’ve set out to accomplish isn’t governance at all. It’s the destruction of public goods. But that’s not governance, especially not in a modern democracy. What is it? Well, it’s a lot of things: ignorance, folly, hate, bigotry, rage, stupidity, and self-destruction, to name just a few… [After being ravaging in two World Wars] Europe’s living standards rose to the highest levels in human history because Europeans enjoyed the greatest public goods in history: from public health, to education, to transport, and so forth. There is absolutely no debate on this score… This is the great lesson of the 20th century, one of the most crucial in history, and now I can restate it in a simpler, more powerful form. We know the key to human prosperity. It’s called investment in public goods. They a) lift living standards while b) keeping societies equal and c) sharing wealth broadly, thus d) creating a relatively stable middle class that e) is the key for democracy to endure… [America and Britain] have been overrun by parties which genuinely don’t believe public goods should exist.”

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

by Tony Wikrent

The dark side

Dress Rehearsal: Trump’s attempt almost two years ago to undermine the 2020 election reads today like a blueprint drawn for a future autocrat.

Fintan O’Toole, January 19, 2023 issue [The New York Review]

To understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to Donald Trump’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented Trump with a detailed plan for the transfer of power to his incoming administration. It was literally trashed. As Christie recalled in his self-pitying memoir, Let Me Finish, “All thirty binders were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.”  Trump didn’t want an orderly transition to his own presidency, let alone to Joe Biden’s. To a raging narcissist a plan is an impertinence, a Lilliputian restraint on the inspired instincts of a giant….

A coup, in this context, does not mean tanks on the streets, helicopter gunships strafing public buildings, thousands of people rounded up by soldiers, and a junta of generals or colonels addressing the nation on TV. On the contrary, the story that needed to be told by the plotters of 2020–2021 was not the overthrow of democracy, but its defense. Trump, as his chief of staff and co-conspirator Mark Meadows put it in his book The Chief’s Chief, was merely seeking “to uphold the democratic process.”….

To understand what Trump could have done instead, it is necessary to revisit a long meeting at the White House on the evening and night of December 18, 2020. This episode is easy to dismiss because it was described by Hutchinson as “unhinged” and because the proposals aired at it were called “nuts” by one of the saner attendees, the former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. These characterizations are accurate. Yet the meeting matters for two reasons. The first is that it immediately preceded Trump’s fateful decision to summon his followers to Washington on January 6. The other is that one of the ideas put forward at this meeting would be of great interest to any future conspirator.

In spite of all of this idiocy, however, Byrne did have one seriously interesting proposal to put to Trump at the meeting. It was that, having seized control of the voting machines through some kind of military task force, there would then be a live TV event in which all of the paper ballots in the six most contested states would be counted in front of the cameras: “If there are not big discrepancies, Trump concedes. But if there are big discrepancies, we would rerun the election in those six counties, or states, using that federal force.” This was actually quite an intelligent idea. By appearing to commit to conceding defeat if no discrepancies were found, Trump could pose, as he had to do if a coup were to succeed, as the defender of American democracy….

Most importantly, there would be a public drama, an elaborate spectacle of “democracy” in action. It is not hard to imagine how Trump’s enablers in the media would sell this show: Why are the Democrats afraid to see what the paper ballots say? The mechanics of this performance remain obscure. How were “discrepancies” to be created? What would the Supreme Court have done? To have a chance of success, the plan would surely have to have been put into effect much earlier—well before the Electoral College met on December 14 to confirm Biden’s victory. Yet Byrne had the germ of the right idea. The best way to steal a presidential election would indeed be through a staged display of democratic process backed by elaborate precooked “evidence” of foreign conspiracy and amplified by Fox News, social media campaigns, and other media. This is the upside-down shape of a successful American coup. Democracy is destroyed by the enactment of its protection.

 

Strategic Political Economy

“The Contest on Corporate Purpose: Why Lynn Stout was Right and Milton Friedman was Wrong

Thomas Clarke [From the journal Accounting, Economics, and Law, via Avedon’s Sideshow 12-15-2022]

It is now 50 years since Milton Friedman set out his doctrine that ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.’ This paper seeks to add fresh and compelling new evidence of why Lynn Stout was correct in her resolute critique of the thesis of shareholder primacy at the heart of the Friedman doctrine, and how this doctrine remains profoundly damaging to the corporations that continue to uphold this belief.”

 

Global power shift

Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union 

[Hudson Institute, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2022]

[TW: As Lambert Strether noted, this is a glimpse at what USA ruling elites really believe. ]

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by Tony Wikrent

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-23-2022]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

We need the return of the state 

[Tax Research UK, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2022]

Neoliberalism is built on lies. For decades the deceit at its core has been ignored because it appeared to deliver prosperity. It does not any more. That is why everything is unravelling.

The biggest lie that neoliberalism promotes is that all value is created by private sector business, which claim is contrasted with a claim that government destroys value. So, apparently, a teacher working for a private school adds value. The same teacher in front of the same children in a state school would, apparently, not do so. The idea is obviously absurd, and yet is key to understanding neoliberal’s approach to public services, which is built on this lie.

This neoliberal lie has corrupted public services. Based on this claim it has come to be believed that there is no answer to any question that the state can supply. Instead, it is the private sector that must provide the solution to problems because that sector supposedly knows best.

 

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl’s incurable cancer 

[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2022]

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year.

T-cells are supposed to be the body’s guardians – seeking out and destroying threats – but for Alyssa they had become the danger and were growing out of control. Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body….

The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago.

Bases are the language of life. The four types of base – adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) – are the building blocks of our genetic code. Just as letters in the alphabet spell out words that carry meaning, the billions of bases in our DNA spell out the instruction manual for our body.

Base editing allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions.

[TW: The development of base editing was funded by a government entity, the US National Institutes of Health, and put into practice by another, Britain’s national health service. It is government that creates economic progress; that’s why We need the return of the state .]

With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough

Daniel Clery, December 14, 2022 [Science]

Despite the fanfare, fusion power stations are still a distant dream. NIF was never designed to produce power commercially. Its primary function is to create miniature thermonuclear explosions and provide data to ensure the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable. Many researchers believe furnacelike tokamaks are a better design for commercial power because they can sustain longer fusion “burns.” In a tokamak, microwaves and particle beams heat the fuel and magnetic fields trap it. “The challenge is to make it robust and simple,” White says….

If the compression of the fuel is symmetrical enough, fusion reactions begin in a central hot spot and propagate smoothly outward, with the heat from fusion sparking more burning. That self-sustaining burn is what defines ignition, and after more than a decade of effort NIF scientists declared they had achieved that milestone after a shot in August 2021 produced 70% of the input laser energy. But NIF’s funder, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, set NIF’s goal as an energy gain greater than one—the threshold it passed last week.

Going that extra mile wasn’t easy. After the August 2021 shot, the NIF team found it couldn’t repeat it. Using a smooth diamond capsule turned out to be key: The one from August 2021 had been the most perfectly smooth and spherical they’d made. “We had to learn how to make the capsules better,” Herrmann says. They also made the capsule slightly thicker, which provided more momentum for the implosion but required a longer, more powerful laser pulse. So they tweaked the laser to squeeze out more juice, upping the energy from 1.9 MJ to 2.05 MJ.

 

Global power shift

The US’ Scorched Earth Policy for Taiwan 

[The Real Politick, via Naked Capitalism 12-16-2022]

A new US Defense Department assessment of China’s military capabilities has Washington scared and panicking and considering a “scorched earth” policy for Taiwan.

The Defense Department’s November 29 report “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” reaches the conclusion that Chinese military strength has reached the point where the US can no longer defeat China in a military struggle for Taiwan off China’s coast.

 

Did Russia and China sign a secret defense pact? 

[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-2022]

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by Tony Wikrent

“The People Cheering For Humanity’s End”

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-8-2022]

“From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways…. The first is Anthropocene anti-humanism, inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment…. Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that anti-humanism decries—scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens.” • I don’t use the phrase “death cult” that often, but perhaps I should start. The exact perspective we should expect from The Atlantic: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” –Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

 

Global power shift

Robbing The Global South, Then Scorning Its Poverty: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 12-7-2022]

China’s Xi on ‘epoch-making’ visit to Saudi as Riyadh chafes at U.S. censure 

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 12-8-2022]

The semiconductor industry and the China challenge 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2022]

“Part 2 at https://asiatimes.com/2022/12/the-chip-industry-and-national-security/”

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