Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (No Mangione/Syria.)
Category: Uncategorized Page 5 of 97
The first is that frozen conflicts are poison. When Russia and Hezbollah and Iran and some Syrian units were winning, rather than make an agreement for a frozen conflict, they should have pushed on. Leaving enemies in the country and the oil fields in US/Kurdish hands was foolish and fatal. Letting enemies flee to Turkey then be sent back was fatal.
The second is that either Russia or Iran should have just stationed some significant ground forces there permanently (Hezbollah is not a full state and doesn’t have the capacity.) Yes, it would be a bleeding ulcer, but the attrition would not be enough to matter. The entire advance could have been stopped by one good, properly equipped Iranian or Russian brigade with air and drone support. The Jihadis didn’t win because they were great fighters, they won because the Syrian army wouldn’t fight.
This assumes that the strategic value of Syria was sufficient: that it was worth the cost.
If Syria’s worth having, then do what it takes. Fighting on and off for thirteen years to then have the regime fall in days is ridiculous.
This argument applies to America in Afghanistan. The difference is that while Russia and Iran have important strategic interests in Syria, or did, the US never had enough in Afghanistan to justify the costs.
Broadly speaking, don’t half-ass. Do it right or don’t do it.
This applies also to Turkey. They should probably cut the bullshit and just occupy the country. Their proxies can’t stand up to Israel and will even have difficulty against the Kurds.
By Tony Wikrent
Tim Harford [via The Big Picture 12-02-2024]
The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage. It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say?
[TW: The ability to speak well in public is a skill that will probably become more and more important as we try to resist the Trump’s regime’s policies and actions. I have often regretted I have not learned public speaking while in high school and college.]
Strategic Political Economy
The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert.
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]
…The structure of the grocery industry has been a matter of national concern since the rise of large retail chains in the early 20th century. The largest was A&P, which, by the 1930s, was rapidly supplanting local grocery stores and edging toward market dominance. Congressional hearings and a federal investigation found that A&P possessed an advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, or other legitimate ways of competing. Instead, A&P used its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over smaller retailers. Fearful of losing their biggest customer, food manufacturers had no choice but to sell to A&P at substantially lower prices than they charged independent grocers—allowing A&P to further entrench its dominance.
Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them….
For the next four decades, Robinson-Patman was a staple of the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement agenda. From 1952 to 1964, for example, the agency issued 81 formal complaints to block grocery suppliers from giving large supermarket chains better prices on milk, oatmeal, pasta, cookies, and other items than they offered to smaller grocers. Most of these complaints were resolved when suppliers agreed to eliminate the price discrimination. Occasionally a case went to court.
During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway….
Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it….
Why did Silicon Valley turn right? The “pounded progressive ally” thesis has limits
Henry Farrell, December 04, 2024 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]
…The shifting relationship between the two involves- as far as I can see – ideas, interests and political coalitions. The best broad framework I know for talking about how these relate to each other is laid out in Mark Blyth’s book, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century.
Mark wants to know how big institutional transformations come about. How, for example, did we move from a world in which markets were fundamentally limited by institutional frameworks created by national governments, to one in which markets dominated and remade those frameworks?….
As Mark puts it in more academic language:
“Economic ideas therefore serve as the basis of political coalitions. They enable agents to overcome free-rider problems by specifying the ends of collective action. In moments of uncertainty and crisis, such coalitions attempt to establish specific configurations of distributionary institutions in a given state, in line with the economic ideas agents use to organize and give meaning to their collective endeavors. If successful, these institutions, once established, maintain and reconstitute the coalition over time by making possible and legitimating those distributive arrangements that enshrine and support its members. Seen in this way, economic ideas enable us to understand both the creation and maintenance of a stable institutionalized political coalition and the institutions that support it.”
Thus, in Mark’s story, economists like Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Art Laffer played a crucial role in the transition from old style liberalism to neoliberalism. At the moment when the old institutional system was in crisis, and no-one knew quite what to do, they provided a diagnosis of what was wrong. Whether that diagnosis was correct in some universal sense is a question for God rather than ordinary mortals. The more immediate question is whether that diagnosis was influential: politically efficacious in justifying alternative policies, breaking up old political coalitions and conjuring new ones into being. As it turned out, it was.
[TW: “The Great Grocery Squeeze” that resulted from Reagan’s decision to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, proves the accuracy of Farrell’s and Blyth’s work. So also Stoller’s discussion of federal judge Carl Nicholsm below. This is all a reflection of civic republicanism being supplanted by liberalism as capitalism developed, allowing “sanctity of private property” to become a more powerful “economic idea” than “promote the General Welfare.”]
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 01, 2024
By Tony Wikrent
Jonathan Larson: A Life of Learning, Service, and Curiosity (July 17, 1949 – November 2024)
It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Jonathan Larson, the founder of the Real Economics blog. Jonathan’s insatiable curiosity, dedication to public service, determination to improve the human condition, and deep intellect left an indelible mark on all who knew him….
He authored Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from an Environmental Blueprint, a book that showcased his commitment to sustainable development and his vision for a greener future. Published in Scandinavia, the book demonstrated his global perspective and ability to inspire change across borders.
He also authored a paper on heterodox economist and scholar Thorstein Veblen, and supported and closely followed the restoration of the Veblen homestead. Jonathan began this blog, Real Economics, to do as Veblen had — challenge and seek to supplant the failing orthodoxy of mainstream neoliberal and conservative economics….
Jonathan’s passing leaves behind a legacy of intellectual brilliance, moral courage, and unyielding dedication to the betterment of society. His life serves as a reminder that curiosity, compassion, and hard work can create a better world. Those who knew him who will forever cherish his memory.
Strategic Political Economy
Trump tariffs a “10 year project” to make China consume more and manufacture less.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]
[TW: The Trump regime’s goal of forcing China to “manufacture less” should be understood in the context of Thorstein Veblen’s explanation of the conflict between business and industry. Business managers and financiers dislike the uncertainty and unpredictability created by technological innovation. Rather than creating wealth through increased and less imperfect production (here, think of the Japanese concept of kaizen), business managers and financiers instead seek to acquire wealth “by a shrewd restriction of output,” causing privation and unemployment. This actually establishes and perpetuates a process of financial sabotage of industry, as Veblen explained in the first chapter of his 1921 book, The Engineers and the Price System.
[By contrast, a foreign policy based on principles of civic republicanism would seek to collaboration and cooperation with other nations to solve the most pressing problems facing humanity, such as transitioning off of fossil fuels, and ensuring universal supplies of clean water, medical care, transportation, and so on.]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-2024]
…Trump is a scab, Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful to unions, unions make the Dems better, workers want unions, the public loves unions, and union membership is falling… it’s the union bosses’ fault.….
Those shitty union bosses? They’re on the way out. In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! Specifically, the UAW organized the brutally exploited Harvard grad students, and the Harvard kids memorized the union by-laws, and every time the corrupt old guard tried to steal the leadership election, one or another of them popped to their feet, reciting chapter-and-verse from the union’s own rules and keeping the vote going:
https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/
Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on all three of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon every union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we’ve got the makings of a general strike.
That means that when the next presidential election rolls around, it’s going to be in the middle of the most militant moment in a century of US labor history. That is an opportunity.
Labor movements fight fascists. They always have. Trump and the GOP are not on the side of workers, notwithstanding all that bullshit about supporting workers by fighting immigration. Sure, when the number of workers goes up, wages can go down – if you’re not in a union. Conservatives have never supported unions. They hate solidarity. Conservatives want workers to believe that they can get paid more if labor is scarcer, and there’s some truth to that, but solidarity endures in good times and bad, and scarcity ends any time bosses figure out how to offshore, outsource, or automate your job. Scarcity is brittle….
Organizing a 2028 general strike under Trump won’t be easy. Workers won’t be able to secure support from the courts or the NLRB, whose brilliant Biden-era leadership team is surely doomed:
But the NLRB only exists today because workers established unions when doing so was radioactively illegal and union organizers were beaten, jailed and murdered with impunity. The tactics those organizers used are not lost to the mists of time – they are a tradition that lives on to this day.
The standard-bearer for this older, militant, community-based union organizing was the great Jane McAlevey (rest in power). McAlevey ran organizing and strike drives as mass-movements; she wouldn’t call for either without being sure of massive majorities, 70%-95%:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/
McAlevey understood union organizing as a source of worker power, but also as a source of community power. When she helped organize the LA #RedForEd Teachers’ strike, the teachers didn’t just demand better working conditions for themselves, but also green space for their students, and protection from ICE raids for their students’ parents. They did this under Trump, and built a turnout organization that flipped key seats and delivered a House majority to the Democrats in 2020.
In her work, McAlevey excoriated the kind of shittyass Dem power-brokers who just lost an election to a convicted felon and rapist, condemning their technocratic conceit that the path to electoral victory was in winning over precisely 50.1% of the vote in each tactically significant precinct. McAlevey said that’s how you get the nightmarish Manchin-Synematic Universe where Dems can’t deliver and workers don’t vote for Dems. To transform America, we need the kinds of majorities that McAlevey and her fellow organizers won in those strike votes – majorities that produced durable, anti-fascist power that turned into electoral victories, too.
The Revenge of the Deplorables?
Les Leopold, November 20, 2024
The working class started abandoning the Democrats long before Trump became a political figure, let alone a candidate. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the working-class vote; In 1996, Clinton 50 percent; In 2012, Obama 40.6 percent; and in 2020, Biden received only 36.2 percent.
This decline has little to do with illiberalism on social issues. Since Carter’s victory, these workers have become more liberal on race, gender, immigration and gay rights, as I detail in Wall Street’s War on Workers.
Furthermore, my research shows that mass layoffs, not illiberalism, best explains the decline of worker support for the Democrats. In the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, as the county mass layoff rate went up the Democratic vote went down. The statistical causation, of course, may be off, but the linkage here between economic dissatisfaction and flight from the Democratic Party is straightforward.
Unions to Democrats: Don’t blame us for Tuesday’s losses
Nick Niedzwiadek, 11/06/2024 [Politico]
Despite persistent fears that labor might break for former President Donald Trump, exit polling showed Vice President Kamala Harris winning voters in union households 55 to 43 percent, roughly on par with President Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. (A separate survey from NBC News had Harris up 10 points among union voters.)
In fact, union voters were one of the few groups that did not appreciably shift toward Trump and Republicans….
Lean Into the Punch: Labor under Trump.
Hamilton Nolan, November 22, 2024 [How Things Work]
…For all of their public talk about how they plan to fight, the instinct of the leadership of most big labor unions in America when faced with a hostile federal government is to do the opposite—to withdraw into their shells like turtles and try to weather the storm, to protect what they already have as best they can until the next election rolls around, when they will pour everything into the campaign of a friendlier candidate, who they presume will reset the playing field to a more welcoming state, which will then allow them to flourish.
This mentality will get us fucking smashed over the next four years….
Many stories have been written about what Project 2025 and another Trump administration will mean for labor policy and the takeaway is “bad things.” The NLRB will be hostile. All prospects for helpful labor legislation will disappear. Related policy action helpful to worker power, like aggressive antitrust enforcement, will cease. Many bad things are coming down the pipeline, but let me touch on three big ones:
- The NLRB….
- Government employees … Trump, with the help of Tweedlee and TweedleDOGE, is going to do everything he can to strip labor protections away from federal workers, purge career employees, install political loyalist hacks in positions that should really have career civil servants, and laugh as federal agencies stop working properly because there are no qualified employees there left to run them….
- The legal assault on the entire structure of America’s labor law regime: Parallel to what the Trump administration will be doing with policy and inside of government agencies, there is already an ongoing attempt by employers to attack the legality of the NLRB and, more broadly, the National Labor Relations Act itself. (More on that here.)….
There are precisely two things to be done, beginning now, and continuing for the next four years. One thing is to organize….
The other thing to do is to strike. More bluntly: to do more legal as well as illegal strikes. (Teachers in Massachusetts are showing us the way right this minute.) The legal regime that corporations are salivating to dismantle is the same one that has, for decades, laid out the ground rules for who and how and where and when strikes could expect to be sanctioned by the law. Take away those rules and the only silver lining for workers is that the shackles are off….
Frontline Democrats Won With Progressive Populist Messages
Luke Goldstein, November 22, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Longtime Democratic moderates who attacked big business and monopolies outpaced Harris in swing districts.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Elephant in the Room–No, the Other Elephant
Charles Hugh Smith [Of Two Minds, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2024]
…The reason why it’s so easy to ignore extreme wealth inequality (EWI) is that we don’t experience EWI as a thing, we experience a decline in our standard of living as wealth is siphoned up into the top 10%….
The RAND study Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 concluded that capital skimmed $50 trillion from labor from 1975 to 2018.
Using data from the Federal Reserve’s FRED database (series A4102E1A156NBEA), correspondent Alain M. calculated the actual sum for the period 1970 to 2022 (2022 being the most recent data available) was a staggering $149 trillion: his spreadsheet is available here as a PDF: Employees Share of Gross Domestic Income 1970-2022.
If wage earners’ share of Gross Domestic Income had remained at 51% instead of declining to 43%, wage earners would have received an additional $149 trillion over those 52 years. That’s roughly $3 trillion a year, which works out to an additional $22,000 annually for America’s 134 million full-time workers or an additional $18,000 annually for the nation’s entire work force (full-time, part-time, self-employed, gig workers) of 163 million….
In my view, there should be zero taxes on all earnings up to the median wage of $60,000 annually–no Social Security taxes, nothing–and progressively steeper taxes on all income / capital gains from capital/finance above some modest amount, say half of the median wage ($30,000 annually), along with a transaction tax for every financial trade submitted, whether it executes or not. Shifting the tax burden from labor to capital/finance would at least start the overdue rebalancing….
Crypto industry accounts for half of corporate donations in 2024 election
GRAPH: Top 10 corporate campaign funders in the 2024 US election
[Public Citizen, via The Big Picture 11-17-2024]
- In 2024, crypto corporations have poured over $119 million directly into influencing federal elections, primarily into a non-partisan super PAC dedicated to electing pro-crypto candidates and defeating crypto skeptics.
- Crypto corporations are by far the dominant corporate political spenders in 2024 as nearly half (44%) of all corporate money contributed during this year’s elections ($274 million so far) came from crypto backers.
- Koch Industries is a distant second place in 2024. The privately held conglomerate owned by Charles and, formerly, the late David Koch, contributed $25 million to its Koch-controlled Americans for Prosperity Action and $3.25 million toward electing Republicans to Congress.
[TW: cryptocurrencies were created and promoted by libertarians in line with their dream of total freedom from government regulation and oversight. In the Federalist Number 10, Madison wrote “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation.” In the Federalist Number 15, Hamilton poses one simple question to test the worth of any national financial scheme: “Is private credit the friend and patron of industry?” Which has contributed more to the advance of the human condition? Libertarianism, or the civic republicanism embodied by Madison and Hamilton? It is exactly because they are unable or unwilling to contemplate such questions that USA and western elites have so little support among their publics. ]
Welcome To The United States of Crypto (podcast)
Jared Jacang Maher, November 15, 2024 [The Lever]
After spending hundreds of millions to influence politicians in both parties, the industry defeated some of its fiercest critics and scored bipartisan support, particularly from President-elect Donald Trump, despite crypto’s potential risks for consumers and the financial system. Today on Lever Time, Lever reporter Freddy Brewster discusses crypto’s emergence as a political power broker and what industry insiders are hoping for in return for their massive donations….
For a transcript of this episode, click here.