Patrick Lawrence [Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2023]
There is disgust and condemnation now, and they find expression not only on the streets of many cities but also in governing circles. Axios reported Monday that an internal State Department memo, signed by 100 officials at State and its aid agency, USAID, accuses President Biden of lying about Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and of complicity in war crimes. On Tuesday, The New York Times put the signatories of another letter to Biden at 400 representing 40 government departments and agencies, including the National Security Council — this in addition to an open letter to Secretary of State Blinken signed by more than 1,000 Agency for International Development employees. So far as I know, this measure of dissent in policy and governing circles is more or less unprecedented….
The devastation of America’s status in the community of nations—and I do not think we witness anything less—is altogether the consequence of a complacency long evident among America’s policy cliques. As Chas Freeman points out in his exchange with Chris Lydon, Israel is now breaking U.S. laws circumscribing the use of American-made armaments; it is in breach of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. And nobody in the U.S. says anything about it, Freeman says with obvious ire. It is the rest of the world that is beginning to speak up. I put it this way: We watch as the Age of Hegemonic Hypocrisy, as I propose we call it, draws to a close….
…We now have the Chinese preparing, by all appearances, to play a diplomatic role in the search for a settlement. We have Iran and Saudi Arabia summiting to determine a common course of action in response to the Gaza crisis. We have Turkey militantly denouncing Israel and talking to Iran after long, long years of animosity. We have a goodly number of America’s friends pulling the plug on their relations with Tel Aviv.
…There are a lot of possiblities to explain subjectively what CNN and the BBC are doing. Objectively what they are doing is re-establishing their credibility as news as opposed to propaganda providers. And I think this is especially obvious for the BBC. One of their senior journalists who has his own program now calls it “Unspun” and repeats in the trailer-adverts that he is delivering news without spin. Why would he be saying this if it were not obvious that everything the BBC has been saying about Russia for the past 20 months is “spun” and is being rejected by viewers for such tendentiousness.
This is all the more timely for these broadcasters now that the lies they have been disseminating about the Ukraine war are overturned by the latest news from the supreme Ukrainian military commander Zaluzhny in his widely cited interview in The Economist. Now, finally, we read in mainstream that the Ukrainian losses in the war may approach 400,000 dead, not 70,000 as official Kiev claims and that the kill ratio till now may be 10:1 or 12:1 in Russia’s favor….
Both Netanyahu‘s government and Hamas did their part to escalate the conflict: in addition to bombing Gaza, Israel launched a number of attacks against Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and even an “accidental” strike on targets in Egypt. US forces also launched strikes on Syria. For its part, Hamas called for the Muslim world to unite in a holy war against Israel. Recall, Hamas is the creation of Israel and western deep state structures which has been lavishly funded and supported, principally by western-allied Qatar, but also by Israel and western powers.
Five days after they lit the fuse on 7 October, Hamas leader and founder Khaled Mashal published a video message appealing to Muslims worldwide, asking them to carry out Jihad and become martyrs for Al-Aqsa. He urged Muslims to spill their blood for Palestine and even asked religious leaders to issue a fatwa compelling Muslims to take part in the holy war against Israel. Mashal himself wasn’t exactly volunteering: he sent his appeal from Qatar where he is safe from the mayhem he unleashed in Gaza.
Mashal has no links to Gaza since he never actually lived there… In the weeks that followed the war’s outbreak, Muslim world backed away from the impulse to attack Israel, and even Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah declined to open a new front from Lebanon.
In short, they didn’t take the bait. Had muslim countries united to attack Israel, many western nations would have united to defend her, and might even have been able to do so with substantial popular support. Instead, using a variety of paramilitary forces in the region, the Muslim powers began to attack US bases in Syria and Iraq. Instead of ensnaring the Muslim world in a devastating war escalation, the US itself has become ensnared in a trap that could ultimately force it out of the region entirely….
Jessica Wildfire [OK Doomer, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2023]
…We’re surrounded by people we care about who can’t change to save themselves, no matter how bad things get. They can’t bring themselves to do anything different. They can’t operate on a more realistic worldview. They can’t break with their political party. They can’t wear a mask. They can’t demand clean air. They can’t update their vaccines. They can’t call out genocide when they see it.
Why?
Two social psychologists at Yale proposed a theory to explain all of this two decades ago. It’s a theory of theories, a master theory.
It’s called systems justification.
According to John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji, we’re wired to resist change. Members of a group will go out of their way to defend the status quo. They do it to preserve social harmony and to boost their own self-esteem. Since most of us play varying roles in perpetuating the current systems, we all feel somewhat motivated to justify them to each other….
Europe is in significant decline and has been for some time. The standard chart compares European GDP versus American but I won’t use it, because I don’t believe in GDP at this point, the numbers are both manipulated and unrepresentative of actuall national economic ability which matters. That Russia with its tiny GDP was able to massively ramp up weapon production and the US and the EU with much larger GDPs were not is a good example.
But what is clear is that European innovation has fallen far behind, as measured in patents, and that industry is leaving the EU, especially energy intensive industry. China and the US, both, are eating Europe’s lunch, and they are losing export customers, especially in the third world. Europe is not resource rich, they need imports and they aren’t going to be able to afford them. De-industrialization looms, and service industries aren’t going to carry the load, which will leave them with agricultural exports, which will also start declining.
So we’re going to do a thought exercise about what’s required to reverse the decline. As will quickly become evident, it’s theoretically possibly but politically impossible.
Europe needs to do one thing in order to maintain a high standard of living over the medium to long term: it must manufacture enough of what it needs and, more importantly, enough of what others will buy from it, to pay for the imports it needs of what it doesn’t make and raw resources it doesn’t have.
If it continues to de-industrializes it will inevitably slide down the value add chain, and into second, then perhaps even third world status.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want it to continue, and even more of it, please consider donating.)
This means in needs cheap resources, the most important of which is cheap energy for its industries. In the short term, the next twenty years or so, that still means petrochemicals, and there’s only one place the EU can get them from: Russia. The US is willing to sell, oh yes, but at much higher prices. (If Europe was truly going to turbocharge to alternative energy, it’s going to need China, see below.)
Unfortunately, the EU has burnt their bridges and the pipelines have been sabotaged. To get back to Russia being willing to sell at discount prices the EU will have to make its bones: it has to give Russia ironclad security guarantees, and that means leaving NATO and creating its own armed forces. It probably means ditching the incurably anti-Russia eastern block nations like Poland (who are a drain anyway and should never have been let in.)
Forming their own military, with nukes, by the way, is not protection against Russia, it’s protection against the US and its allies.
Now, Russia might cut a deal anyway, without Europe leaving NATO, but the problem is that what Europe needs from China is a cartel deal: it needs China to agree to let it keep some high tech industries. Europe can only keep such industries if it either innovates far faster than China and engages in subsidies to keep prices lower or if China agrees: China is innovating far more quickly than Europe. and it has a lower cost structure. Foolish sanctions have sped up its progress in fields it had previously been willing to leave alone, like the lithography, required for creating chips.
If Europe is a lockstep US ally, China will not be willing to make cartel deals because in that case Europe is an enemy and sanctions can always be used against China in a time of crisis (as opposed to pre-emptively and stupidly) to try and hurt China. But if Europe is neutral or friendly, and a customer, well, smart people to don’t improverish their customers, they let them have some industry.
The last thing is that Europe has to significantly increase its rate of innovation, and the steps involved include bringing a lot more manufacturing back to Europe and some significant changes in law and custom, enough to be an entire other article.
However the point of this exercise is to show why Europe is going to continue its decline. It has a high cost structure and a slow rate of innovation, and it can’t fix either given its politics. (Be clear, innovation is related to the manufacturing floor, it can’t recover if you’re losing that.)
This is similar to climate change, where no major country can fix it, even if it is theoretically possible, because it is politically impossible. A bigger, global problem, but the same dynamic.
Anyway, Europe is in decline and will continue its decline. You can only live on legacy innovation for so long and Europe is running out.
Europe should, above all, avoid war with China at all costs. Germany essentially created the chemical industry in the 19th century. In WWI, when the US entered the war, they broke the German patents, and much of the industry moved to America. After WWI, well, the US didn’t reinstate those patents and the chunk of the industry now in America never moved back.
Do that and Europe might eke out an extra decade or two.
Oh, and now that they are nobodies, with no military and industry that barely matters and which they have sanctioned China on, they should shut their mouths and stop insulting China and interfering. The only major thing they have to offer now is consumers, and that’s going to keep going away.
Essentially, Europe needs to stop thinking they are the Europe that once ruled the world, or even that they are important American satrapies. Both Korea and Japan outproduce them in patents, and it’s not close. They’re just has-beens, and if they want to change that, they need to take radical steps.
I recently listened to a long podcast with Mearsheimer. One of the hosts discusses Putin floating the principles of a possible peace deal.
I don’t see how it can happen. The US and Europe have admitted that they went into the Minsk agreements intending not to keep them, and that is after the US betrayed Russia over Libya, getting their vote based on telling them that it was not intended to be a regime change operation.
Putin is said to have spent a couple days watching the video of Gaddafi being raped with a knife, then killed. Focuses the mind on what happens if you trust the wrong people and what the West wants done to its enemies. (People wonder why Putin hates Hilary, this is why.)
So, there can be no deal, because Russia and Putin don’t believe that the West in general and the US in particular (they have contempt for EU leaders who the know simply follow US orders) can’t be trusted to keep it.
That means there’s really on one way to have a peace deal: hostages.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
It’s an old idea. If there’s no trust, in the old days you had people the other side cared about, usually family members, live with you. Break the deal and they get it in the neck.
So if there’s to be a deal with Ukraine, there have to be hostages, and they have to be given to Russia. Not people, in this age, but something the US cares about. Perhaps the contents of Fort Knox? Perhaps something else? (Suggest possibilities in the comments.)
I personally can’t think of anything that would be enough, so I can’t see a peace deal now.
The deal will happen when it’s a surrender deal. When the Ukrainians firmly admit they are losing and losing badly. And world war I style deal, where the victor sets the terms.
As such, I don’t see Ukraine keeping Odessa, for example. The deal will be ugly.
If you regularly read this blog you learn what you need to know before others do. Let’s run thru just a few, many are common knowledge now, but they weren’t when I wrote them.
That Covid was airborne. Everyone knows it now, but it was disputed by WHO when I asserted it.
That Covid becomes more dangerous each time you get it and that Long Covid is the thing to be scared of.
That schools were a primary vector for infection, long before authorities would admit it (most still don’t.)
That Russia would win the Ukraine war.
That Europe would be badly economically damaged by the Ukraine War and sanctions.
That China would win most from the Ukraine war, and that the US would benefit in some ways.
That most of inflation over the last few years was driven by pure market power jacking up prices.
That an age of war of revolution was soon to be upon us. (It has begun.)
That the IPC reports on climate change were vast understatements. (Said this long ago.)
That the political point of no return on climate change was reached long ago.
That the US would eventually lose dollar privilege due to abusing it. (Wrote the first article about that 20 years ago.)
That China would be the new strongest power (many years ago.)
That we would move to a two polar or multipolar world (everyone knows this now, but I wrote it years ago.)
That China would first take over manufacturing then take over the scientific lead (again, a very old prediction.)
For a couple decades I’ve noted that Israel was looking for a final solution for the Palestinian problem: ethnic cleansing ideally, but genocide was not out of the question.
Again, for a couple decades I’ve noted that the Israeli army was far weaker than it used to be in terms of competence: proven in the last month.
The decline of the UK would be faster and more serious than that of the EU.
And far more.
Of course I’ve gotten some important things wrong, but my hit/miss ratio is good.
A lot of what is written here isn’t predictive. I write about morals and ethics, or how to live the good life, or just lamentations of evil. There are also plenty of explainers of how things work now or have in the past, though I tend to do fewer of those than I once did.
Generally speaking, what you get by reading this site is more correct knowledge of the present and the future than any “reports” or think tanks I know of, and everyone can read for free: no multi-hundred or thousand dollar subscription gate.
That said, my work does need to be paid for because I need to eat and sleep in a warm place, and it’s paid for by people who donate or subscribe. Through their generosity, everyone is able to read. Because I have specific ethical views (rape is bad, Palestinians shouldn’t be treated like animals in a slaughtering pen) last year some saw some large donors depart for places where they could be told that clear evil is sometimes OK.
So, I’m asking my readers who can (if you would go hungry or forego health care or anything important because you give to me, don’t) to donate or subscribe (monthly subscriptions are very helpful but either is great.) You help me and you keep my writing available to everyone and I damn well appreciate it.
This years goal is $12,500. At that level I’ll write an article about the Middle Ages scholastic crisis, where the universities produces way too many people with degrees. This has some relevance to current circumstances and I’ve been eyeing writing it for years without quite committing.
But mostly, again, you are helping me and keeping my writing free and available to everyone.
Thank you, and again, if you are in financial trouble don’t give and I hope your circumstances improve (imagine a hug here. I know what poverty is like.)
(Afterword. If you had a subscription and think it’s still running, please check. When credit cards change, the subscription ends. I always let people know, but email messages don’t always get thru.)
Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett, November 6, 2023 [Washington Post, via downwithtyranny.com]
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymityto describe private conversations.Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family….
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act….
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed….
Historian Heather Cox Richardson tells Salon about her book “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.” The “Letters from an American” writer explains how Republicans from Nixon to Trump have launched an attack on democracy and shares what Americans can do about it. Cox Richardson reflects on why she is still optimistic…
“… the modern day conservative movement — which is not intellectually conservative; it is quite radical and always has been — used language and history to convince Americans to give up on democracy. The Trump years are a bit different; he becomes a strong man quite quickly, and turns that intellectual and rhetorical strategy into a movement….
…People who think Trump happened from nowhere and is the sole cause of our current malaise are completely missing the previous almost 100 years in which there was a concerted movement to overturn the concept that the government should work for ordinary Americans….
[Trump] has become part of their identity, and they cannot be ripped away… Scholars [of authoritarianism] talk about this: once you have started to poison your own soul by buying into somebody who is abusing others, you can’t turn away without admitting you’re the one who is the problem.
Willful ignorance occurs when someone intentionally avoids information about the negative consequences of their actions. A new meta-analysis found that 40% of people will choose to remain ignorant of how their decisions affect others. The evidence suggests that willful ignorance provides people with a built-in excuse to act selfishly.
[TW: and keep in mind that the central idea of economic liberalism — and neoliberalism — is that the “free market” of everyone following their own selfishness will result in the best allocation of society’s resources. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness” — John Kenneth Galbraith. Here’s the full quote:
The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor. The man who has struck it rich in minerals, oil, or other bounties of nature is found explaining the debilitating effect of unearned income from the state. The corporate executive who is a superlative success as an organization man weighs in on the evils of bureaucracy. Federal aid to education is feared by those who live in suburbs that could easily forgo this danger, and by people whose children are in public schools. Socialized medicine is condemned by men emerging from Walter Reed Hospital. Social Security is viewed with alarm by those who have the comfortable cushion of an inherited income.
— “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
[Also note the effects of the institutionalization of selfishness in the links under “Health care crisis” ]
“Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus.Finally, there was only one other family between us and the ticket counter. This family made a big impression on me. There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. The way they were dressed, you could tell they didn’t have a lot of money, but their clothes were neat and clean. The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, animals, and all the acts they would be seeing that night. By their excitement you could sense they had never been to the circus before. It would be a highlight of their lives.
The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband’s hand, looking up at him as if to say, “You’re my knight in shining armour.” He was smiling and enjoying seeing his family happy.
The ticket lady asked the man how many tickets he wanted? He proudly responded, “I’d like to buy eight children’s tickets and two adult tickets, so I can take my family to the circus.” The ticket lady stated the price.
The man’s wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, the man’s lip began to quiver. Then he leaned a little closer and asked, “How much did you say?” The ticket lady again stated the price .The man didn’t have enough money. How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn’t have enough money to take them to the circus?
Seeing what was going on, my dad reached into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill, and then dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father bent down, picked up the $20 bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.”
The man understood what was going on. He wasn’t begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking and embarrassing situation. He looked straight into my dad’s eyes, took my dad’s hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied; “Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.”
My father and I went back to our car and drove home. The $20 that my dad gave away is what we were going to buy our own tickets with. Although we didn’t get to see the circus that night, we both felt a joy inside us that was far greater than seeing the circus could ever provide.
That day I learnt the value to Give. The Giver is bigger than the Receiver. If you want to be large, larger than life, learn to Give. Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get – only with what you are expecting to give – which is everything.The importance of giving, blessing others can never be over emphasized because there’s always joy in giving. Learn to make someone happy by acts of giving.”
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, November 9, 2023 [Wall Street on Parade]
On October 20 we reported that JPMorgan Chase, a serial recidivist when it comes to crime, had paid $1.085 billion in legal expenses in just the last six months. A nice chunk of that money went to the Big Law firm, WilmerHale, which has been representing JPMorgan Chase this year in multiple lawsuits involving the bank’s dark history of financial dealings with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. (See Related Articles at the bottom of this article.)
When the largest bank in the United States pays big bucks to a law firm with a roster of 1,000 attorneys, it doesn’t expect its $290 million class action settlement with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims to blow up in its face just days before the final Fairness Hearing – a legally required court event to determine if the terms of the agreement are “fair, adequate and reasonable.”….
We had anticipated that WilmerHale might file a respectful response to the Attorneys General objections, perhaps agreeing to change the language in the settlement that the Attorneys General found improper. These are, after all, the highest law enforcement offices in 16 states and the District of Columbia.
We could not have been more wrong. The response from WilmerHale effectively blasted the Attorneys General for sticking their nose where it didn’t belong.
What the Attorneys General are challenging boils down to this: Under the federal law known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), Attorneys General have the right to bring claims on behalf of sex trafficked victims. The language in the JPMorgan Chase settlement proposes to extinguish those rights. The State Attorneys General explained it as follows in their filing with the court:
William Mitchell [Modern Monetary Theory, via Mike Norman Economics, November 9, 2023]
On November 6, 2023, the Governor of the Bank of Japan, Ueda Kazuo gave a speech to ‘business leaders’ in Nagoya – Japan’s Economy and Monetary Policy….
The strategy of the Bank of Japan is very different to that of the Western central banks.
The latter have been attempting to scorch the demand-side of their economies with interest rate rises, designed to push up unemployment to reach some ill-defined NAIRU, because they claim that wages growth may break out….
In contradistinction, the Bank of Japan is holding rates around zero and controlling the bond market to keep government bond rates stable across the yield (maturity) curve, exactly because they want to encourage much faster wages growth to underpin a higher stable inflation rate.
In the West, the thought of accelerated wages growth is met with fear and derision from corporate types and government.
Is neoliberalism effectively dead or at least on its way out?
The implications of 40 years of foreign policy have become clear. China is not our friend. Rather than normalizing and entering into the first world order, China’s in many ways become the opposite; more intractable today than it was 40 years ago. There has been a great shift away from China basically providing the U.S. consumer with lots and lots of flat-screen TVs and cheap T-shirts.
We’ve lost our ability to make a lot of critical things, so there’s been a resilience impact as well. It’s kind of insane that we had to go to a T-shirt manufacturer in a panic as the federal government and say, we need you to convert [because] we couldn’t make medical gowns. We couldn’t make medical masks. That has really started to hit policymakers in the face, almost unavoidably so.
The most interesting thing about the Trump-Clinton [2016] election cycle was all of the energy in the electorate was with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both of whom were getting at this deep sense of malaise among working-class Americans and this intuitive understanding that we fucked things up over the last 40 years.
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 11-06-2023]
There is a growing awareness that all nations use industrial policy on an ongoing basis, whether or not they acknowledge it as such. Many conventional policy measures—from public investment allocations and trade measures to environmental regulations and public procurement rules—influence which industries and production methods thrive and decline, which economic (and social) actors win and lose power, who creates value, and who captures it. Therefore, whether or not policymakers frame such policy measures as industrial policy, that is precisely what they are….
Today, the existential threat of climate change and environmental degradation, rooted in a system of production that has been unambiguously diagnosed as terminally self-destructive from a range of scientific perspectives, necessitates a similarly ambitious transformation of the production systems that make up the American economy. The emerging US industrial strategy recognizes climate change as a central problem, but the full scope of existential threats we face (e.g. biodiversity loss, soil depletion, and water pollution) have yet to be integrated as priorities.
…Those strikes weren’t just about better wages and working conditions for auto workers, which are important on their own. What caught my eye is that the labor unions were able to affect corporate decision-making on a more structural level, as I’ll discuss below. Indeed, Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW, is now the single most important business leader in America, a generational figure who is, ironically, like the reverse image of transformational anti-union General Electric icon Jack Welch.
So today’s issue is about the significance of that shift, and how labor unions and antitrust are being used to wrest control over critical corporate investment decisions from financiers, to empower workers, and to teach Americans how to build again….
…If Turkish President Erdogan is sincere about wanting to help, there’s a simple way to do it. Send a squad of military cargo planes with pallets to drop (ie. with parachutes) into Gaza. Tell Israel that if they are shot down, it’s an automatic declaration of war: pass a bill saying that before the planes go.
Meanwhile, the real part of the genocide has begun. It was never about killing them all with explosives, most will die from disease, hunger and lack of water.
[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 11-05-2023]
…eager to complete the ‘pivot to Asia’ initiated in the early 2010s, the US has sought to partially disentangle itself from the region. Its goal is to establish a model that would replace direct intervention with oversight from a distance. To contemplate any real reduction in its presence, though, it first needs a security settlement that would strengthen friendly regimes and constrain the influence of nonconforming ones. The 2020 Abraham Accords advanced this agenda, as Bahrain and the UAE, by agreeing to normalize relations with Israel, joined a wider ‘reactionary axis’ spanning the Saudi Kingdom and Egyptian autocracy. Trump expanded arms sales to these states and cultivated connections between them – military, commercial, diplomatic – with the aim of creating a reliable phalanx of allies who would tilt towards the US in the New Cold War while acting as a bulwark against Iran. Obama’s nuclear deal had failed to stop the Islamic Republic from projecting its influence….
[War on the Rocks, via The Big Picture 11-06-2023]
What Israel missed is the growing democratization of technology, which is rapidly providing new and dangerous capabilities to non-state actors. Stephen Biddle, in his book Nonstate Warfare, argues that this is allowing violent non-state actors to achieve military capabilities that had previously been reserved for states. When carefully integrated into hybrid military-terror campaigns, these can challenge states that insist on maintaining dated misperceptions of their foes. Our research finds non-state actors are increasingly developing special operations capabilities, which are creating strategic and political effects beyond their tactical use.
[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 11-06-2023]
Good overview. On the tunnels:
“A source close to Hamas’s political leadership says the group believes it can defeat Israel but acknowledges the heavy price being paid by those on the ground.”…
While Hamas did not foresee an Israeli response on this scale, it has an extensive network of tunnels, which run for “many hundreds of kilometres”, MEE was told by another source.
The idea that Hamas would cease to operate if it lost Gaza City, which the Israeli forces are trying to encircle, is therefore less likely.
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 11-09-2023]
[Lambert Strether: “IOW, AI cannot function as a business without the theft of intellectual property, on a positively grandiose scale, to create its training sets. That sounds rather like “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” to me.” ]
The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter, via Naked Capitalism 11-10-2023]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-10-2023]
The pandemic school closure debate is now often framed as being solely about the kids. However, it's important to acknowledge that in 2020, the focus was mostly about using the kids as guinea pigs (ie subjecting them to a new virus) to achieve herd immunity + faster reopening.👇🏽 pic.twitter.com/PjwdDSAcHO
Daniel Immerwahr [The New York Review, November 23, 2023 issue]
A recent book contends that the global economy has a new geography of special zones, islands, and enclaves that benefit the world’s wealthiest residents.
If America is to recover any semblance of meaningful democracy in our country, we must cut out the cancer of big money in our political system by overturning Citizens United….
Republicans on the Supreme Court having legalized political bribery (and, thus, functional ownership) of judges and legislators, both federal and state.
In 1976, in response to an appeal by uber-rich New York Republican Senator James Buckley, the Court ruled that wealthy people in politics couldn’t be restrained from using their own money to overwhelm their political opponents. They then went a step farther and struck down other limitations on billionaires using their own money to “independently” promote the campaigns of politicians they like.
In other words, for morbidly rich people to have “free speech,” they must be able to spend as much money on politicking as they want. If you don’t have millions or billions, your free speech is pretty much limited to how loud you can yell: this was a decision almost entirely of, by, and for the morbidly rich.
Two years later, in 1978, four Republicans on the Court went along with a decision written by Republican Lewis Powell himself in declaring that corporations are “persons” entitled to human rights under the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution), including the First Amendment right of free speech.
And free speech, as they’d established two years earlier, meant the ability to shovel money into political campaigns. Effective in April of 1978, elections could go to whoever spent the most money….
Prior to the Court’s Citizens United decision, for example, there was a bipartisan consensus in Congress that climate change was caused by burning fossil fuels and that we should do something about it, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse so eloquently documents….
Clarence Thomas, actively groomed for decades by fossil fuel and other billionaires, became the deciding vote in Citizens United, legalizing not only his own corruption but that of every Republican in Congress.
Once the fossil fuel industry could pour unlimited money into either supporting — or, perhaps more importantly, destroying — the candidacy of any Republican politician, every Republican in the House and Senate began to say, “What climate change?”
As Senator Whitehouse said on the floor of the Senate:
“I believe we lost the ability to address climate change in a bipartisan way because of the evils of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Our present failure to address climate change is a symptom of things gone awry in our democracy due to Citizens United. That decision did not enhance speech in our democracy; it has allowed bullying, wealthy special interests to suppress real debate.”
Meatpackers used to make twice as much, in real terms. Now we make half as much in Storm Lake as someone in Illinois, which we like to scoff at as corrupt. Who owns Iowa? Koch Enterprises and Bayer. How do you fix pollution in the river? You don’t. You tell yourself it is the price of feeding starving children in Gaza with No. 2 yellow corn. Or it is the price of us not being involved in Middle East wars. You put up with the stench near Iowa Falls because Iowa Select is the only game around, so you play that game. We could have open markets but we elect politicians who let them lock up.
You should be damn glad for your $50,000 in median household income. Your kid doesn’t really need to go to college. So few jobs around here call for it. Yeah, we used to make twice as much, relatively speaking, but we sure are glad to be free of the union dues. The best you can hope for is a tax cut, even though you barely make enough to pay tax….
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-10-2023]
“Robert Bigelow, one of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) most prominent donors, said he is switching his support from the Florida governor to Trump. Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites of America and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that DeSantis is ‘not strong enough,’ nor is he the commander in chief the U.S. needs…. Top GOP donor and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus also announced his endorsement of Trump on Thursday, arguing the former president is the ‘simple choice’ in a high-stakes political world…. The support comes on the heels of the third GOP presidential primary debate, which Trump notably did not attend. Despite his absence from the past GOP debates and his ongoing legal battles, the former president continues to hold a strong lead over his rivals.”
The conservative student newspaper cofounded by Peter Thiel in 1987 has been riling up the left-leaning Stanford community for more than three decades. But it’s also quietly become one of the surest paths to an enviable job in Silicon Valley. Here’s a look at the extensive network of tech investors and founders who got their start writing for the Review
Will Bunch [Philadelphia Inquirer, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-06-2023]
“the real high-stakes players — like Jeff Yass from the Philadelphia suburbs, whose bets that started with his college poker game and led to a major investment in TikTok have made him the richest man in the state — know where the real action is: state courts. The power wielded in places like the Pennsylvania Supreme Court — over important things like drawing congressional maps, funding schools, punishing polluters, rewarding tax evasion, or crimping worker power — is enormous. And those justices are elected here, as in other key states…. I doubt that Yass cares much about the issue making the most noise in this election — abortion rights — but I imagine he cares quite a bit about having a court that won’t rule for organized labor or against Big Oil and Gas. ProPublica recently chronicled how Yass aggressively fought to lower his taxes by an estimated $1 billion, even suing the IRS in federal court. If Yass’ tax strategies are ever litigated in Harrisburg, does he really desire judges “who apply the law as written” — or something else?”
[Seeking Rents, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-08-2023]
“A conservative think tank funded by a far-right billionaire wrote a controversial new bill in Florida that would weaken the state’s child-labor laws, according to records obtained by More Perfect Union. The records show that representatives for the Foundation for Government Accountability wrote the original draft of the Florida legislation, which would allow employers in the state to make 16- and 17-year-old teenagers work the same schedules as adults — including overnight shifts on school nights. ‘Attached is draft language on the Youth Worker Freedom issue that Rep. Chaney expressed interest in to FGA,’ a lobbyist for the FGA’s advocacy arm wrote in an Aug. 28 email to an aide to Rep. Linda Chaney, a Republican legislator from St. Pete Beach, which More Perfect Union obtained through a public-records request.’”
“Tuesday’s election results drove home to some Republicans in Congress what they already know and fear— that their party has alienated critical blocs of voters with its policies and message, particularly on abortion. And the results stiffened their resolve to resist such measures, even if it means breaking with the party at a critical time in a high-stakes fight over federal spending… In the House, however, gerrymandering has made most Republican seats so safe that lawmakers routinely cater to the far-right wing of their party, and a slim majority has given hard-right lawmakers outsized influence. The result has been that House Republicans continue to draft legislation that is out of step with a vast majority of voters, including some of their own constituents, on social issues.”
Howie Klein, November 9, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]
“The House Republican leadership had to pull two critical spending bills this week. Neither would’ve become law, yet both illustrated the divides in the House Republican Conference and members’ complete unwillingness to bridge them. Both moderate New York Republicans and hardline conservatives were unmoved by the leadership’s entreaties on the Transportation-HUD spending bill. New York Republicans were peeved that the bill cut too much from Amtrak and public transit, while hardliners thought it didn’t cut enough. On Thursday, the GOP leadership abruptly pulled the Financial Services-General Government spending bill when both conservatives and moderates revolted. Conservatives didn’t like that the legislation failed to explicitly ban funding for a new FBI headquarters. Moderates opposed the repeal of a provision that prohibited D.C. companies from discriminating against employees who get an abortion. Johnson and party leaders lobbied their members for two days to back the FSGG measure, only to come up short. In fact, the leadership was bested by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who whipped conservatives against the FSGG bill. ‘Us pragmatic conservatives— the guys in Biden districts— we felt like we were walked on for nine months,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) noted. He added: ‘What you’re seeing is the pragmatic conservatives, the common sense conservatives, say we’re not going to get run over anymore. It’s probably a bigger challenge for Mike— Speaker Johnson— to overcome. But we’re tired of being treated like second-class citizens.’ This dynamic is about to become much more important. The federal government will shut down in a week and Johnson has yet to unveil how he plans to fund agencies beyond Nov. 17. Other GOP leaders have been kept in the dark. Rank-and-file Republicans have been frustrated with the lack of information.
New York Magazine, via The Big Picture 11-04-2023]
Here are some not very fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency….
1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup.
If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president….
3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade….
6. He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts.
While serving as chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2021, Johnson proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these cuts wouldn’t be necessary if forced birth were the law of the land….
8. He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park….
9. He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana….
Laura Jedeed, November 10, 2023 [Poltico, via downwithtyranny.com]
For the last 10 years, the “Convention of States” movement has sought to remake the Constitution and force a tea party vision of the framers’ intent upon America. This group wants to wholesale rewrite wide swaths of the U.S. Constitution in one fell swoop. In the process, they hope to do away with regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC, virtually eliminate the federal government’s ability to borrow money, and empower state legislatures to override federal law.
As far-fetched as this idea might sound, the movement is gaining traction — and now, it believes, it has a friend in the speaker of the House.
“Speaker Mike Johnson has long been a supporter of Convention of States,” Mark Meckler, co-founder of Convention of States Action (COSA), told me when I asked about Johnson’s ascension. “It shows that the conservative movement in America is united around COS and recognizes the need to rein in an out-of-control federal government which will never restrain itself.”
Howie Klein, November 7, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]
As if their abortion hubris wasn’t bad enough, House Republicans are literally bringing up Social Security and Medicare again. Rather than get behind Democratic proposals to make the rich pay their fair share to keep the programs rolling, the rich— and their pawns in Congress— want to fight the battles they lost for the last 80 years: ending Social Security and Medicare. And MAGA Mike is leading the charge by reviving Paul Ryan’s failed deficit commission. MAGA-Mike’s “fervent support for trillions of dollars in cuts,” reported Nathaniel Weixel, “during his time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) could be a blueprint for GOP budgets if the party wins control of the government… Johnson promised to establish a bipartisan debt commission ‘immediately,’ and indicated at a press conference this past week that he was close to naming members. The idea for a 16-member debt commission that would examine Social Security and Medicare solvency was initially floated by McCarthy as part of debt limit negotiations… Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid currently make up nearly half of the entire federal budget, with a total annual price tag of $2.7 trillion.”
Corporate media seems to lack the vocabulary to accurately describe the modern Republican Party. The latest example, of course, is the election of a new Speaker of the House: Mike Johnson, an insurrectionist anti-gay right-wing extremist Trump proxy. Those words accurately describe the little-known congressman from Louisiana. In fact, they’re quite restrained. It would be even more accurate to call him a bigoted Christofascist member of the Trump cult willing to end democracy as we know it.
[FOX, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-10-2023]
“Another election night in which the Republicans had to put away those champagne bottles they had on ice and keep them for perhaps another day. It wasn’t a disaster for them, but it also wasn’t the results they were expecting to hear from the voters, either. What is the message the voters are sending? A lot has been written about how the abortion issue is backfiring on the Republicans, and it is. But that’s not really the reason they are failing to win over swing voters unhappy with the economy and other issues. What voters are saying is that they want more personal freedom. Abortions over the last several decades have been greatly declining in numbers, down about two-thirds from their peak numbers. People don’t really want more abortions, as today most women have access to and use contraception — but they do want the personal freedom of having the choice of abortion — hence the very name ‘pro-choice.’”
In October 2022, ProPublica broke a story about a little-known company, RealPage, which was artificially increasing rental rates on apartments. Later that month, lawsuits were filed against RealPage alleging price-fixing and market manipulation. In November 2022, the Department Of Justice opened an investigation into them. This is all based on the research of James M. Nelson, ‘The Man Behind the RealPage lawsuit’. But Who is RealPage and why is this connection important for you to understand?
He is the son of the late development tycoon Trammell Crow (1914 – 2009), the creator of the Trammell Crow Company (TCC). Trammell is recognized as the grandfather of the “speculative building” industry, which he began in 1948. Forbes in 1971 and The Wall Street Journal in 1986 called TCC the largest landlord in the US, and by 1993 they had also become the nation’s largest developer.1
Harlan Crow wields his inherited wealth and politics with great power. In 1999 he co-founded the ultra-conservative Club for Growth, that amongst other achievements, claims to be the driving force behind Citizens United, which opened the door for unlimited dark money in politics. They also invested over $20 million with 42 congress members who voted to invalidate the 2020 election.
In the forthcoming book, the New Landlord, we read: In 2005, at the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession and the ensuing chaos, the Crow Empire was at the center of the financial crash. Crow had violated their own strict policy of not investing in speculative residential land. In the blink of an eye, one of the oldest and largest real estate empires, known as the grandaddy of the construction industry, the titan of Wall Street—the Crow Empire, collapsed financially alongside the non-banking giant Lehman Bros. The collapse would send shock waves throughout the industry resulting in the industry spiraling into the financial abyss.…
Harlan Crow’s influence over the rental housing industry is powerful. Greystar CEO Bob Faith detailed that over the decade’s Crow has formed a tight-knit group of managers that now dominate the industry. Just how powerful is that reach? Our concentration study concluded that half of all rental units in the metro Seattle area are priced by a small group of 13 managers who all originated from–the ‘Crow Empire.’
Well, this is what I pointed out would be the problem the minute Israel cut off all water and electricity then went and bombed the power and water infrastructure.
The current disease trends are very concerning. Since mid-October 2023, over 33,551 cases of diarrhea have been reported. Over half of these are among children under age five—a significant increase compared to an average of 2000 cases monthly in children under five throughout 2021 and 2022. 8944 cases of scabies and lice, 1005 cases of chickenpox, 12635 cases of skin rash, and 54,866 cases of upper respiratory infections have also been reported.
It’s just going to get worse, a lot worse:
Lack of fuel has led to the shutting down of desalination plants, significantly increasing the risk of bacterial infections like diarrhea spreading as people consume contaminated water. Lack of fuel has also disrupted all solid waste collection, creating an environment conducive to the rapid and widespread proliferation of insects, rodents that can carry and transmit diseases.
Meanwhile, most people are living on almost no water. They can’t make bread any more, even if they had flour, so there’s very little food. Stories of people not eating so that what little food they have can go to their children are common. Lines for what food there is can take all day, and fights are becoming common.
None of this is unexpected. Netanyahu and Genocide Joe are responsible.
If Turkish President Erdogan is sincere about wanting to help, there’s a simple way to do it. Send a squad of military cargo planes with pallets to drop (ie. with parachutes) into Gaza. Tell Israel that if they are shot down, it’s an automatic declaration of war: pass a bill saying that before the planes go.
Meanwhile, the real part of the genocide has begun. It was never about killing them all with explosives, most will die from disease, hunger and lack of water.
Donors and subscribers make it possible for me to write, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE
