Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Utilities As Mutual Companies

By

On July 3, 2023

4 Comments

One of the big constant news stories recently has been about UK water utilities constantly flushing untreated sewage into the rivers and oceans near the UK, while raising prices, paying huge salaries to their executives and massive dividends. One solution is to take them back into public ownership.

But another possibility is to make the mutual companies. I worked for a mutual insurance company for a while, and helped it de-mutualize, at which point its prices went up, employees were treated worse, executives made more money and so on.

In a mutual companies, customers own the company. Dividends are paid to the customers. Prices tend to be lower than in stock companies (there’s plenty of research on this), employees are treated well and executives make less. Since customers own the company, they have a say in what the company does, and since customers of, say, water companies wouldn’t want sewage in the water or forest fires (for electrical companies like California’s PG&E) they might prove better for environmental concerns and also for customer service. Also a lot less likely to get situations where the customers water is full of lead and other pollutants.

There used to be a lot of mutual companies, but most of the de-mutualized because executives wanted to pay themselves more, especially thru stock grants and so on, but if a law was put in place that utilities and other public companies like railways and public transit are either public or mutual and can’t be stock companies, that might cure a lot of problems, especially if the owners(customers) have to approve executive salaries.

Worth a try, at any rate, though I’m aware of the political problems.

This is a donor supported site, so if you value the writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 2, 2023

By

On July 2, 2023

4 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

War

The Darkness Ahead: Where The Ukraine War Is Headed

John Mearsheimer [via Naked Capitalism 7-1-2023]

The real casualties of Russia’s ‘civil war’: the Beltway expert class 

Max Blumenthal [The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-2023]

FSB spooked the CIA on Prigozhin coup 

[Indian Punchline, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-2023]

THIS Is How NATO’s War On Russia Has FAILED w/ Scott Ritter 

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-2023]

[Yves Smith: “Worth the listen even though long. Revealing opening section on Iraq.” Ritter explains, for the first time to my satisfaction, why Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. And why no weapons of mass destruction were found: because the UN inspection teams Ritter had been a member of had found them and forced their destruction before the war. ]

Further thoughts on the lessons of the Prigozhin armed rebellion 

Gilbert Doctorow, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-2023]

All aboard the gravy train: an independent audit of US funding for Ukraine 

[The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 6-28-2023]

The War Between My Two Words 

[Between Two World: The “Art” of an American Surviving in Small Town Russia, via Naked Capitalism 6-28-2023]

The Americans were wrong about Russia militarily and politically. There is no qualified Russian expert among the advisors to President Biden. The sanctions and the war prove that. I know from watching the U.S. news. Their descriptions of the impact the war has had on life in Russia are so far from reality that I really cannot believe these people get paid to fabricate such news.

My fear, as I have expressed in many contexts, is that the powers-that-be in the U.S. will not have the moral courage to admit they were wrong and they were lying. These are not people of strong convictions and integrity at the helm in America. I had two friends who posted two videos on my Facebook “wall” yesterday. One was the testimony of an FBI official, whose name I did not get, in a congressional hearing. The two representatives questioning him under oath caught him lying and evading their questions time after time. He just could not muster the courage to admit they had lied in reports which had been filed and then concealed those non-classified documents from Congress and the American public.

Read More

Open Thread

By

On July 1, 2023

16 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Quick Takes 4: Covid Mental Illness, IMF Admits Greed Sometimes Bad, & More

By

On June 29, 2023

20 Comments

The sheer desperation of the US to halt China’s rise is on display with the news that America blacklisted fourty-four flight schools for teaching Chinese pilots.

Ain’t gonna work, sunshine, and it makes you look like petty fools. Also this whole extraterritorial law thing is now beyond tiresome and pissing everyone off. Ain’t anyone but your lackeys who doesn’t want this to end and to see America in the graveyard of empires.

***

In the sort of lovely Covid news we’ve become used to, it seems that about one-third of everyone who gets Covid gets short or long term mental issues:

delirium, agitation, altered consciousness, hypoxic encephalopathy encephalitis, dysexecutive syndrome, cerebrovascular complications (e.g., stroke), hypoxic encephalopathy, convulsions, neuromuscular dysfunction, demyelinating processes, or parkinsonism through several pathophysiological mechanisms.

Meanwhile, it seems Japan may have entered its’ ninth Covid wave. But remember, children, the WHO told us the emergency is over. Which is, I suppose, true. “The world burning down is now normal and not an emergency. Continue about your business, citizens.”

***

As long as we’re talking about the world burning down, it seems that tropical forests shrunk by 10% in 2022 – not just the Amazon, but Congo and so on. Chow down on those burgers, you might as well benefit from destroying the world!

And remember all that news you’ve been reading about how renewables are taking over the world! Well it seems that coal use is the highest its been since 2014 and fossil fuels still provide 84% of the world’s energy, because we keep increasing how much energy we use faster than expanded renewables can keep up.

It makes me so happy to see how seriously we’re taking climate change.

***

Everyone favorite foreign policy realist, Mearsheimer, now has a substack. His first piece is on how the Ukraine war will end (or, sort of, not) and who will win. I find myself in agreement with almost all of it, though this doesn’t mean I agree with Mearsheimer on everything else.

Measheimer notes, as I have, that everyone in the war considers this existential or nearly, and thus no one is willing to go to peace. End of the day, though, it’s an attrition war and Russia is winning it.

***

The IMF, rather amazingly, has published figures showing what everyone with half a brain and and an ounce of honesty was reporting two years ago, at least, that the largest contributor to inflation is companies taking huge profits. This is important because it indicates even part of the elite has decided that it’s too much: it matters that the IMF is saying it, but the actual content is a yawner.

On the other hand, they did make a pretty chart, so here it is.

***

Meanwhile, Delaware continues to lead in the important civil rights area of corporate personhood. All people should, after all, have the vote, and it’s simply unfair when they don’t, so Delaware has a bill to let LLCs vote in a municipal election pending. All right minding liberty lovers will no doubt support this extension of rights to society’s most discriminated-against people.

***

And that, dear readers, is the end of today’s Quick Takes. Remember that this blog is powered by me and I am powered by your donations and subscriptions, which I exchange for kibble, a roof over my head, a computer and some internet stuff which allows me to write. So if you want to give, that would be, well, nice, especially since some large donors decided that my writing that rape is always bad, mmmkay and that Israel is a shitty apartheid state and that supporting an apartheid state makes you bad, was a good reason to stop giving.

(Which is understandable and I don’t blame them, people who support rape and ethnic cleansing obviously don’t like being told these things are, y’know, evil. Though I’ll say that I didn’t expect the whole “how dare you say rape is always bad” freakout. Seemed pretty “mom and apple pie are good” when I was writing it, though I do applaud the level of self-acceptance required to admit you’re sometimes OK with rape.)

Oh, like everyone asking for your cash, subscriptions are great (though I almost never subscribe to anything, so I get it if you’d rather one-time it.) Also, if you’re skint, don’t give. I don’t want money from people who are having trouble paying the rent, affording food or buying medicine.

If you’re a billionaire, or even a deci-millionaire, feel free to give till it still doesn’t hurt. I promise I’ll use at least some of your money to help overthrow your class!

How Over Is Covid?

By

On June 27, 2023

17 Comments

The official Covid mortality numbers are down, and pretty significantly, in most countries. But we also aren’t testing as much and  most countries aren’t collating and releasing figures as much either.

For now, however, we have excess mortality numbers.  So, a guy named Diego Bassani produced these two excess mortality charts for Canada.

First, age 15-64.

 

Second, 0-14.

Compare the 2020 line for adults and children, then the 2021. In 2020 we protected kids, in 2021 we gave up and threw them to the wolves. I said at the time that the idea that kids were going to be just fine if we sent them back to school wholesale without ventilating and filtering schools was nonsense, and it was.

Anyway, it sure doesn’t look like Covid is over, does it?

And really, why would we think it would be over since we didn’t do anything to end it except say it was over and stop most of what was done to slow it down, from masking and isolation to widespread vaccination?

I rather suspect most governments are gaslighting their populations. Lying. And step by step they will lie more by changing the excess death baseline (the UK is already on this) and so on.

“No, this is how it’s always been.”

Of course, not all deaths are directly Covid, but the excess are mostly because of Covid. If you get cancer and the hospitals are slammed and you don’t get care for months then die, it won’t show as “Covid”, but it’s because of Covid, or rather our response. In Canada I keep seeing stories about overworked hospitals and how emergency departments are having to shut down for the weekend or whatever. That basically never happened pre-Covid.

Covid’s here. It’s still killing and Long Covid is still stalking the land. And we’re just pretending, like some “New Emperor’s Clothes” that it isn’t

I don’t see how adding a semi-permanent pandemic and mass disabling to climate change and environmental collapse is anything but bad and complete malpractice by our ruling class, even given that they are the enemies of all humanity except themselves, since it’s going to hit them too.

This is a donor supported site, so if you value the writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE

What’s The Good Future Look Like In Environmental Collapse?

By

On June 26, 2023

20 Comments

There are a few possible answers to this question, but one comes out of a conversation I just had with a friend. He observed that replies suggest westerners don’t like the idea of arcologies:

My answer? “No. Well, it doesn’t really matter. Soon enough it will be “Arcologies, bitches, or you all die.”

A bit of exaggeration for effect, but what people don’t get about climate change is that the real problem isn’t “it’s getting hotter” but ecological collapse and that these numbers are looking closer and closer than the standard models suggested. (Which regular readers will know is what I’ve said for years.)

https://twitter.com/janevandis/status/1672934147298394113

It’s all about tipping points and self-reinforcing “doom-loops”.

So, there will be war, revolution, lots of violence, massive famines, huge refugee crises and so on. This will all happen sooner than people really expect.

Any solution set is going to require a lot of re-wilding. And that means, at the least, the end of suburbs and exurbs and probably the end of most farms as we know them. We are going to have to figure out how to make very high density farming work, whether that’s highly curated food forests and regenerative agriculture, or its vertical farms and massive vertical greenhouses, or it’s underwater farms (high pressure atmospheres leads to extremely fast growth). Or, more realistically all of these and more.

As for humans, a lucky few, maybe one or two percent will get to live in the new wilderness in exchange for taking care of it and everyone else is going to get crammed into high density. Well, that or we reduce the population to about a billion people, a process which will involve a lot of blood.

If people want out of the high density, they will simply have to prove that they increase biodiversity. If they make there be more animals and plants and bugs and microbes and so on with their presence, they can be wherever that is true. If not, arcologies or very high density urban.

There’s a bunch of other stuff, like the end to planned obsolesence. Creating something that is meant to break and isn’t biodegradable and made from actual renewable resources will have to be treated like we do serial killers today, minus the romanticization.

But basically, you can’t live with nature if you don’t strengthen the ecology. Otherwise, into the arcology.

This is a donor supported site, so if you value the writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 25, 2023

By

On June 25, 2023

5 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In Delaware, Corporations Are Dangerously Close to Acquiring the Right to Vote 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 6-22-2023]

As GOP states across the country aim to limit voter participation, Delaware’s Democratic-controlled legislature has been considering a bill to allow the expansion of the franchise to businesses. The Republican legislation would explicitly permit the city of Seaford, Delaware, “to authorize artificial entities, limited liability corporations’ partnerships and trusts to vote in municipal elections.”

The legislature has until June 30, when the legislative session ends, to vote on the bill.

With hundreds of thousands of corporations officially headquartered in a small Wilmington warehouse, Delaware has long been known for its business fealty. The state’s new legislation would allow corporations to upend the balance of power in Seaford, a small eight thousand–person city twenty miles north of Salisbury, Maryland. Just 340 people voted in the most recent election on April 15 — and the bill would potentially provide as many as 234 votes to businesses in the community.

The State That May Let Corporations Vote In Elections

Matthew Cunningham-Cook, June 20, 2023 [The Lever]

No, We Haven’t Lived with Diseases for Millions of Years. 

Jessica Wildfire [via Naked Capitalism 6-21-2023]

You hear this a lot: Apparently humans have lived with germs and diseases for millions of years. There’s no need for masks or vaccines. Nobody needs clean air. Natural immunity works just fine.

It’s wrong.

It couldn’t be more wrong.

We’ve never been able to live with diseases, not like we do now. Most westerners have no idea. Before medicine, life looked different.

You couldn’t even drink the water.

As an article in Scientific American points out, “water was unsafe to drink for most of human history.” According to Paul Lukacs, humans had to drink wine. It wasn’t fun, either. Ancient texts describe wine as “wretched, horrible, vinegary, foul.” The only thing worse was plain water. You often had no idea if it was safe to drink. For thousands of years, humans opted for beer and wine instead. There was just enough alcohol to kill germs….

Scientists and historians from all disciplines agree on this point: For most of our history, our lives were short. Average life expectancy remained well below 50 for millennia. We didn’t get eaten by tigers.

We got eaten by plagues.

When you look at the last 2,000 years across the world, you see the same thing. About half of all children died before reaching adulthood. Scientists confirm this trend all the way back to the stone age. As Oxford scholar Max Roser says, “Whether in Ancient Rome, in hunter-gatherer societies, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in Medieval Japan or Medieval England, in the European Renaissance, or in Imperial China, every second child died.”

Epidemics have upended countless civilizations, from Rome to the Akkadian Empire. These societies didn’t just live with it. Death and grief played a central role in their cultures, because it happened all the time. It was a different world that most people today can’t wrap their heads around.

They didn’t shrug it off.

They chased answers.

History is full of doctors and scientists who devoted their entire lives trying to treat and cure diseases that plagued us. It’s also full of quacks and charlatans who made fortunes by selling fake miracle cures. There’s a reason why historical novels and movies feature apothecaries and snake oil salesmen. Almost everyone was sick or scared of getting sick and dying….

Diseases have always hit the poor worse than everyone else. Throughout history, the rich have invested in sanitation for themselves first while leaving everyone else behind and blaming them for their own deaths….

[TW: The role of government in fighting disease is central, One indication is to scan the list of Nobel Laureates affiliated with or funded by the USA National Institutes of Health.

“To date, 169 scientists either at NIH or whose research is supported by NIH funds have been the sole or shared recipients of 101 Nobel Prizes.”

And, then there is the fight for clean water supplies.
Chronology of American Waterworks from 1649 to 1865
Chronology of American Waterworks from 1866 to 1880 ]

Read More

Prigozhin Launches A Coup Effort (And It’s Over)

By

On June 24, 2023

36 Comments

Update 3: It’s over. Prigozhin has turned around. He only had one slim chance once he didn’t get defections from them military.

Putin, if he has any sense, needs to get this clown back into prison and disband Wagner or at the very least stop the convincts to mercs pipeline. However it looks like the deal may be that Shoigu gets canned and Prigozhin doesn’t go to prison, in which case Putin has made a significant mistake. (At least if he keeps the deal.)

****

Well, it’s on. This is why you don’t use mercenaries, let alone mercenaries who are convicts, or trust scum like Prigozhin.

Remember that Prigozhin is to the right of Putin, which is where the threat was always going to come from.

The issue here is just how much of the Russian army will side with Putin. If it’s anything substantial, he wins. If not,  he’s done unless he can occupy the Kremlin. This is why Prigozhin emphasized not enough weapons, etc… it was a stab in the back narrative: “Putin won’t let us win the war.”

Putin played around with the war, unwilling to go all in and used Wagner as a prison to frontlines pipeline. That was a mistake.

We’ll see if it’s a fatal one. This is entirely a matter of morale—what the military will do.

If Putin wins, he will be stronger than before the coup, just as Erdogan was, because he will be able to use it to purge opponents.

Update: I’m not seeing reports of mass desertions to Prigozhin. If’ that’s the case, his odds are slim.

Prigozhin is rushing for Moscow. He needs to occupy the Kremlin and declare victory. If he doesn’t, he’s probably finished in a day or two.

My money is on Putin.

Update 2: Still not seeing any signs of significant defections from the military and the regional governors and generals are siding with Putin.

Prigozhin needs to rush to Moscow and declare victory. If he does, he might win. If not, he’s toast.

Putin’s question is if he has a loyal force in the military that will fire who aren’t on the frontline facing Ukraine. The military is not going against him, but will they defend him? And, as is his modus operandi, I suspect he’s being too cautious about the use of force.

Page 148 of 532

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén