Thanks to everyone who has given, I appreciate it greatly. We’re about $1,300 short of the final goal. If we hit it I’ll write an article on reasons for hope. Either way, again, I’m very grateful.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 15, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
[TW: Dear readers: I was on the road much of this past week, so had limited time and access. If this wrap seems a bit short and abbreviated, it’s because it is. Should be back to normal this coming week.]
[Curiosity Chronicle, via The Big Picture 1-13-2023]
I asked a number of 90-year-olds a simple question: “If you could speak to your 32-year-old self, what advice would you give?” In total, there was over 1,000 years of lived experience captured. The responses were…incredible. They range from fun, playful, and witty to deeply moving. I’d encourage you to read through them with your loved ones and reflect on those that hit you the hardest.
Global power shift
Why the CIA attempted a ‘Maidan uprising’ in Brazil
[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-2023]
A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.
On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.
According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation – which bears visible signs of hasty planning – now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.
That suggests CIA planners are avid readers of Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the New York Fed. In his ground-breaking 27 December report titled War and Commodity Encumbrance….
India tops Japan to become world’s No. 3 auto market
[Nikkei Asia, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-2023]
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-12-2023]
There are more people living inside this circle than outside of it
[source, read more on Brilliant Maps: https://t.co/qilsWQFuHE] pic.twitter.com/5RShzvabnN
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 11, 2023
.
[Compact, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-2023]
…There is no clearer sign of emerging elite skepticism of a borderless capitalist economy than Rana Foroohar’s new book, Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World. The author, a Financial Times columnist, celebrates the dawn of a new age of economic localization….
The other big winner of globalization, alongside Western corporations, was China. As Foroohar rightly recalls, although we tend to associate neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, the push towards hyper-globalization truly started with Bill Clinton in the ’90s. That’s when a series of trade deals, culminating in the entry of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, took the guardrails off the global economy. “It’s amazing but true,” Foroohar writes, “that when it came to trade, Democrats in the ’90s were far less protectionist than the Republicans who came before them. Indeed, they supported the WTO rules that, by 2000, made it nearly impossible for countries to craft their own trade policies.”
America Will Lose Its Scientific Ascendance To China & When Disruptive Science Will Recover
Ian Welsh, January 11, 2023
We’re mostly living off the legacy of a past civilization now (because yes, the civilization of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries are dead). We haven’t made a lot of fundamental discoveries since, or if we have they haven’t been followed up. Even really fantastic stuff like quantum computing is mining that same vein discovered a century ago.
Further, we have refused to really change our physical plant, beyond the widespread telecom/computer revolution….
Physical plant changes demand new solutions, but we’re still running on hydrocarbons and even our “alternative energy” is old. Solar panels were invented in 1883. Windmills are ancient and windmills producing electricity are essentially as old as electricity itself. Our advances in batteries are impressive, but they are extensions.
We don’t really want to change anything fundamental. Computers and telecom were adopted wholesale not because they improve productivity (it doesn’t show up in the macro data), but because they allowed people in charge more control. But in the face of known catastrophes we have done essentially nothing.
BY Lee Harris, January 11, 2023 [The American Prospect]
Strategic Political Economy
Engineers on brink of extinction threaten entire ecosystems
[The Register, via Naked Capitalism 1-10-2023]
The graph [Intel] showed at the latest VLSI Symposium, however, was a real shocker.
While computer science course take-up had gone up by over 90 percent in the past 50 years, electrical engineering (EE) had declined by the same amount. The electronics graduate has become rarer than an Intel-based smartphone.
Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why
[Nature, via The Big Picture 1-10-2023]
The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the past half-century. (Nature)
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-2023]
https://twitter.com/davidrkadler/status/1611431708775092250?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1611431708775092250%7Ctwgr%5E4e66f742f9405520dfcde4f523357e770bb37d19%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2023%2F01%2Flinks-1-8-2023.html
.
Your stuff is actually worse now: How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
[Vox, via The Big Picture 1-9-2023]
[TW: blaming crapification on consumerism? It’s supposed to be a demand-driven market economy; I don’t see how consumers are “demanding” crap.]
8 Grocery Shortages You Can Expect to See in 2023
[Eat This, Not That, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
USDA Now Says The U.S. Lost 1.6 Million More Acres Of Corn In 2022, Where Did They Go?
[AgWeb, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-2023]
Oligarchs
America’s Theater of the Absurd
[The Chris Hedges Report, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power, including the media. Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.
In This House We Prey: Managing family wealth for dynastic power
[The Baffler, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-2023]
The Ultrarich Are Getting Cozy in America’s Tax Havens
[Portside, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-2023]
How Big Pharma Actually Spends Its Massive Profits
Julia Rock, January 6, 2023 [The Lever]
Between 2012 and 2021, the 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development, according to a new study by economists William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a researcher at Brown University.
But that hasn’t stopped drug companies and their lobbying groups from using the cost of innovation as a key argument in their campaign to keep Medicare from being able to negotiate lower drug prices. The pharmaceutical industry has spent at least $645 million on federal lobbying over the past two years.
Elitist Corporate Media Attacks Populism, Briahna Joy Gray on Dem v. GOP Dissent
[Rumble, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-10-2023]
Climate and environmental crises
Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections
[Science, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-2023]
“Our results show that in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully.”
Texas ag agency says climate change threatens state’s food supply
Texas Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
‘Holy grail’ wheat gene discovery could feed our overheated world
Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
The golden fuel: Asia’s rise to economic power and food security has been powered not by rice but by American maize, the ultimate flex-crop
[aeon, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-10-2023]
Loss of Hinman Glacier, North Cascade Range 1958-2022
[American Geophysical Union, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
The key lesson to learn from science’s greatest debate
[Big Think, via The Big Picture 1-11-2023]
In 1920, astronomers debated the nature of the Universe. The results were meaningless until years later, when the key evidence arrived.
Oregon Follows California, Bans Combustion New Car Sales By 2035
[Motor1, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
China clean energy giants unveil world’s largest wind turbines
[Bloomberg, via American Clean Power 1-11-2023]
Ming Yang Smart Energy Group Ltd. unveiled the world’s largest wind turbine, an offshore behemoth whose more than 140-meter-long blades will sweep across an area larger than nine soccer pitches.
Arlington County’s government is running literally everything on clean energy now
[WAMU 88.5, via American Clean Power 1-9-2023]
Arlington County, Virginia reached a milestone in its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions: 100% of county government operations are now powered by renewable electricity….
Most of that electricity – some 80% – is coming from a sprawling solar farm in rural Pittsylvania County, Va. The facility covers 1,500 acres of what used to be crop land, producing 120 megawatts of power. That’s enough to power roughly 30,000 homes.
Arlington County is purchasing about one-third of the power generated at the solar farm, while Amazon is buying the rest.
Information age dystopia
POLARIZING AND ISOLATING AMERICANS IS GOOD BUSINESS FOR MEDIA MONOPOLIES
[The Real News, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
[GeekWire, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-2023]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Democrats Don’t WANT To Stop Fascism
[Youtube, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-9-2023]
The Right Played Hardball in Congress. The Left Should Take Notes
[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-2023]
Democrats to Labor: You’re On Your Own
[Compact, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-2023]
(anti)Republicans’ political malpractice
“Unpacking the House GOP’s new rules: A handy guide to the changes”
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-10-2023]
“Republicans have killed Democrats’ “pay-as-you-go” rule, often shorthanded as PAYGO. It had required legislation that would add to the deficit to be offset with tax increases or spending cuts. The GOP has replaced PAYGO with what it’s calling CUTGO, which requires mandatory spending increases to be offset only with equal or greater decreases in mandatory spending — no new taxes allowed. The GOP last put this into place in the 112th Congress. That doesn’t mean that deficit-increasing tax cuts are off the table. The CUTGO rule only requires offsets if bills would increase mandatory spending within a five-year or 10-year budget window. For example, Republicans could pass extensions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, some of which have set to expire in 2025 (while others already have).”
[TW: If this had been USA policy from the get go in 1789, we’d still have mud trails instead of interstate highways. Conservatives obviously never stop to wonder why there hasn’t been one unending series of financial meltdowns over the past two and a half centuries, since the national debt has gone from $75 million in 1791 to $31.42 trillion now.]
‘87,000 IRS agents’ is the zombie falsehood setting the House agenda
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 1-11-2023]
We call these “zombie claims” because they keep rising from the dead no matter how often they have been fact-checked. But we haven’t before witnessed such a roundly criticized claim set the agenda for a new Congress.
“Pfizer gives $1 million to Republican Party of Kentucky to expand its headquarters”
[Kentucky Lantern, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-9-2023]
“A report filed by Republican Party of Kentucky Building Fund last week with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance listed the $1 million from Pfizer along with five other big corporation contributions in the final quarter of 2022 totalling $1.65 million. That is an extraordinarily large haul for the fund which had raised only $6,000 during the first three quarters of 2022.”
Illinois becomes latest US state to ban assault weapons
[ABC, via Naked Capitalism 1-12-2023]
The (Anti)Federalist Society Infestation of the Courts
Will SCOTUS Revoke the Right to Strike?
Miles MOGULESCU, January 13, 2023 [The American Prospect]
This week, SCOTUS heard oral arguments in Glacier Northwest, Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union 174. Should SCOTUS rule in favor of the employer in this case, the right to strike could be significantly suppressed. The case has come at a time when, in response to growing economic inequality, union organizing and strikes are growing at the fastest pace in recent history. Corporations fear this trend, and a politicized right-wing Supreme Court majority could help them slow it.
A Chicago Attorney Is Getting Justice For Hundreds Of Wrongfully Convicted People All At Once
[Buzzfeed, via The Big Picture 1-14-2023]
Josh Tepfer has helped exonerate 288 people, many of whom were convicted based on patterns of misconduct by corrupt police or officials.
Conservative / Libertarian Drive to Civil War
Inside the Jan. 6 committee’s massive new evidence trove
[Politico, via The Big Picture 1-8-2023]
The panel’s evidence provides the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win.
The Jan. 6 committee’s final report says some key questions remain unanswered. Here are 8 of them
[Grid, via The Big Picture 1-8-2023]
They include how pipe bombs got to the DNC and RNC headquarters, and how much Trump and his allies knew ahead of the attack.
“The Failures of the January 6 Report”
Jeet Heer [The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 1-13-2023]
“But the report issued by the committee also has a broader purpose: to establish a convincing account of the coup attempt that can shape public memory. Harvard historian Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker, offered a scathing critique of the report, convincingly portraying it as a narrowly focused indictment of Donald Trump that ignores broader political forces that created the coup. In 2016, Donald Trump ran on the boast ‘I alone can fix it.’ The January 6 report merely flips the script by saying Trump alone can break it…. A truer account of the origins of January 6 that tried to move beyond Trump could find genuine bipartisan responsibility if it focused on shared policy failures. The Clintonian embrace of neoliberalism in the 1990s wreaked economic havoc on the working class that made Trump’s demagoguery more persuasive. Bipartisan support for the Global War on Terror after 9/11 helped legitimize the xenophobia that Trump would come to exploit and created a nation fearful of the world. The failure of the Obama administration to push for a strong stimulus in 2009 and 2010 ensured a lost economic decade, again driving desperation. Lepore doesn’t address any of these salient issues of policy. Her focus is on blaming partisan rhetoric and social media.”
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Words are always a problem, and never more so when discussing spirituality/meditation/cultivation.
There are many, many different types of meditation, designed to do very different things. There are forms of breath meditation whose primary purpose is to calm the body. When you do so, you may notice certain things about reality/yourself, but knowing “how to meditate” doesn’t mean you have achieved any level of insight or awakening; it’s just a technical skill.
But almost all of what I would consider real spirituality is about “knowing thyself.” This is primarily about observation; about noticing facts about yourself that you hadn’t before, and then noticing them over and over until something clicks and you start perceiving your existence in different ways than the norm.
When teaching “meditation” one of the main questions is how much to signpost; how much to point. If you tell people what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to see it, but the power of the insight is weaker than when it takes them by surprise.
That said, I’m going to “point” to something: almost nothing exists.
If you either calm the chatter of your mind or learn to disregard it (it doesn’t matter much which) and rest your awareness lightly over the sensations you’re feeling, what you may notice is that there isn’t a lot there. Mostly there’s a lot of nothing, with some sensations floating in space (which is also a construct, but that’s a later thing).
It’s an odd thing to notice, that you aren’t solid. You think of yourself as solid: a body, but the actual experience isn’t that and that you believe it is is because you’re filling in what you “know” is there, stitching together a reality which doesn’t actually exist.
Try it sometime. Just be still, calm the mind or ignore the chatter, close your eyes, and see what’s actually there. (You can do this with eyes open, but it’s easier with eyes closed.)
You may be surprised.
And thinking otherwise is tiresome and delusional. From Nature:
Young Chinese scientists who got their PhDs overseas and returned to China as part of a state-run talent drive published more papers after their return than did their peers who stayed abroad. The productivity bump can be explained by returnees’ access to greater funding and an abundant research workforce, according to the authors of an analysis published in Science1. The findings come as geopolitical competition between the United States and China mounts.
The only things which could derail this are a major war which China loses (though no one’s likely to “win”), or being disproportionately effected by climate change and ecological collapse and unable to handle it.
As regular readers are probably tired of me saying, this happened before with the UK and the US. The research center moves to the manufacturing base.
Meanwhile, a study found that “disruptive science” has declined.
The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature1.
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with mid-twentieth-century research, that done in the 2000s was much more likely to push science forward incrementally than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.
A chart is instructive:
Study authors suggest the following:
The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3 that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.
Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same.
David Graeber had another (partial) explanation:
“There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers”
I’m fairly sure this is a matter of institutionalization and the wrong style of professionalization. Institutions stifle creativity in most cases. Exceptions like Bell Labs are rare; unicorns in modern parlance.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
The old German academic system which took over the world was extremely productive: to become a “doctor” you had to produce new knowledge. It worked fine until the massive expansion of universities after the war. I’m not an academic insider, but I’m virtually certain that the current system would be unrecognizable to those professors and scientists from the 19th and early 20th centuries: similar to the Roman Empire keeping for the forms of the Republic and pretending the Senate mattered and so on.
The other issue is that “disruptive” isn’t the same as “paradigm changing”, it’s one step down, and I’m guessing that paradigm changing discoveries have genuinely declined. We are mining the same coal seams, and have been for a long time. Quantum mechanics was discovered pre-war, the structure of DNA briefly after the war, Von Neuman and Turing Machines date from the same period. The basis of semiconductors were discovered in 47/48, and so on.
We’re mostly living off the legacy of a past civilization now (because yes, the civilization of the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries are dead). We haven’t made a lot of fundamental discoveries since, or if we have they haven’t been followed up. Even really fantastic stuff like quantum computing is mining that same vein discovered a century ago.
Further, we have refused to really change our physical plant, beyond the widespread telecom/computer revolution. If time-traveled to the present from 1960, once you learned how to use smartphones/computers/payment systems, you’d be fine and fit in. Oh, there are plenty of small changes, I remember the 70s well enough to know that, but the basic structure is the same.
Physical plant changes demand new solutions, but we’re still running on hydrocarbons and even our “alternative energy” is old. Solar panels were invented in 1883. Windmills are ancient and windmills producing electricity are essentially as old as electricity itself. Our advances in batteries are impressive, but they are extensions.
We don’t really want to change anything fundamental. Computers and telecom were adopted wholesale not because they improve productivity (it doesn’t show up in the macro data), but because they allowed people in charge more control. But in the face of known catastrophes we have done essentially nothing.
When we decide to make fundamental changes to our physical plant and to our institutions (including universities) then there will be a massive upsurge in “disruptive science” and there will be new paradigmatic changes and discoveries, assuming we don’t wind up in a Dark Age.
That will happen when civilization collapse makes maintaining the shell of a 70 year old way of life impossible.
We’ve raised approximately $8,400, when including the $2,300 from the emergency fundraiser earlier in 2022. That puts us past $6,500 and a summary article on the world’s position and prospects, and $1,600 from the $11,000 final goal and threshold for an article on reasons for hope. I’ll end the fundraiser sometime next week, whether we’ve achieved the goal or not.
Generally speaking, money simply tells me, like everyone, that what I do is valued and I should do more of it. As always, if you are in a position where money is short for essentials like food, housing or medical care, please don’t donate or subscribe.
But if you have some extra and you value my writing…
Watching “left wing” reactions to the Speaker’s election in the US House was instructive. Too many people were appalled when I pointed out that the left, the “Squad” specifically, could have done the same thing to get concessions in 2024.
If you were appalled at the idea then you are not a member of the left in any useful way.
(That statement and this post will occasion another torrent of abuse in the comments for me to throw into spam, and laugh about. If you think that after 30 years online, most of it moderating comments, you can insult me in a way I haven’t heard before, you are a fool as well as a piece of human garbage.)
You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.
Usually when a House member tries to vote in a way that the party leadership doesn’t like, they are threatened with the cut off of money or votes.
Right wing Republicans have power because they can deliver votes and money. Right wing Republicans who chose to get concessions in exchange for the votes in the House Speaker election (which is an entirely democratic thing to do an in line with what the founders intended) have their own, largely small money, donor networks. They don’t need the Republican money machine. Furthermore their voters expect them to act on their stated beliefs.
The difference with the Squad is instructive. They claim to have left wing beliefs, but won’t vote them when it matter. Either they are scared of the threats made by leadership, or they don’t really believe their beliefs, or they know their supporters don’t really believe and won’t hold them to account. If you won’t do something when you have the power to do it, you don’t really believe in it.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
This, by the way, is why the Netroots movement failed. For a while we had influence and were a rising power in the Democratic power.
Why? Because we could raise money from sources Democrats couldn’t; we could deliver votes and we threatened incumbents with primaries.
The Netroots lost because Obama figured out how to bypass us to get the money and votes without us and our primary threat proved weak.
The radical right has succeeded to a large extent because the institutional Republican party has not been able to bypass them and their primary threat is real. They stand a good chance of winning many primary challenges and they will make an incumbent’s life miserable if crossed.
The voters are loyal to their beliefs and, while not perfect, do have an expectation that their representatives will represent those beliefs. You may laugh at them for supporting even Trump, say, but if so you’ve missed the point: Trump gave them what they wanted most, control of the Supreme Court and an end to Roe vs. Wade. Those of you old enough will remember when Bush Jr. was forced to back down on his preferred Supreme Court nominee because she was too moderate and nominate someone acceptable to the pro-life movement.
No political movement has power if its “supporters”” do not actually vote their beliefs; donate based on their beliefs; volunteer based on their beliefs and hold their elected and un-elected representatives responsible when they violate those beliefs. (This doesn’t mean you expect reps to be perfect, but on whatever matters most — say abortion for right wingers — you hold them accountable.)
If you can be peeled off because of appeals to lesser evildom or some-such, you make your movement weak and your beliefs are worthless. Without solidarity and accountability there can be no movement which matters.
I don’t agree with radical Republicans about almost anything (except that the world and America would better off if the US interfered a lot less in other counties business). They are, essentially, my ideological enemies, though so are mainstream Democrats and Republicans.
But they have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.
(There’s some conflation in this article between Republican groups, that’s unavoidable. But basically the bleeding edge, wherever it is, has been winning internal Republican party battles for about 50 years. The left edge has been losing those battles and that’s why America has become an authoritarian dumpster fire with soaring inequality which is in possible terminal collapse.)
We’ll talk a little more about real belief and the use of power soon.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World
Paul Krugman [New York Times, via The Big Picture 1-3-2023]
…the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.
When an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.
The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch….
Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology that writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public….
[TW: Montesquieu wrote (see below)]
“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury….” [emphasis by TW]
Max Berger [via Naked Capitalism 1-4-2023]
When I looked into SBF’s political giving to write a follow up to last week’s piece, I thought I knew what I was looking for. It’s a subject I’ve written about before.
But, when I looked at the end-of-cycle FEC data, the results were truly shocking.
I found more evidence SBF was collaborating with AIPAC and Trump supporting billionaires to stop the growth of the squad and the electoral left.
Five billionaire funded PACs were coordinating closely on a strategy to defeat progressive candidates in Democratic primaries — a kind of Injustice Democrats.
Mark Mellman, a long-time operative and AIPAC ally, appears to be at the center of the effort and likely spearheaded the shared campaign. He was hired by four of the five groups this cycle, who collectively paid his firm $476,016.67… According to FEC data, over 75% of the money SBF contributed to Democrats in 2022 went to groups that spent nearly all their money on competitive primaries in the Democratic Party.
SBF personally contributed $29,250,000 to Protect Our Future and DMI PAC (which later contributed the money to Web3 Forward). Both of these groups spent the vast majority of their money on Democratic primaries. They also worked closely with two AIPAC affiliated SuperPACs called the United Democracy Project (UDP) and the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and a group called Mainstream Democrats which aimed to defeat the “far-left.”
Conservative Political Parties Embody The Politics Of Nihilism
Howie Klein [DownWithTyranny 1-6-2023]
Yesterday public intellectual Umair Haque took a stab at explaining why democracy is broken in the U.S. and Britain to the point where both countries appear ungovernable. He began by asking why the Tories and the GOP are so incredibly incompetent that their nations are falling apart. And his answer goes back to the old truism about conservatives not believing in public goods. “If you don’t believe in public goods,” he wrote, “you are basically saying that the there is no job of governance to be done. Because there’s nothing to administer, oversee, nurture, invest in, shepherd, keep ship-shape for the next generation.”
Now the crux of his argument: “Neither the GOP nor the Tories believe in public goods. Not believing in public goods, they can’t do the job of governance. Because of course, to them, the task they’ve set out to accomplish isn’t governance at all. It’s the destruction of public goods. But that’s not governance, especially not in a modern democracy. What is it? Well, it’s a lot of things: ignorance, folly, hate, bigotry, rage, stupidity, and self-destruction, to name just a few… [After being ravaging in two World Wars] Europe’s living standards rose to the highest levels in human history because Europeans enjoyed the greatest public goods in history: from public health, to education, to transport, and so forth. There is absolutely no debate on this score… This is the great lesson of the 20th century, one of the most crucial in history, and now I can restate it in a simpler, more powerful form. We know the key to human prosperity. It’s called investment in public goods. They a) lift living standards while b) keeping societies equal and c) sharing wealth broadly, thus d) creating a relatively stable middle class that e) is the key for democracy to endure… [America and Britain] have been overrun by parties which genuinely don’t believe public goods should exist.”