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To win the bloc of rebels thwarting his rise, McCarthy was apparently prepared to agree to conditions that he had not been previously willing to accept. That includes reinstating a rule that would allow a single lawmaker to force a vote to remove the speaker, effectively placing himself at the mercy of his detractors who could trigger a vote at any point.
McCarthy and his allies hope the concessions and several other commitments will be enough to persuade enough holdouts to drop their objections and end the stalemate that has clouded the opening days of their new majority.
In 2020 Democrats had a House margin of 9 members. Five members, committed to vote as a bloc, could have held Pelosi or any other candidate to ransom until they got what they wanted.
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You have power if you’re willing to use it. The “Squad” is a joke because when they have leverage, they don’t use it. They don’t really believe in their own ideology: they don’t think they have the right to force other Democrats to govern better.
Republican right wingers, as much as I disagree with them, know how to use power. They don’t believe they are illegitimate.
Until left-wingers get over the idea that exercising power is bad, they will remain meaningless, and politics in most of the developed world will continue its 50 odd year swing to the right.
They are going to put CO2 monitors in all classrooms, with a limit of 800ppm.
We offer a translation into English of our synoptic on the new French environmental code relating to the measurement of CO2 in schools. A PDF version is available at https://t.co/R2WmMULY69
This is intended for foreigners who have expressed an interest in this new code. https://t.co/vuQ4gJCu9y pic.twitter.com/UioyBUnUWM— LET'S AIR (@nousaerons) January 3, 2023
This sort of thing is what has needed to be done for a long time now. We need to clean up our air the way we did our water to get rid of waterborne diseases. Aggressive ventilation, filtration and UV (with ozone detectors to make sure it isn’t too much) should be standard in all buildings.
As a plus, as CO2 rises due to climate change, we’ll know how bad it is. Leaving aside pathogens, CO2 is toxic. One of the larger problems we have, but fail to acknowledge is also the reduction in oxygen content in cities and buildings, which is also bad for us. Were I rich, I’d have a positive pressure house built with filtration, CO2 monitors and scrubbers, and oxygen concentrators and O2 monitors. (Positive pressure is more than doable. The SciFi author Robert A. Heinlein created one back in the 50s.)
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Water monitoring and filtration/purificiation in all houses would also be wise. For the first time in history, rainwater is no longer safe to drink.
Generally speaking the world is going to become a lot more variable: forest fires, droughts, pollution and erratic weather. The US just got hit by a huge massively cold winter storm, meanwhile Europe had a heatwave in January. We need to prepare.
So, Canada has done two interesting things in the last couple years to deal with the effects of Covid. The first is let in a lot more immigrants:
Canada added more than 431,000 new permanent residents last year, the largest annual increase in its history, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seeks to ease the country’s labor shortages.
The new admissions met the 2022 target set by Trudeau’s government and exceeded the prior year’s record of about 401,000 newcomers, according to a release from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on Tuesday.
The Canadian government has consistently raised its annual immigration goals in recent years, with the latest plan targeting 465,000 new permanent residents this year and half a million in 2025. The policies have also propelled population growth to a fresh record and may be contributing to a decline in the country’s median age.
Immigration accounts for nearly all of Canada’s labor-force growth and about 75% of the nation’s population growth.
When you realize that the Canadian population is only about 39 million you’ll understand how radically large this number of immigrants is.
This is an attempt to keep wages and inflation down. Without immigrants, wages would rise quickly, and that can’t be allowed, since Canada, like most developed countries, considers wage inflation almost the only type of inflation which matters.
Almost. To my surprise, Trudeau has decided to do something about housing inflation (something I’ve been calling for for many years):
A two-year ban on some foreigners buying homes in Canada has come into effect.
The ban aims to help ease one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world.
As of this summer, the average home price in Canada is C$777,200 ($568,000; £473,700) – more than 11 times the median household income after taxes….
…As of 1 January, the ban prohibits people who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents from buying residential properties, and imposes a C$10,000 fine on those who breach it.
This won’t be enough to cool the housing market much, though the last year has seen a slight decrease in prices. Still, Canada remains one of the most expensive markets in the world: more than New Zealand or the USA.
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(Correction: In addition to a fine, the government can order the house sold, but it’s not automatic and should be)/ In addition a ban of all AirBnB rentals not of the own person’s home (or perhaps one vacation property) and the seizure of all non vacation/summer housing left empty of residents for more than 3 months for any reason other than ongoing renovations would actually cut prices and rents significantly.
The Canadian government needs a lot more people to keep wages down, but if immigrants can’t find housing in cities with jobs (and they can’t, the markets are insanely pricey and few rental units are available at prices immigrants can afford), then the immigration push might well stall out.
Thus the attempt to cool the housing market. This is more intelligent policy than I’m used to from Western governments, but it’s still in service of expanding inequality, virtually the only priority of most developed world nations.
Nonetheless, a golf clap for Prime Minister Trudeau. He’s stupid and venal, but not a complete idiot.
Some interesting news in the semiconductor wars:
https://twitter.com/SGMWorldnews/status/1609008735128817664
Now, ASML had indeed opposed US restrictions. They said explicitly that in the case of sanctions, China would learn how to make the machines themselves.
Europe’s technological lead is being destroyed by following US policies. Energy intensive firms are fleeing Europe because US energy prices are much lower (this is due to sanctions on Russia and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines) and following US sanctions on China means that China just learns how to make what Europe supplies them now.
It’s sort of rocket science, actually. As you may remember, the US banned China from the International Space Station, so China just built its own and now looks likely to have a base on the moon before the US.
Woops.
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China, to repeat myself, is the world manufacturing floor. Mercedes moved their auto-design center to China. When the US took the lead over the UK in manufacturing, the UK retained its tech lead for about 20 years, but it did lose it.
Repeated sanctions on any area where the West has the lead, whether space, aerospace, semis or anything else only provide a perfect complete tariff to a country with millions of engineers and scientists and more manufacturing capacity than any other country in the world. They speed up, not slow down, the day when China will both have the tech lead and the manufacturing base.
Back in the late 90s and the early 2000s I warned, repeatedly, against transferring the manufacturing floor to China. That was the decision point, that was when it could have been stopped.
Sanctions against key points only make sense if you’re going to either go to war or move massively back to industrial policy, and the West is not going to do either of those things. I’m not sure a full move to industrial policy would even work, but it’s certainly what should be done. However, it could only be done if you were willing to crash real-estate and securities prices by about two-thirds, because the cost-structure matters.
What Europe should be doing is aligning itself with the rising power, China, or remaining a neutral bloc and negotiation places where they will keep the tech lead with China, as part of specialization. China wants trading partners and they see benefits in not having to rush every tech sector out of fear of sanctions. The US is both going down and fundamentally, at a policy level, willing to feast on Europe to slow its decline. Euro elites though they were part of a trans-Atlantic elite, but they only sort of were. When push comes to shove, American elites will let Euro elites swing. Generations of dominance have created an American elite willing to almost anything, or perhaps even anything, to retain dominance.
Europe has hitched itself to the wrong ship, and trusted the wrong nation, thinking that being a satrapy is the same as being an equal ally, and they have joined a cold war that will hurt them more than help them.
They will pay the price.
Covid will not miraculously end. New variants will continue to be born, and they will generally be optimized for immune escape and damage. Hospitals in most countries will continue to be under high strain, because governments will keep pretending Covid is over when it is not and that it doesn’t ravage people’s immune systems. I find this chart of Canada’s Covid experience applies to most countries in spirit.
This will likely be the warmest year on record, but the coldest year of the rest of your life and if it isn’t, it’ll be in the top 5 on both lists. Same with extreme weather events. These will combine with water shortages to cause more problems with the food chain and there will be serious food price fluctuations, though how serious will depend on where you live and who gets hit hardest by climate events. Frequency and severity are increasing, but predicting exactly what where is in most cases impossible, which is part of the problem.
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Nothing of significance will be done about climate change or ecological collapse, though some agreements may be signed which will have no teeth and no noticeable effects on the top line numbers.
The US will continue to pile sanctions on China in an attempt to stop it from challenging the US. Those sanctions will be damaging in the short run, but nothing the US sanctions will be something China can’t genuinely learn to make themselves because they aren’t racially or culturally inferior, and they have the largest industrial base in the world.
Cold War will continue to develop, with the BRICS at the heart of the other side, and movement towards an alternate financial system which bypasses the dollar will likewise continue. China will not allow Russia to be strangled by Western sanctions. Countries outside the developed core will continue to sway towards China, which offers cheaper loans and goods and is their primary trade partner, and also, with a few exceptions, interferes less in their internal politics.
A continued movement towards vertical integration in companies and to countries trying to be able to produce more of their own key goods. People are figuring out that as the cold war develops and neoliberalism collapses, you can’t, actually, trust the supply chain and the poorer you are, or the more the US dislikes you, the more that is true. This will play into countries choosing sides, as well. China does produce more of what most countries need than the US does now and that is going to become more, not less, true, especially when you add in Russia.
Europe will continue to lose industry to America and other low-energy cost nations. I rather doubt they’ll prioritize protecting their industrial base over being American satrapies and anti-Russia, so the EU’s decline as a great power will continue even as they militarize under US guidance and control, using US weapon systems and thus making their dependence higher.
I’d like to be wrong about this one and there’s a small chance I might be, since as the economic consequences become worse, the population may become desperate enough to realize that the cost to anti-Russianism may be a bit too high.
Join in with your dead-obvious predictions in the comments. The best way to be right about things is just to accept the blindingly obvious. Oddly, most people are really bad at that.
by Tony Wikrent
The dark side
Fintan O’Toole, January 19, 2023 issue [The New York Review]
To understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to Donald Trump’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented Trump with a detailed plan for the transfer of power to his incoming administration. It was literally trashed. As Christie recalled in his self-pitying memoir, Let Me Finish, “All thirty binders were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.” Trump didn’t want an orderly transition to his own presidency, let alone to Joe Biden’s. To a raging narcissist a plan is an impertinence, a Lilliputian restraint on the inspired instincts of a giant….
A coup, in this context, does not mean tanks on the streets, helicopter gunships strafing public buildings, thousands of people rounded up by soldiers, and a junta of generals or colonels addressing the nation on TV. On the contrary, the story that needed to be told by the plotters of 2020–2021 was not the overthrow of democracy, but its defense. Trump, as his chief of staff and co-conspirator Mark Meadows put it in his book The Chief’s Chief, was merely seeking “to uphold the democratic process.”….
To understand what Trump could have done instead, it is necessary to revisit a long meeting at the White House on the evening and night of December 18, 2020. This episode is easy to dismiss because it was described by Hutchinson as “unhinged” and because the proposals aired at it were called “nuts” by one of the saner attendees, the former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. These characterizations are accurate. Yet the meeting matters for two reasons. The first is that it immediately preceded Trump’s fateful decision to summon his followers to Washington on January 6. The other is that one of the ideas put forward at this meeting would be of great interest to any future conspirator.
In spite of all of this idiocy, however, Byrne did have one seriously interesting proposal to put to Trump at the meeting. It was that, having seized control of the voting machines through some kind of military task force, there would then be a live TV event in which all of the paper ballots in the six most contested states would be counted in front of the cameras: “If there are not big discrepancies, Trump concedes. But if there are big discrepancies, we would rerun the election in those six counties, or states, using that federal force.” This was actually quite an intelligent idea. By appearing to commit to conceding defeat if no discrepancies were found, Trump could pose, as he had to do if a coup were to succeed, as the defender of American democracy….
Most importantly, there would be a public drama, an elaborate spectacle of “democracy” in action. It is not hard to imagine how Trump’s enablers in the media would sell this show: Why are the Democrats afraid to see what the paper ballots say? The mechanics of this performance remain obscure. How were “discrepancies” to be created? What would the Supreme Court have done? To have a chance of success, the plan would surely have to have been put into effect much earlier—well before the Electoral College met on December 14 to confirm Biden’s victory. Yet Byrne had the germ of the right idea. The best way to steal a presidential election would indeed be through a staged display of democratic process backed by elaborate precooked “evidence” of foreign conspiracy and amplified by Fox News, social media campaigns, and other media. This is the upside-down shape of a successful American coup. Democracy is destroyed by the enactment of its protection.
Strategic Political Economy
“The Contest on Corporate Purpose: Why Lynn Stout was Right and Milton Friedman was Wrong
Thomas Clarke [From the journal Accounting, Economics, and Law, via Avedon’s Sideshow 12-15-2022]
It is now 50 years since Milton Friedman set out his doctrine that ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.’ This paper seeks to add fresh and compelling new evidence of why Lynn Stout was correct in her resolute critique of the thesis of shareholder primacy at the heart of the Friedman doctrine, and how this doctrine remains profoundly damaging to the corporations that continue to uphold this belief.”
Global power shift
Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union
[Hudson Institute, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2022]
[TW: As Lambert Strether noted, this is a glimpse at what USA ruling elites really believe. ]
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