I don’t know who will win. I would prefer the Democrats do so that Biden can govern a bit more and because McConnell truly is awful.
Anyway, use comments to discuss the runoff, results, consequences, and so on.
We have a brilliantly authoritarian ruling on the Assange extradition case. The judge (who was endlessly hostile to Assange) ruled he couldn’t be extradited because of his bad health, but said that none of the press freedom arguments worked.
Now this is good news for Assange, but it is terrible news for press freedom. If the judge had approved the extradition of Assange, he would have appealed, and there is a very good chance for a reversal on appeal. Assange isn’t a US citizen; the US has no jurisdiction, and he was clearly acting as a publisher through the entire sequence.
The Australian journalists’ union sums this up well:
MEAA, the union for Australian journalists, welcomes today’s decision by a British judge to prevent the extradition to the United States of our member Julian Assange and calls on the US government to now drop his prosecution.
The court ruled against extradition on health grounds, accepting medical evidence that Assange would be at risk in US custody.
However, journalists everywhere should be concerned at the hostile manner in which the court dismissed all defence arguments related to press freedom.
“Today’s court ruling is a huge relief for Julian, his partner and family, his legal team and his supporters around the world,” said MEAA Media Federal President Marcus Strom.
“Julian has suffered a ten-year ordeal for trying to bring information of public interest to the light of day, and it has had an immense impact on his mental and physical health.
“But we are dismayed that the judge showed no concern for press freedom in any of her comments today, and effectively accepted the US arguments that journalists can be prosecuted for exposing war crimes and other government secrets, and for protecting their sources.
“The stories for which he was being prosecuted were published by WikiLeaks a decade ago and revealed war crimes and other shameful actions by the United States government. They were clearly in the public interest.
“The case against Assange has always been politically motivated with the intent of curtailing free speech, criminalising journalism and sending a clear message to future whistleblowers and publishers that they too will be punished if they step out of line.”
MEAA now calls on the US government to drop all charges against Julian Assange and for the Australian government to expedite his safe passage to Australia if that is his wish.
This is a brilliant way to paint Assange guilty of a crime, who is just being let off for sympathy, when he is not guilty (or if he is, so are hundreds of other journalists who have reported on leaked or hacked data from “dubious” people). The US may be appeal, so it’s not clear whether (as of the time of writing) Assange will go free.
At any rate, mission accomplished: An evil law (The Official Secrets Act) is not declared a dead letter by British courts and so can be used as a cudgel in the future. Assange is a broken man; a shadow of himself, and a warning to anyone else who would reveal American war crimes or that the DNC colluded to elect a specific candidate (Clinton) against another candidate (Sanders.)
And no, I don’t give even one shit who hacked the info: It was in the public interest and the public had and has a right to know about American war crimes and Democratic party election fixing.
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 3, 2021
by Tony Wikrent
How the Police Killed Breonna Taylor
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-31-20]
“The Times’s visual investigation team built a 3-D model of the scene and pieced together critical sequences of events to show how poor planning and shoddy police work led to a fatal outcome.”
A stunning visualization of the police raid, including footage of investigation interviews with officers. The ineptitude uncovered is gross and flagrant. Only the most biased and pro-authoritarian can fail to see the incident as a massive over-reaction by police who were on some sort of psychological thrill ride based on being able to actually shoot at a live target.
The Georgia Senate Race
Perdue’s Time as Dollar General CEO Marked by Charges of Wage Theft, Race and Sex Discrimination
[Capital and Main, via LA Progressive 12-31-2020]
Dollar General, which he ran between 2003 and 2007, rests on a business model of offering low-cost goods at rock-bottom prices while paying workers poorly. The stores, ubiquitous in low-income neighborhoods, are generally understaffed and have become magnets for crime, according to a recent investigation. The corporate dictum that wages remain at 5% of gross sales “placed us at the bottom of a low-paying industry,” Cal Turner Jr., the son of Dollar General’s founder, told ProPublica.
Perdue presided over a more than 30-fold increase in the number of employee lawsuits filed against the company, according to a Capital & Main review of court filings. While he worked at the firm, 2,494 individual employment cases were filed charging the company with gender and racial discrimination, rampant wage theft, failure to provide medical leave and other workplace violations. In the four years leading up to Perdue taking the helm, 76 employment cases were filed in federal court.
In a just society — such as christianists claim to desire — corporate leaders like Purdue would have been curbed, broken, bankrupted and punished by the legal system, not elevated to the highest public offices in the republic.
Strategic Political Economy
Neoliberal Champion Larry Summers Opens Mouth, Inserts Both Feet
Matt Taibbi, December 28, 2020
Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, president of Harvard, and Chief Economist at the World Bank, wrote a post-Christmas editorial for Bloomberg entitled, “Trump’s $2000 Stimulus Checks are a Big Mistake.” …The genesis of this Summers article is a perfect tale in microcosm about how America’s intellectual elite manages to lose elections to people like Donald Trump. It’s a two-step error. First, they put people like Summers in charge of economic policies. Then, they let them talk in public….
Of course, these same people often believe in jaw-droppingly enormous levels of public aid. Think of the $20 billion in taxpayer funds that went to rescue currency traders in 1995 (presented in the media as a bailout of “Mexico”), the massive IMF bailouts of Asia and Russia in the late nineties, and especially the multi–trillion-dollar Fed-fueled rescues of the finance sector both after 2008, and now (“We’re not going to run out of ammunition,” explained Fed chief Jerome Powell). Other examples include giving companies like Goldman, Sachs 100 cents on the dollar on debts owed them by AIG in that bailout, or the $3.625 billion private intervention to save one crackpot hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management in 1998.
The operating principle in most of those cases was that financial institutions must not be allowed to take crippling losses, even if those losses were the fault of the companies in question, because such a decision might trigger (pick one or more) “a chain reaction,” “catastrophic losses throughout the system,” “graver economic consequences,” the “spread” of investor “flu,” etc., etc.
The thinking of these experts changes, however, the instant the question shifts to rescuing individuals affected by something like the 2008 crash, or the current pandemic. Suddenly we learn that resources are scarce, and the commitment of public money to rescue mere People With Problems risks “moral hazard.”
Why Larry Summers MUST Believe $2,000 Checks Are A Bad Idea
Ian Welsh, December 29, 2020
Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
It’s traditional on New Year to either do a retrospective or a look forward. Let’s look forward to 2024.
Since the election, it has become conventional wisdom that Trump is defeated, and the “next” Trump will be more dangerous. I have been pointing this out from 2016 on, repeatedly: Even if Trump wanted to do all the things his critics feared, he was too incompetent to pull them off.
The person who isn’t Trump who is the most likely heir presumptive and the “actually dangerous” one is Josh Hawley.
First there is the fact that, along with Bernie Sanders, he was the primary person other than Trump pushing for a $2,000 check. His name was on that, all through the news. Trump’s final attempt to help the American people, and he was the champion.
Second, there is his move to force debate on whether to certify the election results.
Thanks @Walmart for your insulting condescension. Now that you’ve insulted 75 million Americans, will you at least apologize for using slave labor? pic.twitter.com/oYJP4Cv2qE
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 30, 2020
You can think that this is bullshit, and still recognize that it is smart politics. About three-quarters of Republicans think that there was significant voter fraud.
Hawley has now positioned himself as the champion of ordinary Americans and the only Senator willing to fight Trump’s doomed last stand.
He is the heir presumptive, and, at least at this point, it seems likely the only person who could beat in him the 2024 Republican primaries would be Trump himself.
As for the general, it seems most likely right now that Biden will fumble the economy, leaving a huge opening for another right-wing populist run.
Remember, until Covid, the economy was doing well. Trumponomics, as I noted in 2017, more-or-less worked. The UI payment increases and extensions were — and are — incredibly popular, and credited to Trump. If Biden’s economy isn’t as good as Trump’s before Covid, he (or Harris) is in for a world of hurt.
And in the tweet above, Hawley is running against Walmart. This is sheerest hypocrisy given he opposed a minimum wage increase in Missouri (which passed anyway), but it doesn’t matter; that won’t be remembered and this tweet will, especially if he says “I was wrong”, which he will.
AOC is Bernie’s heir, and Hawley seems to be moving into the position of Trump’s.
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***MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST****
Jeremiads notwithstanding, it appears that Biden’s strategy of appealing to Trump-disgusted suburban voters worked. At the US presidential level, at least, left-populists and Sanders supporters proved to be essentially irrelevant, politically. The Democratic consultant class has had its biases confirmed. What is, haha, left to the left-wing populist is to double down on the jeremiads: to predict that in the future, the inevitable failure of now-successful beige neoliberal centrism to reinstate its heavenly mandate in the USA will result, down the road, in the election of a smart fascist/right-populist Man On Horseback, if we’re lucky, merely a Viktor Orbán figure or suchlike for the American context — or worse, possibly much worse.
This reasoning seems very plausible to me. Because it is true that unless the neoliberal establishment has a change of heart, Bidenist/Obamaist US leadership will not be able to turn the ship around from an on-going trajectory of national and global decline. And insofar as that decline is felt in shrinking living standards, and insofar as “beige centrism” manages to suppress left-wing alternatives, the population will likely turn to forceful/violent right-wing populism, and all the inherent divide-and-conquer grifts that right-wing populism brings with it alongside the nationalist emotional highs and the “sugar rush.” As I said, it seems very plausible.
One of the bad habits of neoliberal intellectualism is an excessive reliance on “counter-intuitive” explanations as exemplified by the once-popular book Freakonomics. We should be rightly suspicious of narratives that tell us that things we view in common-sense terms as bad are actually good. Sometimes counter-intuitive explanations like that are valid, but only sometimes. But we should not fall into the reverse trap and always uncritically accept simpler explanations that happen to match our moral intuitions. A common left-wing moral intuition is what I explained above: A people increasingly deprived of access to the good life and unable to access progressive responses to that deprivation will eventually provide reactionary forces a breakthrough. It has, after all, happened before.
It is the implied determinism that we should view with at least a little bit of suspicion. First of all, although we should heed history’s warning signs, history actually does not truly repeat reliably, and context matters. Trump’s senility and incompetence was, in point of fact, part of the Trump political brand. It was the riposte to a failing elite in a time when elite “competence-signalling” was part of the elite self-image. The specific trajectory to the “competent Trump” is much harder to fathom, when the incompetence was specifically a part of what he was and still is lionized for by his most ardent followers.
If we leave aside the typical and easy materialist determinism that thrives particularly on the more left end of the spectrum and accept a little bit of “counter-intuitive” reasoning, a different picture emerges. One in which the success and failure of Trump was highly dependent on circumstances over and above material discontent, circumstances that are difficult to line up again. Circumstances in which the very competence of the future feared competent fascistoid is one of the features that prevents his (or her) rise, just to give a possibility. One in which the bad memory of Trump is sufficiently mobilizing for a long enough period of time that the mainstream neoliberal centre is protected from attempts at overcoming it.
In that world, between every election, things just keep getting worse and worse. And yet, the process of coalition building in a complex society given the American political system simply throws up Biden after Biden, Democrat or Republican. Decline centrism, unending. Like Tyler Durden’s vision in Fight Club, with people drying meat on the asphalt of a ruined highway, except they’re still arguing over whether they should choose the chieftain with the red trim or the blue trim as head chieftain, out of fear that one of them might reduce the incentives created by the fear of winter freezing by their proposed “peltfare” program.
Imagine this future: the soft, dirty sole of a comfortable white Reebok runner gently stroking a human cheek — forever.
Larry Summers, the man who is reliably wrong about everything, came out against a $2,000 check for Covid release.
It’s worth examining why, because Larry is an economics exemplar, and what makes him different is not being wrong about almost everything, it is being willing to shoot his tweet off about it.
This figure shows that the $2,000 tax credit would take household income relative to the economy’s potential size into territory never seen before with an economy anywhere near normal. pic.twitter.com/KTj3veE0QD
— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) December 27, 2020
That chart indicates there is no problem: The economy is on course, and fine. A $2,000 check for everyone will “overheat” the economy.
Larry Summers, 2013
There are three problems with this. The first is believing the numbers mean much of anything. Disposable income is one of the hardest things to calculate; there is a lot of guessing (called modeling) involved. We don’t actually know what everyone’s expenses are every month, and worse, we don’t know which ones they haven’t been keeping up on. If you give someone an extra $2,000, and they spend it on rent or paying down their credit card or student loans or mortgages, it turns out it wasn’t disposable income. Nor can you be sure what will happen to savings when you give someone a (small) cash windfall: They may save a fair bit of it. (The “marginal propensity to save may change to use econospeak.)
So +2,000 may not increase spending: We don’t know how much will go to savings and to debt repayment or other expenses.
The second thing is the idea that a one-time $2,000 windfall actually matters much. Even if it did all go to disposable income and get spent, so what? It’s a blip. Pricing and inflation decisions are made on longer term expectations, far more than on windfalls; if prices rise, they’ll fall back immediately. It’s a yawn.
The third is the great failing of neoliberal economics: A refusal to deal with distribution. Back on December 10th, a story claimed that 11.4 US households were $70 billion dollars behind on rent, averaging $5,000 each.
A story in November had the number of people behind on rent at 40 million.
The stories for people behind on mortgages and student and credit card loans are similar. More people are homeless, and so on.
Aggregate income is fine, in part because of UI extensions, but also because Covid has seen a redistribution of income and wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.
Everyone’s not OK. Tens of millions of people are in a bad way. In California, something between 40 to 50 percent of small businesses are in danger of closing and when some of them (be optimistic, say half) do, those jobs will go away.
So, let’s go back to Summers. He sees an aggregate economic number known to be unreliable, and assumes that it is reliable in a pandemic. He assumes that people will spend all the money, thus “overheating” the economy, rather than using it to pay off debts (to people who probably are also in over their heads and thus will not be spending much) or saving it. And, he doesn’t take into account the fact that aggregate personal disposable income, even if accurate, is an aggregate figure. Or perhaps, being generous, he assumes UI and other programs catch it all (if they did, we wouldn’t have all those people near eviction or small businesses near bankruptcy).
Summers lives in an imaginary world. He lives inside models and statistics and assumes that, combined, they represent the world well. The statistics often don’t, the models are often garbage, but a man who has dedicated his life to neoliberal economics cannot, indeed must not, see that, because if he admitted it was true, his entire life would be based on a lie.
So, the numbers are fine, the models are fine, and giving people more money will overheat the economy. It must be so, or Summers is a fool who has wasted his life, however much money he may have made.
Indeed, if he were to go down that rabbit hole he might realize that he helped cause the financial crisis with securities deregulation and didn’t see the housing bubble and so on precisely because he believes nonsense models and facts. Which would mean he has done great harm, and that a reasonable person who didn’t believe a bunch of nonsense wouldn’t have done all that harm.
So, the numbers are fine, the models are fine, and people don’t need $2,000 checks.
(Aside: I am given to understand by a friend who knows Summers well, that he is in fact, in terms of raw processing power, brilliant. I note that raw processing power, as my friend Stirling Newberry once pointed out to me, just gets you to the wrong conclusion faster if you don’t have judgement.)
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Cases have been found outside of Britain, including in the US and, ironically, France (slammed the door too late.) The practical result of the increased infectiousness are discussed by Tomas Pueyo.
The points are, as you’d expect, that it increases the speed of exponential growth. If it becomes the dominant strain (and it almost certainly will, because it grows faster), you have to really lock down. No sham lockdowns, people don’t go out for anything but food (maybe you even deliver that); schools are closed, no one works outside the house unless they truly are an essential worker.
Herd immunity now requires 75 percent+, not 60 percent of the population. That means it will take longer, and with respect to vaccines, people will need to be convinced to take them, or if necessary, forced to.
Countries that already got Covid-19 under control, like Vietnam, New Zealand, China, and Taiwan (notice a trend?) will be fine. They just keep tracking and tracing; keep quarantining visitors, and keep clamping down hard on even a hint of a break-out. Those of us who haven’t, like most of Europe, the US, Canada, Brazil, and so on, can either get serious RIGHT now and close schools and go to a real lock down, or we are going to have to wait for vaccine immunity, which may take until the end of 2022 depending on how many doses your country is getting and when (and if people will take them, or be forced to).
In general terms, my sense is that the first half of 2022 is going to be worse than 2021 in countries that have fumbled Covid, after that things should start improving noticeably.
This was a pro-active choice by our elites: They decided not to handle Covid. It was handled in many countries, the playbook is known to anyone who cares to know it just by seeing what was done or reading a 101 textbook, but “fumbling” Covid made elites in countries like the UK, Canada, and the US a lot richer and more powerful, so it was allowed to rage through the population and destroy the small business economy so that those who were able to stay open, like Amazon and Apple, and so on could grab huge amounts of market share.
Grandma died and young people got life-long heart problems so Jeff Bezos and private equity scum could get richer.
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