Ian Welsh

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

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 19, 2020

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On January 19, 2020

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by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Seattle city council bans most political spending by ‘foreign-influenced corporations’

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-20]

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy
(Vox, via The Big Picture 1-17-20]

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by , the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

…The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.

Too damn bad the Vox author does not realize this is exactly the political process of demagoguery warned about by Hamilton, Madison, Adams and others at the beginning of the republic. And more – they warned that this process was likely to be initiated  by the rich, such as Leon Black (see below).

Green New Deal – An opportunity too big to miss

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Open Thread

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On January 18, 2020

32 Comments

Feel free to use the comments to this post to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (Posting was light last week due to some business, but should resume a more regular schedule this week.)

Dozens of Extinctions from the Australia Wildfires, But That’s Not the Worst

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On January 15, 2020

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So a few humans got killed, and a lot of property got burned, but the real losers were the animals.

“Hundreds of species have been affected by these fires,” Legge says. “That includes many dozens of threatened species; some of these will be brought to the brink of extinction as a result of this event. And if they’re not made extinct by this event, I think this is the beginning of the end for them. Because this event will reoccur. It’s awful. It will be ecosystem collapse in a lot of cases. And we’re not exactly sure what we’ll end up with at the end of it all.” (my emphasis)

So here’s the thing: What is happening in California, the Pacific Northwest, Australia, the Amazon, and elsewhere is that the climate is changing.

Bit of a surprise, right? I mean, it’s called “climate change” for a reason.

But this means that the plants and animals that are in these places now, which have been adapted to a particular climate, which means not just temperature but rainfall, will no longer be viable. They will be removed. That’s just how this is going to run.

Now, if we were going to stop here, or even just continue a bit, whatever. It’d be awful, we’d lose biodiversity, but we’d recover.

But as the interviewee, Sarah Legge, notes later on:

Obviously, the driver here is climate change, leading to extended drought and high temperatures. Australia is looking at 3 to 4 degrees of warming. I’m frightened to even imagine the country in that scenario. If this fire event is what we experienced with 1 degree of warming, what on earth are we going to be experiencing at 3 or 4 degrees of warming?

Yeah. Only one-third to one-quarter through this. The worst is yet to come.

Note the bolded text in the first post “Because this event will reoccur.” This isn’t the last fire in Australia, or elsewhere.

There will be less dramatic reshaping of climate. Rains that don’t come, maybe even monsoons that don’t come. Less water or more water. Local areas will have wildly variable temperature changes–arctic temperature increases are already at three to four degrees celcius.

This will effect us and our agriculture. We grow crops in latitudinal bands, modified by soil and water availability. As those change, we’re going to have huge spikes in the prices of crops, and eventually (and eventually may be rather soon), famines. We tend to grow monocrops without genetic variability (corn, rice, wheat, etc.) Vat-grown food, which industry is pushing, is still going to require vast monocrops (though much of it will be algae), and much of it will still be vulnerable to these sorts of changes.

We’ve only just started this process. So far, very few humans have died, but the plants and animals are taking the brunt.

But that will change.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

AOC Is Actually Serious About Building Progressive Power

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On January 13, 2020

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This matters. This is putting your money where your mouth is and refusing to play nice with your enemies.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already topped the fundraising charts in her short time in Congress, but the liberal darling won’t donate a cent of her millions to Democrats’ House campaign organization — a position that has rankled some of her colleagues, Fox News has learned.

Instead, Ocasio-Cortez is building her own fundraising operation for fellow progressive candidates to bypass the official Democratic Party infrastructure. Already, she’s actively funding primary challengers to oust certain Democratic colleagues.

Refusing to playing nice with your enemies? Yes. For as long as I’ve watched us politics, the DCCC has been hostile to progressives, usually underfunding them or refusing to fund them, and has pushed conservative Democratic candidates.

AOC mentioned this in March:

The Democratic party is a conservative centrist party (centrist in American terms, conservative in its ideology.) Independents are more left-wing than Democrats are, which is why Sanders did better with them than with Democrats in 2016. Those Democrats who whined about this are right: Sanders isn’t a Democrat, because he’s a left-winger and Democrats aren’t.

So for years, Democrats have constantly put their muscle and money behind centrist candidates and attacked left-wingers. The cry of the old Netroots was “More and better Democrats!” By this we meant, “more left-wing Democrats,” but the party was fanatically hostile to that and eventually crushed the insurgency–with a great deal of help from Obama.

Now another generation is taking their shot, and I’m glad to see they aren’t playing nice. The fight for the Democratic party is a fight, and to the victors goes the policy. People like Pelosi want to sell that policy to Wall Street and so on, people like Sanders and AOC want to use it to help ordinary people. It isn’t more complicated than that, and while tactical alliances can be made against Republicans, Pelosi and Biden have nothing in common with AOC or Sanders. They aren’t friends, they’re enemies. It’s just that in America’s two-party system, they cohabit.

But too many left-wingers have continued to think that Democrats like them, are friendly to them, or want the same things as they do.

They don’t. Democrats want the rich to get richer, they want to have slightly “smarter” wars than the Republicans (Libya rather than Iraq), and they want to not be cruel quite as openly as Republicans. Democratic policy is epitomized by Obama pretending to help home owners, but actually pushing them into bankruptcy to help banks.

Obama was a REAL Democrat. People like AOC and Sanders harken back to the politics championed by FDR and ended by Bill Clinton, husband of Hilary Clinton.

Don’t give money to your enemies.

AOC gets it.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 12, 2020

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On January 12, 2020

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 12, 2020
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population (PDF)
Charles I. Jones, [Empty Planet, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-20]

To sustain a constant population requires a total fertility rate slightly greater than 2 in order to compensate for mortality. The graph shows that high income countries
as a whole, as well as the U.S. and China individually, have been substantially below 2 in recent years. According to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects 2019, the total fertility rate in the most recent data is 1.8 for the United States, 1.7 for China and for High Income Countries on average, 1.6 for Germany, 1.4 for Japan, and 1.3 for Italy and Spain. In other words, fertility rates in the rich countries of the world are already consistent with negative long-run population growth: women are having fewer than two children throughout much of the developed world.

“Americans’ happiness is correlated with spending on public goods”

[Boing Boing, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-20]

“Baylor University political scientist Patrick Flavin’s forthcoming study in Social Science Research finds that people in states with higher public goods spending (on ‘libraries, parks, highways, natural resources and police protection’) report higher levels of happiness. It’s not clear whether they are happier because they have better services, or whether people who choose to live in places where they don’t have to pay for their neighbors’ kids’ education, parks, etc, are selfish, miserable f*cks.”

The Carnage of Establishment Neoliberal Economics

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Open Thread

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On January 11, 2020

16 Comments

Feel free to use the comments to this post to discuss subjects unrelated to recent posts.

An Australia Picture Worth Those Thousand Words

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On January 9, 2020

35 Comments

Really, very little to add to something like this, except, “Imagine that happening in a densely populated country. Now, imagine it happening in a densely populated, poor country.”

(This is a 3D image based on NASA data, not a photograph from space. All areas have been effected, not all were burning at the same time.)

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Iran Isn’t Going to Let Itself Be Kicked to Death Without Fighting Back

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On January 7, 2020

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As expected, and very cleanly and clearly. No attempt to obfuscate:

At least two airbases housing US troops in Iraq have been hit by more than a dozen ballistic missiles, according to the US Department of Defence.

Iranian state TV says the attack is a retaliation after the country’s top commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike in Baghdad, on the orders of US President Donald Trump.

As I noted when Iran general (and war hero) Qasem Soleimani was assassinated, Iran pretty much had to retaliate.

Soleimani was effectively the most powerful General in Iran. Think of him as a combination of Eisenhower and someone who fought on the front lines: to Iranians, a genuine hero. The man who actually was most responsible for defeating ISIS, among other things.

You could regard him as the second most important man in Iraq.

If the US could kill him without consequences, no one in Iran’s leadership was safe, except possibly Khameini (the Supreme Leader) and maybe not even him.

Retaliating is a matter of personal survival for Iran’s leadership. Personal.

But Soleimani was also tremendously popular. So, as often happens when attacked by outsiders, even Iranians who dislike the Iranian regime have rallied around. (Americans may remember something similar after 9/11.)

I note that Iran has retaliated by hitting military targets. Which is to say: The US killed someone in their military, they have retaliated by attacking the US military. I would say that this is legitimate.

Only bullies think that their victims are obligated to sit still while being hit and not punch back. Oh, and a lot of Americans.

Trump threatened that if Iran retaliated he would hit multiple targets, including cultural ones. Iran has said that if he does so they will escalate, including hitting Israel and Dubai.

What they are trying to indicate is that they are not going to be Iraq. It isn’t going to be some nice clean war where the victim sits still while bombed to shit by US forces and only a few American soldiers die, which no one actually cares about who matters. (No, no, don’t pretend that American leaders actually care about American casualties, their actions indicate they do not and you’ll look like an idiot and a fool.)

Remember that Iran is an ally of both Russia and China. China needs Iran in order to complete its Belt and Road Initiative (the centerpiece of both their economic and alliance strategy and Xi Jinping’s signature policy, upon which his legacy rests). Russia is run by Putin, who has made not allowing the US to destroy any more Russian allies the centerpiece of his foreign policy. It’s why he went into Syria, and it’s why he hates Hilary Clinton so much, as he regarded her as the prime US actor in destroying Libya.

So this war has a real chance of serious escalation. Iraq was isolated and had no friends. Iran is somewhat isolated, yes, but it does have powerful friends who believe it is in their self-interest to keep Iran from being blown into failed state status by the US.

Again, the logic here is the same as Iran’s as regards escalation: If Russia (and China) let the US take out their allies whenever the US wants, then what is to stop the US from just doing that until these countries have no allies left?

This is a dangerous moment, and the US is not in the right here. The US unilaterally caused this problem by assassinating a senior government official. All the whinging on about how Soleimani has been involved in Iranian proxy attacks on the US is ludicrous: The official US policy is to fund and aid terrorists attacking Iran (look it up.) US officials, certainly including every President since Bush, have made decisions leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and other countries’ military personnel.

This is realpolitik, not some morality play. There are no good guys here, there are just people who are acting on orders or in what they think are the interests of their country. (Or, in Trump’s case, his own interests.)

The correct action right now is to not escalate again. Escalation will lead to a lot of dead people, for no gain for either Iran or the US.

Note that I despise Iran’s regime. I am a left-winger who believes in the equality of men and women, kindness and universal humanity, not in theocratic government. If Iran’s government were to fall tomorrow, I’d be OK with that.

But that’s internal Iranian business. It’s not America’s business to start a war with Iran. It will not make anything better, any more than attacking Iraq did, or attacking Libya (which now has its famous open air slave markets).

It should also be noted that, if the war happens, the Europeans are going to get slammed with another bunch of refugees. Perhaps they should pre-empt this by sending some troops to Tehran, so that if Trump attacks, he has to kill Germans and French.

Kidding, kidding. I know that the EU has no actual morals and not enough guts to do this. But, y’know, in an alternate universe where they actually had the bravery to stand up to the US either in their own interests, or in something approaching a desire to do the right thing…

We’ll see how this plays out.

But remember, Iran isn’t planning on sitting still and taking it. This isn’t going to be Iraq of Afghanistan. If this turns into a real war, they will hit back with everything they have, rather than hoping that if they just lie there and let the US kick them, the US will stop before kicking them to death.

And China and (especially) Russia don’t want them kicked to death.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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