Month: June 2023 Page 2 of 3

There is no more important line in all of the humanities and the social sciences than this one from the Melian dialogue:

the strong do as they wish, while the weak suffer as they must

We have a system which requires those who wish to be powerful to perform evil acts. It is difficult to become powerful without having been vetted, without having “made ones bones.” To be sure, if you want power in a corporation or as a politician or in an organization like the World Bank or IMF, your killing and your torture of people is sanitized and done at arm’s length, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

You must prove you can make the “tough” decisions, which apparently means hurting other people while paying yourself very very well.

So tough.

Some few may make it thru to the bottom rungs of power, they, like AOC, are socialized into the requirements of power. First a politician who has noted that Israel is an apartheid state, for example, is made to bow before Israel, then step by step they are lead to vote for or at least abstain on votes they know are evil.

A manager is made to lay people off or fire them even as executive salaries increase, or to steal wages, or to force overtime. They are made to enforce policies they know are wrong.

In either case, after a time they become evil because we become what we do.

The good tend to be repulsed by power, because they see how it is abused, and they believe that power corrupts. There is some truth to this, of course, when you’re powerful you don’t have to care what other people think, or who you hurt, because they can’t retaliate. The weak are very well aware that if they hurt someone, that person may hurt them back.

Thus you never truly know if someone who is weak is truly good, it is power that reveals a person’s soul because true goodness is not a result of fear or bargaining.

But Thucydides was right: the powerful do as they will and the weak suffer what they must. The only way to create a good world is for the good to be powerful, and to create a system which filters out the evil and does not allow them to become powerful. When they do make it thru, and some will, just as very occasionally a good person gains power in our world, they must be forced out.

But if we want a good world, the good cannot run from power. They cannot disdain it. They must seek it, while understanding that it appears evil now because it is controlled by those who are evil.

If the good do not seek power, and if the good do not fight for it and if the good do not fight to keep the evil away from power, then we will always live in Hell.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 18, 2023

By Tony Wikrent

On June 18, 2023

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by Tony Wikrent

MY FIFTY YEARS WITH DAN ELLSBERG

Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 6-17-2023]

Climate and environmental crises

WTF is Happening? An Overview

[Watching the World Go Bye, via Naked Capitalism 6-14-2023]

As of June 10, 2023, worldwide data showed the remarkable concurrence of three dramatic climate events.

The first WTF is in the Antarctic, where sea-ice extent is setting record lows daily, now fully over 2 million kilometers below the 1991-2020 mean.…

For the second WTF we are going to move from the ocean to land and consider global 2-meter surface temperatures, where on June 10, for the third consecutive day temperatures breached the 1.5°C barrier (above the 1850-1900 IPCC baseline)….

And the third WTF is perhaps the furthest from any notion of normalcy. WTF is happening to the world’s oceans, and in particular the North Atlantic? Ocean temperatures have been setting unprecedented daily records, spiking to highs that are shocking climate scientists, as they look for possible reasons….

Narrowing the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act

[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 6-13-2023]

How Arizona squeezes tribes for water

[High Country News, via Naked Capitalism 6-15-2023]

Strategic Political Economy

The AMLO Project

[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 6-12-2023]

The Mexican political system was shaken on 1 July 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his new party MORENA achieved a resounding electoral victory, winning 53% of the votes in a four-way race – a thirty-point lead over his closest contender….

The idiosyncrasies of AMLO’s left-populist presidency have pitted him not only against the neoliberal right, but also against the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan intelligentsia and neozapatista-adjacent autonomists. These groups have variously accused him of ‘turning the country into Venezuela’, peddling ‘conservativism’ and acting as a ‘henchman of capital’. Yet as his six-year term reaches its final lap, a closer look at AMLO’s record reveals a much more complex picture. His overarching project has been to move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. To what extent has he succeeded, and what can the left learn from this endeavour?

Lina Khan Fires a Crooked CEO

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-2023]

The FTC blocked a genomics technology merger, leading to the firing of a CEO. The deal involved Bill Gates, Barack Obama, China and Jeff Bezos. And corporate America is in shock….

…it’s worth taking a look at one of the biggest recent stories in corporate America that went largely unnoticed by the political world. Last Sunday, Francis deSouza resigned from his position as the CEO of Illumina, which is one of the most important medical technology firms in the world. Since 2019, deSouza had pursued a string of failed acquisitions, and ultimately his shareholders revolted. His most recent was an attempt to buy cancer test producer Grail, which was ruled unlawful by both European antitrust enforcers and the Federal Trade Commission’s Lina Khan.

You may not have heard of Illumina, and you probably haven’t heard of deSouza. But deSouza is now the second CEO to lose his job due to Biden antitrust enforcers, after Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle resigned last year in the wake of a failed merger with Simon & Schuster. In C Suites, and within the antitrust bar, deSouza, and Dohle, are now cautionary tales of empire building gone wrong….

…And this brings me to Microsoft, which is pursuing a somewhat irrational acquisition of game giant Activision, a bank shot attempt to monopolize gaming. The merger is on the rocks, because Great Britain ruled that it’s illegal, and the combination is also being challenged by the FTC. And yet Microsoft won’t relent. A few weeks ago, in an essay called Corporate Temper Tantrums, I noted that there’s an open question about whether large corporations or democratic governments set the rules for our societies. Microsoft is the key example. Its threat to combine operations with Activision, despite the British government calling the transaction illegal, looks completely crazy, akin to civil disobedience by a Fortune 500 firm. There’s no reason for it, since the firm has a great path ahead embedding AI in its products. Gaming is a sideshow. Why would the firm destroy its political reputation with this scorched earth campaign?

The answer, I believe, runs straight through the resignation of Illumina’s CEO….

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On June 17, 2023

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Quick Takes 3: Foreign Interference, Pandemic Deaths As New Normal, China-Brazil Trade and More

By Ian Welsh

On June 15, 2023

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In Covid news:

1) CO2 levels below 540 are sufficient to stop exponential Covid spread.

2) The European Mortality Project will start using death numbers from 2020-2022 and late when calculating excess mortality. Meaning that they will make “people who died due to Covid or Covid related mortality” just part of the normal. An out of control pandemic is normal now.

Given the reduction in testing, I have no idea what current Covid death numbers really are. Last time I wrote an article a commenter kindly pointed out that the CDC’s numbers were much less than the numbers I’d posted (always check the most recent numbers, woops) and I adjusted them down, but how much of that reduction in Covid deaths is real, I just don’t know. I’m 100% sure it’s not, well, 100%, however.

We’re all just going to pretend the pandemic is over and if that means not testing and changing statistical indices to make a pandemic level of death normal, well that’s what we’re going to do.

Meanwhile, readers who were with me thru the pandemic will know I constantly said we needed filtering and ventilation. Turns out that if we’d done that, we could have ended the damn thing. What a sur…-well, ok, not a surprise. Complete common sense solution would have worked. Who would’a’thunk?

Who’s Interfering In Country’s Politics?

Every time I hear some idiot whine about Russian interference in the US I laugh my ass off, and chasing it down and bolting it back in place has significantly inmproved my fitness.

But what everyone knows is that the country that interferes the most in other countries’ politics is the US. I knew a senior aide in the Mulroney government of the 80s, and she said they confirmed that the US had the place wired for sound. Everything said in the parliament buildings, including in private ministerial officers were known to the Americans.

Anyway, the French are doing a witch hunt about foreign (read “Russian”) interference, and Francois Fillion (prime Minister from 2007 to 2012) told them the following

“Have I encountered foreign interference in my political life, and particularly when I was in government? Yes, I have encountered it. Most of the time they came from a friendly and allied country called the United States. I am not passing judgement: your commission is working on foreign interference. I am telling you that, for example, I was listened to with President Sarkozy for 5 years by the NSA. We found out when documents from the American secret services leaked, and everyone focused on the fact that the NSA was listening to Ms. Merkel, but they were also listening to all members of the French government and probably those of other European countries.”

You’d have to have a room temperature IQ and the judgment of a cabbage to think otherwise, but our journalists and pundit class are down with the requirements of their jobs.

That China Developing Country Trade Thing

So, if you were Brazil, which country would be more important to you, the US or China?

Brazil’s extreme, but the issue is simple: this sort of stuff is going on all through Africa and South America, though in most cases it’s less one sided: the Chinese sell a lot of goods. But whatever way you slice it, Chinese grade is more important than the US or the EU now to most developing countries. (France, in particular, used to be a big deal in a lot of Africa. China has eaten their lunch.)

Then we have US/Israel Blowback. It seems that when Israel decided to support Ukraine, and Iran not only sold Russia drones it needed but helped them build a domestic factory, Russia decided to reciprocate by giving Iran hypersonic missile technology, which, yeah, the Israeli “Iron Dome” is not going to be able to shoot down worth a damn.

Russia spent a lot of time balancing its Syria interests against not antagonizing Israel, but I guess Israel didn’t realize there were limits.

And remember, Iran hit a US base with missiles when the US assassinated one of its generals.

Enough for today, more in the future.

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What Made Wagner Useful To Putin & Russia + Notes On Ukraine’s Counteroffensive

By Ian Welsh

On June 13, 2023

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People misunderstand Wagner’s role in the Ukrainian war.

Wagner is a prison to meat-grinder operation. Convicts were recruited, given a bit of training and sent on the most dangerous attacks. This meant that regular Russian troops were not expended, and that less civilians had to be drafted or recruited.

When Prigozhin complains about mistreatment, he’s probably right. To the Russian military, Wagner are useful, but scum. Remember that Prigozhin himself is an ex-convict, and he was sent to prison for theft, which included in one case choking a woman nearly to death.

Using convicts may have saved Russian troops, but convicts in the military never ends well. The same thing was done, without the mercenary cutout, in Afghanistan by the Russians and it did great damage to the Russian military.

Prigozhin, though I have no sympathy for him, is refusing to send more convicts into the meat grinder for Putin, or perhaps he’s running low on convicts and would now have to use his more valuable troops.

Which leads us to the counter-offensive. It’s going badly. So far, very badly. The equipment NATO gives Ukraine and even the training is all very nice, but NATO militaries are built around the assumption of air superiority or supremacy, and they don’t have that. This makes Ukrainian columns (and they keep attacking in columns, which seems unwise) very vulnerable to Russia air and artillery.

I’ve heard some people say the heavy brigades have yet to be committed, so we’ll see what happens. But I’d be surprised in the counter-offensive really changes the picture of the war. So far the Russians are betting they can win a war of attrition, especially if the attrition is born more by Ukrainians and Russian convicts than by Russian troops, and so far, that seems to be true.

This is especially the case as NATO equipment stores have been drawn down to the point where most NATO countries are leery of sending large amounts of equipment to Ukraine because it would leave the cupboards completely bare.

The war would already be over if there hadn’t been massive NATO supply and command and control, but Ukraine has lost a lot of men and I don’t see how NATO can keep up the resupply. Russia’s seems to have some supply issues, but it looks to me like Ukraine’s are more serious.

We’ll see how it plays out.

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And He Said To Me “We’re all going to die, and heaven knows we deserve to”

By Ian Welsh

On June 12, 2023

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That’s what a friend wrote to me when he sent me the story attached to that picture.

“A cleanup is underway as an unquantifiable amount of dead fish washed ashore on several Texas beaches today due to low oxygen levels in the water, according to a Quintana Beach County Park Official.”

Yeah. Now this isn’t just a climate change thing, nor is this the first time it’s happened, but warm water holds less oxygen and also reduces the number of oxygen producing phytoplankton. Red Tides (algal blooms which deplete oxygen) are also made more common by climate change.

So, there are two things to say about this.

First: the probability that all humans will die is low. Not zero or effectively zero though I know some smart people who think that’s true. They argue “the Earth has had this much carbon/heat before and there was life, it’ll suck, but whatever.” Well, yeah, but not while humans were around.

What it really is is about is an assumption that the next equilibrium point (from the one we’ve inhabited for about 10K years) is a livable one, and that we won’t blow thru it and others and settle at one which is not livable, or more accurately, which we cannot adapt to in time to avoid an extinction spiral.

It is also true that the problem is NOT just carbon, it is ecological collapse. Human are apex predators. If we take out the web beneath us, we are the ones most vulnerable.

This is probably true. It is not certainly true.

Second: Just Because Human Life Will Probably Go On, Doesn’t Mean Yours Will. Or, y’know, the life of anybody you care about. Always true, but more true in mass death scenarios. Nor does it mean your life will not really, really, suck.

Well, there’s your Monday cheer for you!

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 11, 2023

By Tony Wikrent

On June 11, 2023

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

What Happens When Corporations are Taxed at 50% – Like Before the Reagan Revolution?

Thom Hartmann, June 5, 2023 [DailyKos]

The main benefit of raising the top personal income tax bracket back up to nosebleed levels is that it causes CEOs and business owners (people who can essentially determine their own pay) to restrain themselves from draining the corporate coffers just to buy a new super-yacht, jet, private island, or a fourth 70-room mansion in the Swiss Alps.

Back in the 1933-1981 era, instead of behaving like spendthrift wastrels, CEOs and business owners would take income up to the edge of the top tax bracket and then stop (with the most prosperous CEOs maxing out at around 30 times average worker income), leaving the rest of the money in the company….

The second, though, is really the most important: taxes are used to incentivize behaviors that are good for the nation and discourage behaviors that are destructive to the nation.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

Thom Hartmann, June 3, 2023 [DailyKos]

[TW: Ian explained the damage tax cuts inflict on real investment in a January 2008 post on FireDogLake, which is now longer even archived. It was entitled, “Why Financial Crises Will Keep Happening” and I saved this excerpt of it:

At this point to wring the excesses out of the system and to stop the systemic incentives to keep blowing bubbles is going to require doing something to make it so it doesn’t pay. There are two parts to any solution. The first and simplest way is to put a very progressive tax on all income no matter how or where earned that probably comes in at over 95% of all income over, say, $500,000 or a million at the most. Suddenly, needing to actually keep the companies sound, and knowing that in 7 years when the loans go bad, they’ll still be there taking the heat for it, will tend to concentrate the mind not on “can I make enough money to be in a yacht in 3 years” but into “does this deal make sense over the longrun”.

-TW ]

The economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich (PDF)

[LSE Research Online, via Naked Capitalism 6-8-2023]

The Abstract: “This paper uses data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment. First, we use a new encompassing measure of taxes on the rich to identify instances of major reduction in tax progressivity. Then, we look at the causal effect of these episodes on economic outcomes by applying a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences indicator that implements Mahalanobis matching in panel data analysis. We find that major reforms reducings taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.”

(anti)Republican Party debt charade

The Fix Was In With Biden’s Debt Ceiling Deal (podcast)

June 8, 2023 [The Lever]

On this week’s Lever Time, Sirota and David Dayen of The American Prospect unravel the “meager thinking” behind the debt ceiling deal.

The Coming Storm of Fiscal Policy

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, June, 2023 [The American Prospect]

How Democrats created a worse debt ceiling situation in 2025…. A default was sidestepped, but only for now. Depending on decisions made by voters just a year and a half from today, we could well see a replay of exactly the same type of hostage-taking from congressional Republicans—only then, President Biden would have even less leverage than he had this time around. Indeed, 2025 will feature a Kilimanjaro-sized fiscal cliff, giving the 2024 elections even higher policy stakes. Provisions of the Affordable Care Act and most provisions of Donald Trump’s tax cuts are both set to expire in 2025, and at the same time the debt ceiling will unfreeze, and the spending caps instituted under the Fiscal Responsibility Act will expire….

The Biden administration has been at its best when using the administrative state to take on rapacious corporations and protect the public. This deal impedes that work. The next deal might see it grind to a halt. Looking at who the president trusted with negotiations doesn’t exactly cause a swell of optimism, either. One of the top negotiators Biden appointed was Steve Ricchetti, a former head of lobbying for pharmaceutical companies (among other industries). Ricchetti has a documented history of opposing labor interests and overt elitism and nepotism. Also heavily involved was White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, who has long been a key pathway for getting corporate preferences into policy. On top of that, Zients himself exemplifies the type of corporate tycoon that the full weight of regulatory power should be coming down on. Trusting either with the fate of regulatory agencies is letting the fox negotiate the strength of the henhouse.

In short, this round of negotiations was fought to a draw, but the White House backed itself into a corner before the next one even started. The White House may have won a reprieve from fiscal policy fights, but there’s a fiscal policy hurricane brewing.