“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada.
“For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.
The report, labelled secret, is intended as a piece of “special operational information” to be distributed only within the RCMP and among “decision-makers” in the federal government.
With the United States entangled in conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and the threat of a war with China looming large, Professor Michael Brenner’s insights and views on the state of the US-led liberal order are arguably as timely and important as ever….
MB: The entire foreign policy community in the United States now shares the basic tenets of neoconservatives. Actually, the scripture is Paul Wolfowitz’s notorious memorandum of March 1991 wherein he laid out a comprehensive, detailed strategy for systematizing American global dominance. Everything that Washington is doing, and thinking, now is derivative of that plan.
Its core principles: the United States should use all the means at its disposal to establish American global dominance; to that end, it must be ready to act preventively to stymie the emergence of any power that could challenge our hegemony; and to maintain full spectrum dominance in every region of the globe. Ideals and values are relegated to an auxiliary role as a veneer on the application of power and as a stick with which to beat others. Classic diplomacy is disparaged as inappropriate to this scheme of things.
For Biden himself, a confident, assertive, hard-edged approach to dealing with others derives naturally from belief in Americanism as a Unified Field Theory that explains, interprets and justifies whatever the US thinks and does. Were Biden reelected, this outlook will remain unchanged. And were he to be replaced by Kamala Harris mid-term, which is likely, inertia will keep everything on the fixed course.
Doesn’t seem to be much question: they’re hitting dams (not to destroy the dam, I suspect, to take out the hydropower and the river crossing point) and various other power infrastructure, night after night.
This is something they hadn’t done before: there had been some attacks, but nothing systematic.
This isn’t a new tactic: in the 90s Gulf War, the US took out nineteen of twenty power plants, which led to water treatment and supply issues, which lead to c. one million deaths from cholera. To this day Iraq doesn’t have enough power. They also directly hit water infrastructure, and they used similar tactics in the 2000s Iraq war.
One of the “good” things about the Ukraine war until now is Putin’s refusal to get down into the mud with such tactics, and I’m disappointed he’s now done so. There is some military case: the railroads are electrified, for example, and Russia is getting ready for a huge offensive, probably starting in May.
Of course, after what the US and the EU have condoned in Palestine, they are in no position to complain about such “relatively” mild actions. Putin isn’t trying to cause a famine and commit genocide and the profile of deaths is far different: the Israelis killed more children in a month than both sides in the Ukraine war have killed in years.
An effect of this is going to be another huge wave of refugees to Europe. Pragmatically, though not ethically, this puts more pressure on the Europeans and I’m sure Putin knows that and wants it to happen.
The war is reaching its endgame. Russia is going to crush Ukraine then enforce the peace they want. I would assume they’ll take Odessa and the entire coast, and otherwise just the Russian majority regions and the land bridge, but they’ll conquer far more of that to force Ukraine and the US to the table.
Ukraine will be a complete basket case after the war, and rebuilding will be done on standard neoliberal debt and looting terms. Meanwhile, there will be far more women than men.
The war should have ended a couple months after it started. Ukraine would have ended in far better shape and hundreds of thousand of soldiers would be alive.
But that’s not what the West wanted, and why should they care, after all. They were, and are, fighting to the last Ukrainian.
The difference between Francis and his critics isn’t as wide as some people make out, and he’s far less unorthodox than his enemies claim, but this is the difference: Francis wants to welcome people, and believes in a God whose primary trait is love, while Church conservatives want to exclude people.
The greatest controversy of Francis’s pontificate has been his allowing blessings for same sex couples. He doesn’t allow marriage, and no priest has to bless a homoxexual couple, but they are now allowed to. In Africa, most of which is virulently and culturally anti-gray, this has gone down badly even with those on the left of the Church, but outside African, it’s been a theological issue. The Church teaches homosexuality is a sin and no grace can be given to homosexual couples.
Anyone who knows the church finds this ironic and funny, given that the priesthood and the bureaucracy couldn’t run without closeted gays.
The larger issue, though, is that just as Jesus spent time with tax collectors, prostitutes and other low-lifes, and believed it was almost impossible for the rich to enter heaven, Francis believes the Church should reach out to sinners, treat them kindly and even love them, as Jesus loved humanity, despite our sins.
The example of Jesus, as displayed in the Gospels, is that of love for the unworthy. His contempt is for the empty ritualists, the Pharisees, and the greedy, but even they are invited to join Jesus on the path to God. But, of all the sins he took time to condemn, Jesus himself never spoke of homosexuality.
I’m not, overall, a fan of Christianity. I’m with Gore Vidal, who said that monotheism was the worst thing to befall the West. Christianity and Islam’s records are of vast violence and coercion and horrific crimes.
But there is a good side to Christianity, a tendency to love and acceptance and care for the poor and the weak which comes directly from the Gospels, and that care tends to be show much more in the better offshoots of Catholicism than in most Protestant denominations, tainted as they are by ideas of predestination and/or salvation by faith alone. When Henry the Eighth forcibly shut the monasteries one claim was that they didn’t help the poor enough, but the new Anglican church did even less.
Francis is the only Pope of my life who I regard as Christian: as following the the example of Jesus, even if very imperfectly. The others were orthodox inquisitors, feeling that rules were more important than love and charity.
I rather doubt that either Benedict or John Paul II will like their reception, should Jesus and Heaven exist:
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
The West has sanctioned China repeatedly, most notably in chip production technologies, but not just in those.
It has backfired, with China quickly building its own chip manufacturing capacity, though they still have a ways to go to entirely catch up. Huawei has also created their own phone OS, cutting the Google/Apple duopoly, and Apple sales are crashing, while the government is telling all government departments not to use Intel or AMD chips.
But China has largely not replied with its own sanctions. The reason is obvious: as long as they don’t, the US remains dependent on China for a vast swathe of goods. The reason chips were sanctioned is that it was one of the only areas where the West was ahead of China (the others are biotech and arguably aviation, though given Boeing’s problems, that’s an arguably.)
If China sanctioned the West, the West would have to re-shore a vast swathe of manufacturing: if not back to Europe and the US, at least to reliable allies. It would become stronger, as Russia did under sanctions.
It would also be in a far better position to wage war. Right now, in a US/China war, the US would be swiftly be crippled by its need for manufactured goods it can only get from China.
To put it simply, the US is far more dependent on China than vice-versa, and China wants to keep it that way.
I’ve written, prescriptively, that money shouldn’t buy anything that matters: not healthcare or education, for example.
Anything we can do, we can afford
But at the top level money can’t buy anything you couldn’t do anyway. Anything we can’t do, we can only buy from others. The Britian of the thirties was still, despite all its problems, a great industrial power. They could do most things, and it was ridiculous to pretend they didn’t have the money. They could build ships and buildings and refine medicines and so on.
There we some things they couldn’t do: they couldn’t produce as much food as they wanted: they bad to buy that from others. But since other people wanted what they could do, they would accept British pounds.
And there were things no one could do, and money wouldn’t buy those things: go to the moon, for example.
Today, for all our money and science, we still can’t just buy an end to cancer.
But if you can’t produce something yourself, you can only buy/do it if those who produce it are willing to sell to you, and if you must have it, they can charge very high prices if they sell at all.
Britain couldn’t produce enough Destroyers in WWII, so they had to go begging to America to get them, and the price the Americans charged was extremely, extremely high. (The book “That Man” by Justice Jackson goes into this.)
Ukraine wants a lot more missiles and artillery shells, but Europe and America don’t make enough or won’t sell large chunks of their reserves.
When you don’t have or, or lose the ability to produce something yourself you lose the ability to buy it with your own currency without other countries having a veto. Produce can mean many things, for the Japanese and Germans in WWII, it meant not having enough oil production of their own.
When America and the West in general shipped their productive capacity overseas they assumed that it didn’t matter: that in the world of free trade, they’d always be able to buy what they needed, and that they’d have effectively infinite money.
It doesn’t work like that. If we produce less, in time our standards of living will decline and in times of crisis, others will keep what matters for themselves first. (Covid vaccines illustrated this, and even if you think they didn’t work, well, at the time the vast majority didn’t believe that.)
As climate change, ecological collapse and civilization collapse continue, we will also find our ability to buy what we need constrained: not enough water in large areas. Not enough fertile farmland. It isn’t that there is nothing we can do: we can try varieties of indoor farming and we can de-salinize water and so on, but we won’t be able to buy enough of what we need. We won’t be able to easily buy insects or bees, or fish in the ocean or low CO2 in the air.
Anything we can do, we can buy. But if we can’t do it, we can’t buy it.
People forget this, both ways. Both in learned helplessness, as if we couldn’t easily house everyone and feed everyone (the absolute food shortages are in the future): we have massive food subsidies and enough ability to build homes, after all.
Anyone saying ‘we can’t afford’ is either a fool, or feeding you bullshit.
But there are some things we can’t afford, and the number of those things will increase over time.
[TW: It is astonishing how upset many people are about the prospect of shrinking populations. The political economic vision of civic republicans should be emphasizing that the entire aim of developing and employing technology that replaces human labor, is to diminish the need for human labor. But the benefits of new technologies must be shared equitably. ]
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-21-2024]
“The top 10 percent in both the UK and the US live over a decade more than the bottom 10 percent. It’s not even that they live more, they live more healthy lives. Why is that? Well the poor often don’t have the chance to exercise, their diets are often poor, and they work multiple jobs and have problems with sleep. All these things we think we can do, they’re harder if you’re poor and have to juggle jobs, child care, et cetera. One worry I have is that if we discover sophisticated interventions—like turning on stem cells and so on, or having to give transcription factors to people intravenously—depending on the sophistication of the intervention only the rich might be able to afford them. That would make the disparity even worse. Not only are the rich living longer, they’re going to live even longer and healthier.”
A Chinese scientist has recently reiterated the idea of building the world’s largest particle collider in China. His team had published a technical design report for it last December. Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said that the country will soon draft a blueprint for the construction of the particle collider called the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), which could cost about 36 billion yuan (US$5 billion).
The “temporary pier” being built on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza is not there to alleviate the famine, but to herd Palestinians onto ships and into permanent exile.
Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians.
If the Arab world will not take them, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed during his first round of visits after Oct. 7, the Palestinians will be cast adrift on ships. It worked in Beirut in 1982 when some eight and a half thousand Palestine Liberation Organization members were sent by sea to Tunisia and another two and a half thousand ended up in other Arab states. Israel expects that the same forced deportation by sea will work in Gaza.
Israel, for this reason, supports the “temporary pier” the Biden administration is building, to ostensibly deliver food and aid to Gaza – food and aid whose “distribution” will be overseen by the Israeli military.…
If the U.S. or Israel were serious about alleviating the humanitarian crisis, the thousands of trucks with food and aid currently at the southern border of Gaza would be allowed to enter any of its multiple crossings. They are not. The “temporary pier,” like the air drops, is ghoulish theater, a way to mask Washington’s complicity in the genocide.
Israeli media reported the building of the pier was due to pressure by the United Arab Emirates, which threatened Israel with ending a land corridor trade route it administers in collusion with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to bypass Yemen’s naval blockade.
The Jerusalem Post reported it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who proposed the construction of the “temporary pier” to the Biden administration….
Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Algeria and Syria who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute “has called the airdrops the greatest humiliation of the United States by Israel he has ever seen. He is struck by the fact that the US is acting as if it is ‘trying to get supplies into besieged people surrounded by an enemy of the United States.’”
[TW: In my first pass at this subject, I found an astonishing lack of information about actual physical parameters of humanitarian aid; i.e., how many tons of food and medical supplies are required to meet the needs of a specified number of people. This is astonishing, but not surprising, because one of the most baneful effects of neoliberalism has been a cultural arrogance toward any subject matter dealing with actual physical economic activity.
[This cultural disdain, of course, was fully explained by Thorstein Veblen, in his Theory of the Leisure Class, and other works, which, I suspect, has never been that popular on “the left” because it explains many socio-economic phenomena better than Marxism. Remember, the actual details of physical economy will, according to neoliberal theory, be magically worked out by “the market” without anyone every having to bother about them. Note that since warfare does not work according to this theory, one finds that the militaries of various nations often remain the only institution that understands physical logistics, and are therefore the only institution able to carry out large scale humanitarian relief.
[Here are the rough estimates. One ton of food feeds about 1,550 people for one day. About two million people in Gaza means that 1,290 tons of food need to be brought in each day.
[If Biden and other world leaders were serious about meeting this need and averting genocide, they would be using military over the shore logistics using tank landing ships and Landing Craft Air Cushions. each capable of delivering around 50 to 200 tons on beaches without any piers or other facilities.
[US military capabilities for its “Amphibious Ready Groups” are summarized in this chart. The “Connectors” column summarizes the equipment that actually moves troops, equipment, and supplies to the shore. US Navy amphibious assault ships deploy 2 or 3 LCACs (Landing Craft Air Cushion), each able to deliver 60 to 70 tons onto a beach. A pier does not need to be built to use this capability, There are probably at least 2 USN amphibious assault ships in the Med and Gulf region right now, though Stars and Stripes reported a few weeks ago that Amphibious Squadron 8, comprised of amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, dock landing ship USS Carter Hall, amphibious transport dock ship USS Mesa Verde, exited the Mediterranean on March 6, 2024. I could not find any information on what unit(s) replaced Amphibious Squadron 8, if any.
[The U.S. Navy is not the only navy that has amphibious capabilities. This website lists NATO member amphibious ships for USA, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Turkiye, and United Kingdom. These are not World War 2 hand-me-downs; most of the ships listed were built in the 1990s and 2000s. The most recent is the Netherlands’ HNLMS Karel Doorman (A833), commissioned in April 2015. However, Karel Doorman carries only two LCVPs (landing craft vehicle personnel), each able to move only 3 to 4 tons to shore.
[Note the especially large number of amphibious ships listed for Turkiye, though many of the smaller vessels are from World War 2 and probably no longer in service. Still, Turkiye evidently has a considerable capacity to bring aid to the Palestinians in Gaza. Why has this Turkish capacity not been put to use yet? No doubt, the Israelis are extremely sensitive about this capability by a Muslim country in close proximity to Gaza and Israel.
[A few other Muslim countries in the Middle East and northern Africa also have amphibious combat ships. Egypt acquired the two Mistral class amphibious assault ships, France had built for Russia in the early 2000s, then refused to deliver. The navy of Iran has around ten amphibious assault ships, the five smallest of which were designed and built by Iran. Iran has also been able to maintain in service 14 hovercraft acquired from the UK in the 1970s. These reportedly have a payload capacity of about 15 tons.
[An interesting oddity is that NATO member Greece has 4 Soviet-designed Zubr-class hovercraft (world’s largest hovercraft), able to carry up to 150 tons. They reportedly were built in Ukraine, not Russia, though Russia has built some for China and other countries, as well as the Russian navy. ]
“You want to get as many civilians out of Rafah as possible,” Kushner told the faculty chair of Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative, Tarek Masoud, in a March 8 interview that was first reported widely on Tuesday. “I think that you want to try to clear that out. I know that with diplomacy maybe you get them into Egypt.”
“I know that that’s been refused, but [with] the right diplomacy I think it would be possible,” Kushner added. “But in addition to that, the thing that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there. I know that won’t be the popular thing to do, but I think that that’s a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.”
…Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram not only ordered his troops to open fire on Israeli civilians and blew up a Palestinian university in Gaza without permission, but also stated in an interview with journalist Ilana Dayan right as the war started that Israel’s political leadership should refrain from any prospect of a political solution to the crisis. The IDF’s chief of staff didn’t say a word then either.
It’s not only the division commanders that are the issue here, but also the soldiers. The video recordings capturing the troops’ actions, their calls for Jewish resettlement of the Gaza Strip (the so-called Gush Katif settlement bloc), the troops’ usage of social media to criticize the alleged “restraint” on their ability to use deadly force, their looting and much more – all these are expressions of an unremitting agitation making its way from the ground up and which the army’s leadership finds hard or is reluctant to restrain.
Richard G. Wilkinson & Kate E. Pickett [Nature, via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2024]
Equality is essential for sustainability. The science is clear — people in more-equal societies are more trusting and more likely to protect the environment than are those in unequal, consumer-driven ones.
As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together1, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity2. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion.
The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility and public trust3,4. The homicide rate in the United States — the most unequal Western democracy — is more than 11 times that in Norway (see go.nature.com/49fuujr). Imprisonment rates are ten times as high, and infant mortality and obesity rates twice as high….
Inequality also increases consumerism. Perceived links between wealth and self-worth drive people to buy goods associated with high social status and thus enhance how they appear to others — as US economist Thorstein Veblen set out more than a century ago in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Studies show that people who live in more-unequal societies spend more on status goods14.
Our work has shown that the amount spent on advertising as a proportion of gross domestic product is higher in countries with greater inequality. The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars.
[FITSNews, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-18-2024]
“[Robert] Turkewitz, who had represented Barnett from the beginning of [his whistleblower retaliation] case, told reporters ‘it made no sense’ for Barnett to take his own life when he was so close to final vindication.”
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-18-2024]
“The previous day, Barnett had been on a roll as a video camera recorded the event. “John testified for four hours in questioning by my co-counsel Brian,” says Turkewitz. ‘This was following seven hours of cross examination by Boeing’s lawyers on Thursday. He was really happy to be telling his side of the story, excited to be fielding our questions, doing a great job. It was explosive stuff. As I’m sitting there, I’m thinking, ‘This is the best witness I’ve ever seen.” At one point, says Turkewitz, the Boeing lawyer protested that Barnett was reciting the details of incidents from a decade ago, and specific dates, without looking at documents. As Turkevitz recalls the exchange, Barnett fired back, ‘I know these documents inside out. I’ve had to live it.’ That Friday, Barnett’s testimony ended at around 5 PM, and the parties reconvened an hour later. ‘John was really tired and didn’t want to testify any more that day,’ says Turkewitz. ‘He wanted to drive home to Louisiana starting that evening, as he had planned. He’d told his mom that he’d be home on Sunday, and it took him two days to drive home. I suggested that we break for a week or two. But the Boeing lawyers took the position that no more depositions could be taken until Barnett completed his testimony.”
Nick Corbishley, March 22, 2024 [Naked Capitalism]
“As economists, we commend (Honduran) President Castro and the people of Honduras, and hope that countries across the world follow their lead toward a fairer, more democratic trade system.”
In 2023, the small Central American country of Honduras (population: 10.7 million) was the second most sued nation at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), with a total of nine ISDS (investor-state dispute settlement) cases against it (the only country with more was Mexico, with 10). Just one of those suits, brought by U.S. corporation Próspera Inc, a company financed by several Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen, is for $10.8 billion, equivalent to around a third of Honduras’ GDP….
But something almost unheard of is happening in Honduras’ case. Instead of waiting for the imposition of crippling fines that would almost certainly bankrupt her government, Xiaomi Castro decided in late February to withdraw her country from ICSID, arguing that the court was infringing illegally on Honduran sovereignty….
As a recent article in The Intercept explains, the legal showdown between the Honduran government and the investors behind the charter cities presents an “almost impossible-to-believe scenario”:
A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies…
The law that established ZEDEs — short for Zone for Employment and Economic Development — effectively carved out portions of Honduras and turned them over to American investors, who operate as effective sovereign governments. The ZEDEs could one day control 35 percent of Honduras’s territory, according to the United Nations, which has said that the zones raise human rights concerns.
It took enormous political muscle more than a decade ago to force the ZEDEs into law. They only became possible when Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a U.S.-backed coup in 2009.
To cap it all off, Castro’s government is currently negotiating a trade agreement with China after announcing the establishment of diplomatic relations with Beijing in October. In doing so, it became the latest in a long line of Latin American governments to jettison their decades-long ties with Taiwan, much to Washington’s chagrin. As the Washington Postominously noted at the time, Honduras (emphasis my own) “was long among the most docile of U.S. regional partners.” Now, its government is cosying up to China, Washington’s principal strategic rival.
James K. Galbraith [Post-Neoliberalism—Pathways for Transformative Economics and Politics, via Mike Norman Economics, March 22, 2024]
In a keynote address to a conference on “Geopolitical Changes” at Kozminski University, Warsaw, on January 29, 2024, Professor James Galbraith called for economics to break with equilibrium dogma and re-found itself on the life principles that govern physics, biology and every existing mechanical and social system. Noting the distinguished presence of Professors Francis Fukuyama and E.S. Phelps, Galbraith called attention to the spectacular fallacies of “an end to history” and a “natural rate of unemployment,” arguing that these doctrines have helped blind our generation to the damage inflicted by rising resource costs and neoliberal policies of austerity and precarity, with dire consequences for households in wealthy societies, for their reproduction rates, and for the long-term viability of the species.
Alex Krainer [via Mike Norman Economics, March 23, 2024]
Interesting post that deal with some of the same concepts as MMT but is not MMT. It’s an interesting take. He has seen both sides, having grown up in a communist country (Yugoslavia). He is former hedge fund manager, commodities trader and author based in Monaco.
Lars P. Syll [via Mike Norman Economics, March 22, 2024]
Health care crisis
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-19-2024]
In 1888, Massachusetts District Police inspectors monitored schools and public buildings with a portable CO2 meter to check whether indoor air renewal was good. If not, the school was temporarily closed to carry out ventilation work.
MATTHEW CUNNINGHAM-COOK, March 21, 2024 [American Prospect]
UnitedHealth, CVS, and Cigna’s PBMs are using their market share and pull in Washington to drive one of the key levers to manage health care costs—independent pharmacies—out of business.
[Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-21-2024]
“The Democratic Party Pizzaburger Theory of Electioneering is: half the electorate wants a pizza, the other half wants a burger, so we’ll give them all a pizzaburger and make them all equally dissatisfied, thus winning the election… But no one wants a pizzaburger. The Biden administration’s approach of letting the Warren/Sanders wing pick the antitrust enforcers while keeping judicial appointments in the Manchin-Synematic universe is a catastrophe in which progressive Dem regulators (who serve one term) are thwarted by corporatist Dem judges (who serve for life)… Jacobin teamed up with the Center for Working-Class Politics, Yougov and the Center for Work and Democracy at ASU and analyzed [the 2022 midterms]: Their conclusion: candidates from working-class backgrounds who campaigned on economic policies like high-quality jobs, higher minimum wages, a jobs guarantee, ending offshoring and outsourcing, building infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back to the US won with a 50% share of the vote in rural and working-class districts. Dems who didn’t lost with a 35% share of the vote.”
Sequeira wrote that “Just 116 of the nearly 7,400 state legislators in the United States come from working-class backgrounds, according to a biennial study conducted by Nicholas Carnes and Eric Hansen, political scientists at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago, respectively. The researchers define legislators as “working class” if they currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical or labor union jobs. They found that 1.6% of state lawmakers meet that definition, compared with 50% of U.S. workers. Only about 2% of Democrats and 1% of Republicans qualified as working class… The dearth of working-class legislators raises concerns that economic challenges such as wage stagnation and the rising cost of living will get short shrift in state capitols.”
“Working-class politicians,” he wrote, “are more likely to have personally experienced economic hardship, so they are more interested in policies to mitigate it, Carnes said. And they often propose solutions that differ from those put forward by colleagues who aren’t working class, even if it means diverging from party doctrine. ‘State legislatures make consequential decisions, and if you have an entire economic class of people that are not in the room when policy decisions are being made, that’s going to tilt the kind of problems politicians pay attention to,’ said Carnes. ‘It also dictates the kinds of solutions they consider against the interests of whoever’s out of the room.’ Working-class representation in state legislatures has always been low, he noted, but the most recent count is even lower than it was two years ago, when the percentage was about 1.8%.”
[TW: I do not agree with Taibbi that Trump’s use of the word “bloodbath” should be dismissed because it was used in the context of discussing industrial policy. Trump is clearly a danger exactly because he understands — at least intuitively, if not expressly — that certain words and phrases arouse some of dangerous passions of resentment and anger. But, I agree with Taibbi about why Trump’s rhetoric appeals to working class people whose livlihoods were rushed by trade policies. ]
“Bloodbath” was clearly economic metaphor, and the worst thing you could say about it is that it underscored a general Trump tendency to preach doom and disaster in a way some consider irresponsible. I don’t. This rhetoric works for Trump for a reason, the same one that makes the media miss on “bloodbath” a double-insult.
This apocalyptic speech resonates in places like Dayton, a region that produced six million vehicles between 1981 and an infamous GM plant closure in 2008. There’s now a Chinese auto-glass factory on the site. Many people in that part of the world watched $30-an-hour factory jobs turned into $1-an-hour gigs for Mexican counterparts after NAFTA, which explains why crowds tend to respond to heated rhetoric about the border. You don’t have to agree with Trump’s stances on these issues, but not understanding why they work is rhetorical malpractice.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Anne Applebaum has a good understanding of how authoritarian regimes have used disinformation to grab power. Yesterday she watched clips of Trump’s MAGA rally near Dayton and tweeted about Trump’s disinformation campaign against the American people. It goes beyond Trump’s continuous unsubstantiated claims, gaslighting, attacks on the media as “fake news” and promotion of baseless conspiracy theories to discredit political opponents and shape public perception. His rhetoric undermines trust in democratic institutions and even erodes the foundations of objective truth itself! The MAGA movement in general promotes lies and conspiracy theories to advance its agenda and is barely distinguishable from QAnon’s allegations that a secret cabal of Satanic pedophiles controls the world and that Señor T is waging a secret war against. This kind of spreading of disinformation poses significant challenges to democracy, as it undermines trust in institutions, fuels polarization and threatens the integrity of public discourse.
[Trudy Lieberman, HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-21-2024]
“[Rolling Stone’s Andrew] Perez points out that one item buried in the 887-page Heritage Foundation blueprint written to inform a potential new Trump administration has attracted little attention so far. It is a scheme to ‘make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option’ for people who are newly eligible for Medicare, he wrote. David Lipschutz, associate director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, says the Heritage plan would hasten privatization. ‘Upon becoming eligible for Medicare now everyone starts with traditional Medicare as the default but can opt out of that program and later choose an Advantage plan,’ Lipschutz says. The Heritage proposal, however, would have people start with Medicare Advantage plans, apparently with the opportunity to opt-out. With this arrangement, you can see how easy it would be for Medicare, as we know it, to ‘wither on the vine’ since many people new to Medicare are not well versed in the difference between the two options and instead are swayed by the TV advertising beckoning them to Medicare Advantage plans.”
[NC Newsline, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-20-2024]
“As a deadline loomed for briefs in the case, 18 Republican-led states filed an amicus brief Tuesday urging the Supreme Court to reverse the lower courts and grant Trump blanket immunity. Oral arguments before the high court on the immunity question are scheduled for April 25, and federal district court proceedings have been halted until the Supreme Court issues a ruling. Trump’s lawyers, led by D. John Sauer of St. Louis, in a 52-page brief argued that a strong executive with virtually no criminal liability from the judicial system was intended by the framers of the Constitution and part of a ‘234-year unbroken tradition’ of not prosecuting presidents for action taken while in office…. ‘The President cannot function, and the Presidency itself cannot retain its vital independence, if the President faces criminal prosecution for official acts once he leaves office,’ the attorneys wrote in the brief’s opening paragraph. That view is in line with how framers of the Constitution saw the presidency, they said. ‘Even if some level of Presidential malfeasance, not present in this case at all, were to escape punishment, that risk is inherent in the Constitution’s design,’ Trump’s attorneys wrote. ‘The Founders viewed protecting the independence of the Presidency as well worth the risk that some Presidents might evade punishment in marginal cases. They were unwilling to burn the Presidency itself to the ground to get at every single alleged malefactor.’ The only exception to absolute immunity is a president who is impeached by the House and convicted in the Senate, Trump’s lawyers said.” And: “They asked the court to reject an argument that another exception to presidential immunity could be made for criminal charges stemming from a president’s desire to stay in power. ‘Because virtually all first-term Presidents’ official actions carry some, at least partial, motivation to be re-elected, this exception to immunity would swiftly engulf the rule,’ they wrote. Prosecuting or not prosecuting a president is inherently a political act, Trump’s attorneys said. ‘This observation applies to former Presidents as well — and it applies most of all to a former President who is the leading candidate to replace the incumbent who is prosecuting him,’ they wrote.”
Conservatives have not limited their attack on reproductive rights to the United States. They’ve been busy imposing their will on other countries, too—with disastrous consequences for millions of poor women….
For half a century, the United States has used the power of the purse to force poorer nations to abide by the anti-abortion values of American conservatives or forgo aid for family planning and, more recently, other health care. Of the several policies adopted over the years, two have been particularly onerous, according to several studies and more than 20 interviews with researchers and reproductive rights advocates in the United States and abroad. Touted to reduce abortions, the policies actually have driven up their numbers sharply and led to tens of thousands of unnecessary maternal deaths. “Anything that happens in the U.S. has a huge impact on the rest of the world,” said Giselle Carino, director of Fòs Feminista, an international alliance that promotes sexual and reproductive health and justice. When Washington places restrictions on abortion, “we have a lot of evidence how it hurts, particularly the women who need the most care and services.”
That anti-abortion policies would lead to more abortions seems counterintuitive, except when you consider that the organizations that perform, counsel, and educate people about abortion are often those that provide condoms, pills, IUDs, and other forms of birth control. If health care providers so much as mention abortion, they can lose money for broader health care services, including contraceptives. Fewer contraceptives equal more unwanted pregnancies. More unwanted pregnancies equal more abortions. More abortions in countries that greatly restrict them equal more unsafe abortions. And more unsafe abortions equal more maternal deaths.
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 03-18-2024]
From the index propagandists for RussiaGate and Iraqi WMDs. “The arguments strike at the heart of an unsettled question in modern American political life: In a world of unlimited online communications, in which anyone can reach huge numbers of people with unverified and false information, where is the line between protecting democracy and trampling on the right to free speech?”
