Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 15 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Russia / Ukraine
Russia will be ‘at war’ with NATO if Ukraine long-range missile restrictions lifted, Putin warns
Avery Schmitz and Michael Conte, September 13, 2024 [CNN]
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned NATO alliance leaders that a move to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of longer-range Western missiles to strike deep inside his country would be considered an act of war.
“This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us,” Putin told reporters on Thursday.
Haley Ott, September 13, 2024 [CBS News]
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Thursday that a decision by the U.S. or its NATO allies to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia would be viewed as NATO’s direct participation in the war, which he said would significantly change “the very nature of the conflict.”
“Flight assignments for these missile systems can, in fact, only be entered by military personnel from NATO countries. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. And therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is a question of making a decision whether NATO countries directly participate in the military conflict or not,” Putin said in response to a question on Thursday.
“If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries, in the war in Ukraine,” the Russian leader added.
Strategic Political Economy
Master Plan, Ep 5: How Corporations Became People
David Sirota and The Lever staff, September 10, 2024 [The Lever]
In Master Plan’s fifth episode, we explore how an unlikely catalyst — Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination — created an opportunity for his Senate replacement to manufacture the first and perhaps most important blow against America’s new campaign finance laws: Buckley v. Valeo. With a supporting cast including James Buckley, John Bolton, Charles Koch, and Robert Bork, this U.S. Supreme Court case was the first to frame the fight against campaign finance regulations as a crusade for free speech and third-party rights.
The master planners were just getting started. While Buckley v. Valeo blew the lid off limits to certain kinds of campaign expenditures, Big Business also wanted to ensure that corporations could spend as freely as their human counterparts. This is where the master planners’ sleeper agent on the Court, Justice Lewis Powell, would work behind the scenes to deliver an expansive ruling that created the foundation for Citizens United.
Matthew Desmond [The New York Review, October 3, 2024 issue ]
In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue….
The latest government statistics estimate that between 11.5 and 12.4 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2022, depending on the measure. That amounts to between 37.9 and 40.9 million people, or roughly the population of California. Still, Barber considers these counts too low. In 2022 a family of four was considered poor if they made less than $29,679 that year, but a 2023 Gallup poll found that most Americans believe such a family needs at least $85,000 to get by.
One can make the poverty problem seem smaller than it is by ignoring all those Americans who are poor in many ways except officially: people who aren’t hard up enough to qualify for public housing but will never be able to afford a mortgage; those who aren’t poor enough to receive Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance either. Barber prefers a more expansive definition of poverty, one that considers someone to be poor if a $400 emergency would prevent them from covering their basic monthly necessities. Using that metric, he estimates that in a country of 337 million people, an astonishing 140 million are poor or low-income.
Most experts would endorse Barber’s position that the poverty line is drawn too low but would stop well short of his claim that “nearly half” of the country is poor. But Barber’s argument isn’t just statistical; it stems from what he has seen. He has met people living out of their cars while earning wages that place them squarely above the poverty line. He has noticed empty dog food cans in the kitchen of a family with young children but no dog.
As for the statistics, there is solid evidence that a lot of hardship is endured above the official poverty line. One study found that more than 20 percent of households with incomes 200 percent above the poverty threshold experience food insecurity. Medicaid covers roughly 40 percent of all births in America. In February and March of this year, the Census estimated that a quarter of renting households making between $50,000 and $74,999 a year would likely face eviction in the next two months. Findings like these help us understand why data that overlook millions of families floating uneasily between official poverty and actual security make Barber so angry….
Most poor people in America are white, of course, though a larger proportion of Black and Hispanic Americans live in poverty. Yet many white people have a difficult time admitting they are or have been poor. On multiple occasions white people have told me that growing up they “were poor but didn’t know it.” I always find this slightly amusing, since no Black or Hispanic person has ever said such a thing to me. When they were poor, they knew it. Black and Hispanic poverty can be harsher than white poverty, but I also believe that white people sense that acknowledging their poverty means on some level denying their whiteness. “It is understood,” Frantz Fanon once quipped, “that one is white above a certain financial level.”….
In his now classic book Why Americans Hate Welfare (1999), the political scientist Martin Gilens compiles an impressive array of data showing that, contrary to popular opinion, Americans generally support “almost every aspect of the welfare state.” However, that support falters when the public mistakenly assumes that most recipients of government aid are Black. This is why fewer Americans supported the Affordable Care Act when it was referred to as Obamacare. It’s why a study published last year found that merely asking people to think about immigration made them less likely to support redistributive policies and charitable giving. Whether they have bought into a kind of zero-sum thinking whereby nonwhite gains require white losses, or they have assumed that nonwhite people are lazy and a drain on society, many poor white Americans continue to endorse policy agendas that directly harm them.
Yet throughout his life Barber has witnessed these old, tired schemes break down….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
New video, witnesses challenge Israel’s account of U.S. activist’s killing
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2024]
The IDF said Aysenur Eygi was shot “unintentionally” during a “violent riot.” A Post analysis shows clashes had subsided and protesters had retreated.
What Might a President Harris Do on Israel?
Robert Kuttner, September 13, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…Many people with more knowledge than I consider the premise of a reconstituted Palestinian Authority to be a fantasy. Likewise the idea of Gaza being administered by neighboring Arab states….
EXPOSED: HOW ISRAELI SPIES CONTROL YOUR VPN
[Mint Press, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2024]
Oligarchy
Eric Schmidt: How Oligarchs Speak when they think no one is listening (YouTube video)
[UNFTR Media, YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2024]
Have you ever wondered what oligarchs talk about when they think no one is listening? Wonder no more. This week we dissect Eric Schmidt’s recent Q&A at Stanford University where he talks about remote work culture, the future of AI and how big tech intervenes at the highest levels of government. The kicker is…he thought it was private and didn’t realize it was being recorded. Some of his comments regarding the laziness of remote workers and the “arrogance” of the programmer community went viral prompting Schmidt to apologize and scramble to have the video removed. Considering he ran the world’s biggest internet search engine he should have known that nothing ever really disappears. In fact, we dug up his own words from 2013 when he said exactly that. Beyond the comments that got the most attention in the media (for a minute) the conversation reveals much more about the dark side of oligarchy in the United States.
The Texas Billionaire Who Has Greenpeace USA on the Verge of Bankruptcy
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 09-10-2024]
Fossil-fuel billionaire Kelcy Warren is about to land a knockout punch on Greenpeace.The pipeline magnate’s company, Energy Transfer, is behind a lawsuit that Greenpeace says could bankrupt the environmental group’s U.S. affiliate. A courtroom victory, which some Greenpeace officials fear is likely, would be a coda in the nearly decadelong battle between the two sides over one of Warren’s signature projects: the Dakota Access Pipeline.In 2016, Greenpeace, Native American tribal groups and thousands of other activists camped in a remote corner of North Dakota to block the project. The monthslong protests impeded the oil pipeline’s completion and became a flashpoint in the fight over fossil fuels. Images of sometimes violent confrontations between protesters and law enforcement made international news.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Kroger Posts Massive Profits Amid Price Gouging Outcry and Merger Push
Julia Conley, September 12, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Grocery giant Kroger’s practice of price gouging in order to pass on its “inflation to consumers,” as one executive recently said, has paid off for the $37 billion company, according to its quarterly earnings posted on Thursday.
The company, which is facing a legal challenge from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over its proposed acquisition of rival store Albertsons, reported that it earned $466 million in the second quarter of 2024, with year-to-date earnings of $1.4 billion—nearly double the amount it earned last year.
Kroger Posts Massive Profits Amid Price Gouging Outcry and Merger Push
Bill Haskell, September 15, 2024 [angrybearblog.com]
More on Kroger push to merge Albertsons into its array of stores. This comes after Appollo Funds and Cerberus Capital Management have milked it for $billions. The $24.6 billion deal [1], largely benefiting Albertson’s private equity owner Cerberus Capital Management, is seen by many as a maneuver to maximize investor returns rather than to provide tangible benefits to consumers or workers. Appollo owns $1.75 billion in Albertson’s preferred stock.
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, September 12, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
Both Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have now reported that it’s not just presidential candidate Donald Trump that is proposing a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund, but that President Joe Biden’s administration is also exploring the idea….
The advisor on Biden’s plan – as reported by both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News – is the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. For the National Security Advisor to be investigating putting more government money into businesses engaged in critical national security areas, means there are very serious problems that market forces on Wall Street are failing to address. Investors on Wall Street want to see ongoing proof of profits, rather than engage in patient long-term investing to ensure the national security of the United States.
Three such problems come to mind immediately: Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel.
As the chart above indicates, in less than nine months, Intel has lost 60 percent of its market value; Boeing has lost almost 40 percent; and U.S. Steel has lost over 30 percent. All three companies play key roles in U.S. national security….
[Bleeding Heartland, via Naked Capitalism 09-10-2024]
…Today, Iowa farmers live in a far different world. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which during the Cold War was America’s best customer for wheat and corn because of communism’s chronic inability to feed itself, now is the world’s largest wheat exporter. Hungry hogs and cattle in China can munch as contentedly on Russian wheat as on American corn.
The threat isn’t confined to the Old World. In the western hemisphere, Brazil has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse, outproducing and out-exporting American corn and soybeans. China, the world’s largest importer of corn and soybeans, didn’t wait to see if Donald Trump can bring his tariff chaos back to the White House. In 2022, China signed a new grain trade agreement with Brazil and the results hit American farmers with the force of a derecho.
Brazil sold $58 billion worth of corn and soybeans to China in 2023, easily outpacing American sales of $34 billion. Along the way Brazil dethroned America’s “King Corn” as the world largest corn exporter. With that export mojo at its back, Brazil this month has announced a record soybean crop, which combined with expected record or near-record U.S. crops can be expected to keep prices depressed through next year.
Corn prices, which had recovered to the $6-$7 range in 2021-22 after the Trump administration tariff debacle, promptly fell below $4. Soybeans also did a look-out-below, dropping from $15-$16 per bushel in 2021-22 to less than $10 by mid-2024. That means Iowa farmers (and the Iowa economy) will take a $15 billion cash haircut at the end of this year….
Predatory finance
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, September 12, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
When the next megabank blows up from its derivative exposure, you can add the names Jamie Dimon and Patick McHenry to former Republican Congressmen Randy Hultgren and Kevin Yoder as four of the men who greased the skids for another derivatives banking crisis. (For our report on the role played by Hultgren and Yoder, see our 2021 report here.)
Dimon and McHenry are the latest lead players in the disastrous history of derivative regulation in the U.S….
On July 27 of last year, the Federal Reserve, FDIC and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released a proposal to require higher capital levels at banks with $100 billion or more in assets. Many of these banks had demonstrated quite clearly in the spring of 2023, via bank runs on deposits, that they could spread systemic contagion throughout the U.S. banking system….
On September 12, 2023 the megabank cartel made its anger and intention to push back known in a 7-page letter that assaulted the proposal. The cartel demanded that the three federal agencies turn over all “evidence and analyses the agencies relied on” in making the proposal.
One of the signatories to the letter was the Bank Policy Institute (BPI), whose Board of Directors consists of the CEOs of the megabanks on Wall Street. BPI is Chaired by none other than Jamie Dimon.
BPI then launched an ad campaign that grossly distorted what the increase in capital would do, claiming that it would harm working families. (These are the same megabanks that blew up the U.S. economy in 2008, put millions of Americans out of work, left millions of working families in foreclosure and got a secret $29 trillion bailout from the Fed – because they had inadequate capital. These megabanks then formed their own coalition to battle in court against the Fed releasing the details of the trillions of dollars in revolving loans these banks had received from December 2007 to the middle of 2010. They lost that battle.)
The Bank Policy Institute then hired Eugene Scalia, a law partner at Big Law firm Gibson, Dunn, to weigh options for potentially suing the Federal Reserve and the other bank regulators over the proposed higher capital rules. Scalia was expected to argue, if the case went to court, that the banking regulators did not do a proper cost benefit analysis prior to proposing the capital rule.
Scalia is the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who didn’t see anything wrong with accepting lots of free vacations from private interests while he sat on the high court. Eugene Scalia is also the lawyer who previously wielded a hatchet to gut key elements of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010….
The Federal Reserve Is Caving to the Big Banks—Again
Timothy Noah, September 10, 2024 [The New Republic]
…it can sometimes be difficult to tell who’s in charge of the economy—the Federal Reserve or J.P. Morgan. No longer among us in corporeal form, the rosacea-scarred titan lives on as J.P. Morgan Chase, the richest bank in the United States and the fifth-largest in the world, with $3.9 trillion in assets. (Places one through four are held by Chinese banks.) J.P. Morgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, enjoys a level of influence approaching that of his bank’s purple-nosed founder. So when the Federal Reserve last year proposed imposing significant new capital requirements on the country’s largest banks to bring the U.S. into compliance with an international agreement called Basel III, which was created in response to the financial crisis of 2007, Dimon said these new rules just wouldn’t do. On Tuesday, the Fed got the message and backed down.
Private Equity Fights Insurance for $15 Trillion Retirement Prize
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2024]
Restoring balance to the economy
In a historic move, Colombia bypasses patent to access HIV drug
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2024]
The World Health Organization considers dolutegravir a preferred first-line treatment for HIV, given its limited side effects and rapid efficacy. Patients reach a low enough level of virus in their system that they won’t transmit HIV during sex.
But there’s a problem: The active ingredient in the medication is currently under patent.
In April, however, the Colombian government took a historic step. It issued its first-ever compulsory licence, a legal mechanism that allows it to co-opt the drugmaker’s patent in the name of public interest.
That decision is expected to clear the way for Colombia’s health programmes to buy generic doses of the drug at a much lower cost.
But bypassing the patent has enmeshed Colombia in an ongoing lawsuit with the pharmaceutical company ViiV Healthcare, which has openly protested the compulsory licence.
Small-Business Regulators Highlight Protection From Predation
Luke Goldstein, September 13, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Contrary to the discussion at the presidential level, small businesses are seeking access to credit and a level playing field for their enterprises.
Stop Calling Kamala Harris’ Anti-Price-Gouging Proposal Price Controls
Zephyr Teachout, September 09, 2024 [Washington Monthly]
Last month, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced that, if elected, she would advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries. Her opponent, Donald Trump, immediately attacked the idea as “SOVIET Style Price Controls.” He was not alone in that hot take. Several mainstream media outlets accused Harris of much the same. “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” harrumphed Washington Post economics columnist Catherine Rampell. “It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.”
That assessment, however, is humbug. Harris’s actual plan has nothing to do with price controls. Instead, it would clearly tap an entirely different set of government powers that states, including ruby red ones like Alabama and Kentucky, have exercised robustly and with little controversy for decades. They are also widely popular, garnering 80 percent approval ratings in some polls. I have personal experience in this area, having used anti-price-gouging laws in legal work I did for New York Attorney General Letitia James during the pandemic. The vice president is simply proposing that Congress extend these longstanding powers to the federal government—though a strong argument can be made that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) already has anti-price-gouging authority, and therefore a future Harris-Walz administration would be able to act regardless of what Congress does.
Wyden Says Trillions in Taxes Dodged by Ultra-Rich Could Fund Social Security Until 2100
Jake Johnson, September 11, 2024 [CommonDreams]
“The ultra-wealthy are avoiding nearly $2 trillion in taxes every 10 years,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said during a Senate Budget Committee hearing. “That is enough to keep Social Security whole till the end of this century.”
“That’s where we ought to go to start making progress,” Wyden added.
The senator’s remarks came during a hearing titled “Social Security Forever: Delivering Benefits and Protecting Retirement Security,” which featured testimony from Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley and several expert witnesses.
Matt Stoller, September 07, 2024 [BIG]
In the late 1930s, it appeared as if Antitrust Division chief Thurman Arnold had tamed the business world, having filed so many antitrust suits with such effectiveness that there was no longer any resistance. In his first year, Arnold filed 1,375 complaints in 213 cases in 40 different industries, from cars to housing to milk to movies. When enforcers merely launched an investigation, prices dropped by 18-33 percent because businessmen wanted to get ahead of any possible violations.
There was still a lot of brutal fighting ahead, but in a sense, the old order in the business world had been morally defeated, exhausted by years of legal combat.
The new order was immensely profitable, far more than that of the 1930s. Some of the highest corporate profit margins in American history were in the 1950s, but corporate leaders knew they had a broader responsibility to society. And it wasn’t nonsense corporate social responsibility rhetoric we hear about today, but a realization that rapacious behavior would bring swift legal consequences….
Anti-monopolists today are nowhere near that level of accomplishment broadly speaking, as we don’t have a political consensus. But in a few areas, we can start to see the outlines of what a world run with some element of the public interest in mind might look like. And that brings me to Google, whose mission has always been what years ago sounded like a good idea, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Next Monday, the third major antitrust trial against Google starts, this one on the software plumbing underlying online display advertising….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Google’s “Assistance” Is Killing Journalism
Freddy Brewster, September 12, 2024 [The Lever]
California lawmakers had a chance to pass first-in-the-nation legislation that would have forced Google, Meta, and other tech firms to pay ongoing fees for earning billions from using news outlets’ content while journalism operations have struggled and closed.
But amid the tech industry’s strong-arm tactics, millions of dollars spent lobbying, and allegations of currying favors from power brokers ranging from the California governor to the CEO of a nonprofit news organization, Big Tech scored a backroom deal last month that killed the journalism bills….
My Youtube Channel Deleted for Hate Speech
Larry Johnson, via Naked Capitalism 09-12-2024]
Collapse of independent news media
The Media’s Demented Policy Illiteracy
Jason Linkins, September 14, 2024 [The New Republic]
Climate and environmental crises
That Debate Showed Why Dems Shouldn’t Tack Rightward—Ever
Kate Aronoff, September 11, 2024 [The New Republic]
…There’s a more compelling and correct story that Democrats could tell about fracking: that fossil fuel companies thought it was too expensive to be worth doing until the federal government poured billions of dollars’ worth of funding into basic research and tax breaks. The industry depends on tens of billions of dollars per year in local, state, and federal subsidies. Despite all that support, fracking companies—none more so than those in Pennsylvania!—spent over a decade burning through their shareholders’ money, unable to turn a profit. All that meant they had to come begging for a bailout during the pandemic so they could keep poisoning the country’s air, water, and politics. Now those same executives are trying to figure out how to fire workers through automation and gin up demand for plastics we don’t need, and that keep showing up in our blood, brains, and placenta. The government has invested real resources into creating the shale boom; now it’s time to redirect those energies into building a twenty-first-century energy economy.
But leading Democrats, including Harris, seem incapable of talking about the downsides of fossil fuel production.…
Democrats’ political malpractice
US child poverty nearly tripled between 2021 and 2023
[Polygraph, via Naked Capitalism 09-12-2024]
The Limits of Harris’s Family Policy
Harold Meyerson, September 12, 2024 [The American Prospect]
But one element of the Democrats’ weakening appeal to working-class Americans, most particularly working-class men, is that many of them simply can’t afford to form families. As numerous studies from all points on the ideological spectrum have shown, the rate of working-class marriages has declined far more than the rate of middle- and upper-class marriages. To cite one such study, from Pew Research last year, in 2021 the share of 40-year-olds who’d never married ranged from 18 percent among college graduates to 26 percent among those who’d attended some college classes but never graduated to 33 percent among those with just high school diplomas or less. The rate of 40-year-old men who’d never married (28 percent) was significantly higher than the rate of women who’d never married (22 percent). Of course, there are many millions of Americans living with a partner who aren’t married, but the class and gender differences seen in marriage rates persist within those unmarried partnerships as well.
As early as the 1980s, sociologist William Julius Wilson attributed the declining rate of marriage among Blacks to the disappearance of family-wage (or even adequate individual-wage) jobs available to Black men, as the number of unionized jobs in manufacturing began its long-running decline. Subsequent studies by MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues documented that the disappearance of such jobs led to declining marriage rates across all races of working-class Americans.
[TW: The America Society of Civil Engineers estimates the US is being crippled by an infrastructure investment gap of $3.7 trillion, over 10 years, 2024-2033. Fully funded programs to fill that gap would create over six million new permanent jobs. In addition, I estimated in 2009 that a ten-year program of building the new infrastructure program needed to end our dependence on burning fossil fuels and bring the US. economy into the 21st century. requires another $4.686 trillion, which would directly create another 12.7 million jobs. My estimate was largely based on the details and sources in a February 2009 report by the National Governors Association: Strengthening Our Infrastructure For a Sustainable Future.]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2024]
[TW: Go to the bottom half for the incredible story of how the “eating pets” mania actually began with the arrest — in Columbus, not Springfield — of a native born American citizen eating a cat. ]
Trump’s Slow-Burn Authoritarianism
Greg Sargent, September 12, 2024 [The New Republic]
…another, less-garish scenario also potentially looms—and in some respects it might be a more plausible one. A second Trump presidency could unleash a kind of lower-profile, slow-burn authoritarianism, something that unfolds much more quietly and largely behind the scenes. In its targeting of internal enemies and its efforts to carry out revolutionary changes via far-right governance, it could end up being much less dramatic, visible, or splashy—but at the same time, extremely insidious, difficult to track, and very challenging to mobilize against.
The potential victims of such behind-the-scenes actions grasp this possibility perfectly well. While we constantly hear about high-profile preparations by Democratic lawmakers, pro-democracy advocates, and other interested stakeholders against the most nightmarish authoritarian scenarios underway, another more subterranean layer of preparations is quietly unfolding among a different class of targets.
These are Trump critics who have already hired lawyers who are advising them to gird for low-grade bureaucratic bullying. They are advocates anticipating years of legal warfare against vulnerable populations like transgender Americans. They are state-level officials scouring statutes to prepare for legal tussles over who controls the National Guard. They are career government officials bracing for the corruption of official information to serve the autocrat in chief’s whims and propagandistic needs, and the underhanded subversion of rulemaking processes to deliver spoils to his cronies. In interviews, what people in these situations say they anticipate is a type of legal and bureaucratic uncertainty that isn’t anything like watching troops invade cities—but nonetheless could prove highly unpredictable and deeply, unsettlingly precarious.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Kash Patel, a high-level national security official during Trump’s first term who is expected to play a senior role in a second one, enthused last December. “We’re going to come after you.” Longtime Trump loyalist Steve Bannon has similarly suggested that, in Trump’s “first couple of months,” prosecutions will “get rolling.” People credibly being floated for high-level Justice Department positions—such as right-wing lawyer Mike Davis—are openly threatening such campaigns. Longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller has called for Trump-friendly U.S. attorneys to prepare in advance to prosecute Democrats based on nothing more than the big lie that current prosecutions of Trump are illegitimate.
These exchanges were quietly and widely noted by a very particular class of people: high-profile Trump critics now bracing to be victimized. Tellingly, however, what these people are actually envisioning is not quite what all these Trump allies are threatening. While they do believe Trump and his allies will attempt splashy prosecutions, they expect something more like sustained legal and bureaucratic harassment.
Trump Has a Story All Ready to Help Him Undermine Election Results
Melissa Gira Grant, September 12, 2024 [The New Republic]
The Privateers- How Billionaires attack Education with Josh Cowen (YouTube video)
[RADICALIZED: Truth Survives Podcast, September 04, 2024]
Josh Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.
Trump Admits He Doesn’t Really Care About Effects of Racist Conspiracy
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, September 13, 2024 [The New Republic]
Donald Trump quickly brushed off the fact that his conspiracy has prompted bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio.
This Was the Beginning of Donald Trump’s Final Unraveling
Michael Tomasky, September 11, 2024 [The New Republic]
… “I have concepts of a plan” was the defining moment of this debate and is going to go down in presidential debate lore as one of the most pathetic lines in debate history….
…“They’re eating the dogs”? I could. Not. Believe. He actually said that. “But people said it on television!” Dear God….
Rick Perlstein, September 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Matthew Sheffield, a former rising star in the conservative movement, turned away from what he finally realized was an extremist, anti-truth agenda….
… When it comes to conservatism, “the one thing that non-Republicans don’t understand is that almost all of them are bizarre religious fundamentalists. Even the ones who don’t present that to you.” And that’s how they learn to reason: as fundamentalists. Sheffield saw it over and over again on the job.
Sheffield became the first managing editor of the Washington Examiner. It’s now a website. But the project, handsomely funded by a right-wing billionaire, began in 2005 as a suite of local daily tabloids in several cities, as a strategy to move the media environment to the right by making readers feel like they were reading normal news in a normal local newspaper. “The people who I was recruiting and were writing for me often had no concept of verifying a story … Because religious fundamentalists don’t need that.” Conservatives always descend from some sacred, impregnable prior truth. As Sheffield says: “The reasoning is about affirming the concept.”….
Sheffield became the first managing editor of the Washington Examiner. It’s now a website. But the project, handsomely funded by a right-wing billionaire, began in 2005 as a suite of local daily tabloids in several cities, as a strategy to move the media environment to the right by making readers feel like they were reading normal news in a normal local newspaper. “The people who I was recruiting and were writing for me often had no concept of verifying a story … Because religious fundamentalists don’t need that.” Conservatives always descend from some sacred, impregnable prior truth. As Sheffield says: “The reasoning is about affirming the concept.”….
… “The core American reactionary motivation is that they want to force the public to obey their principles.”
“There are a lot of people like me. I have ten million-plus Twitter engagements every month. People like what I’m saying. But it goes back to that liberal thing—that they think the Republicans can be saved. They can’t be saved.”
Maybe that bluntness limits his impact. That sentimentality that there are no red states or blue states, only the United States, remains oh so seductive. Sheffield finally grasped the impossibility of Republican redemption during the high tide of Barack Obama’s fervor imploring Democrats to believe in the existence of Republicans of good faith—and that once he was re-elected, “the fever will break,” and “we can start getting some cooperation again.”
That wasn’t true then. And to believe it is bonkerdoodles now.
The conservative movement, he says, is “100 percent controlled by extremists. And they are very, very wealthy. So they can afford to push a politics that almost no one believes in. We’re not to that point yet, but let’s just say that at some point in the future the Republican Party is not getting even 15 percent in elections. They’re rich enough, fanatical enough, that they wouldn’t change. They would just keep trying to push the same things. And it might get more extreme. It will get more extreme. They have no relationship to the political marketplace.”
Who needs mere votes when you’re in direct touch with God?
Donald Trump Doesn’t Know What Donald Trump Is Doing
David Dayen, September 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…Somewhere along the way, an aide must have idly read half a page to Trump from Karl Rove’s book about William McKinley, and now tariffs are to him what tax cuts are to every other Republican: a cure for every ailment….
There’s been a lot of dumb talk about tariffs lately, but they aren’t totally outlandish. That’s why, as Trump said in his only somewhat accurate comeback, Biden has kept a lot of the Chinese tariffs on. Lori Wallach and the Rethink Trade crew have a good primer on the purpose of tariffs. They are a trade enforcement tool for critical industries where countries have an economic and national-security imperative to compete. They are attempts to induce that competition fairly. And they are completely justified along those lines.
But that’s only if you combine them with other tools to allow for industrial expansion, like investing in manufacturing sectors or using export controls on certain technologies. The Biden administration has done this, and even added new, targeted tariffs on the same sectors where manufacturing is being encouraged. Because they are using tariffs in the manner in which they should be used, manufacturing construction in critical industries is soaring faster than any time in the last 30 years, private investment has been leveraged manyfold, clean-energy jobs in the U.S. are rising at twice the rate of other jobs, and the expected market share for U.S. semiconductors is now expected to grow after decades in the wilderness….
None of this is even reckoned with by Trump anymore. If it were, he’d have to admit that his tariffs failed to bring back industrial capacity. So instead, he’s gone deep into his mind and decided that tariffs are just a cheat code that allows you to cut other taxes and fund every need the government has. That means you can’t ever take them off, if they’re your main revenue source.
Thinking about tariffs as revenue is innumerate. Trump had to pay back out almost as much additional tariff revenue that he brought in to help struggling exporters, particularly in agriculture, caught up in his trade war. Tariffs cannot replace the income tax, and fund child care and other priorities, as a mathematical matter. But worse than that, the revenue on across-the-board tariffs, where no industry will rise to pick up the production and higher prices will result, will simply come from working families. Like any sales tax, it’s going to be regressive on those who spend a higher proportion of their income on basic necessities.
Analysis Shows Trump Loyalists Have ‘Infiltrated’ Election Boards in Key States
Edward Carver, September 13, 2024 [CommonDreams]
More than 100 election officials across eight swing states in the U.S. presidential race have engaged in partisan election denial in recent years, raising fears they could try to turn the November result in favor of Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a report released Friday.
The 88-page report, produced by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), details the election denial history of 102 county and state election officials in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The authors found that election deniers have majority control of 15 county election boards in those states and of the statewide board in Georgia.
[Rolling Stone, via downwithtyranny.com 09-08-2024]
…Trump’s enemy list continues to grow, including prosecutors who’ve brought criminal and civil charges against him. Indeed, lawyers close to Trump and his inner circle have spent more than a year researching obscure elements of the criminal code, seeking novel ways to criminally charge such officials in retaliation. There’s no nemesis too small. The tally even includes late-night comics who’ve pissed him off. As president, Trump briefly attempted to get Justice officials to twist campaign finance laws and the federal equal-time rule to declare that anti-Trump material broadcast by Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others was somehow illegal. During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party— in the form of jokes and on-air satire….
Usually these round up posts are not strictly topical, but I feel have to remark briefly on the shameful and dangerous situation developing in Ohio. Make no mistake, this is the pure incitement of racial hatred with the potential to lead to serious violence. They are inciting a pogrom. It’s the kind of politics many of us feared would take hold when Trump appeared on the scene. Between Springfield and the Darryl Cooper episode on Tucker Carlson, we can see the essential character of the American right today. This is what they believe and this is how they practice politics. And this is why it’s not hyperbole or hysteria to bring up the question of fascism. Many of us detected the strains of ugly nationalism in Vance’s convention speech. Now I think we are vindicated. My friend Jamelle Bouie writes about it in his newsletter better than I can:
“In waging rhetorical war on the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, Vance has clarified the meaning of his convention speech. It does not matter, to Vance, that these Haitian newcomers came here legally, under the Temporary Protected Status program. It does not matter that they filled a valuable need. It does not matter that they reversed a slow collapse that has already sapped the life from so many former industrial towns. It does not matter that they work hard and seem eager, by all accounts, to establish themselves as productive members of the community.
“What matters to Vance is who they are, where they come from and what they look like. They don’t belong to this soil, he might say, and therefore they don’t belong. Right now, the most Vance can do to wage this war is use his words. I shudder to think what might be possible if he had the authority of the state to wield as well.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
J.D. Vance’s Master Plan For Citizens United 2.0
Freddy Brewster, September 12, 2024 [The Lever]
The vice presidential candidate is helping spearhead a lawsuit designed to prompt the Supreme Court’s destruction of some of the country’s last remaining campaign finance laws….
Vance’s new lawsuit — filed alongside the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees, and former Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) — aims to abolish some of the last barriers separating candidates and buckets of cash from corporations and wealthy donors. In specific, the case argues for permitting megadonors to use national party committees to directly coordinate their limitless spending directly with candidates.
Takeaways from AP’s report on JD Vance and the Catholic postliberals in his circle of influence
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2024]
Loper Bright and the Ascendancy of the Cost-Benefit State (PDF)
[SSRN, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2024]
The Supreme Court’s overturning Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo launched an earnest debate about its implications. Understandably, the focus was the expected impact of its standard for judicial review of agency statutory interpretations on agency win rates, with some legal scholars predicting that “respectful consideration” (applying Skidmore) would not change the outcome in most cases. One issue that has not received the attention it deserves, however, is that Loper Bright also significantly advanced what leading legal scholars, particularly President Obama’s former regulatory czar, call the “cost-benefit state”-the principle that “government regulation is increasingly assessed by asking whether the benefits of regulation justify the costs of regulation.”
How The Far Right Defeated Bush And Screwed Us For A Generation (YouTube Video)
[The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder, September 10, 2024, via YouTube]
David Sirota [discusses] the recent reporting on his podcast tracing the blueprint for legalized corruption in the form of deregulated campaign finance law and gutted bribery statutes back to the Watergate scandal, a scheme funded by illegal corporate donations, and a memorandum response by one Lewis Powell to growing calls for campaign finance reform that would go on to define the American conservative movement for the next half-century. Expanding on this, Sirota walks through how the recommendations found in Powell’s memo would be implemented seamlessly over the next few decades, filling attempted congressional reforms with loopholes for corporate backs, and bringing about multiple successful Supreme Court cases (decided, in part, by the now Justice Powell) that would set the stage for the Citizen’s United decision’s unbridling of corporate spending on elections, before looking at the myriad ways (many obvious) in which this legalized corruption completely undermines democratic governance. After touching on the constant (and, at points, prevalent) backlash to growing corruption in US politics, David and Sam explore the normalization of this corruption to a point beyond complacency, but of a refusal to even call it out, dissecting the hold corporate money has on our elections and what that means for candidates seeking to reform the system, and diving deep into the central role the Supreme Court has played in advancing American conservative agenda as an acting super-legislature.
Civic republicanism
What Aristotle Knew About Oligarchy That We Forgot (YouTube Video)
[thelegendarylore, September 06, 2024, via YouTube]
In this video, we explore Aristotle’s book “Politics,” where he breaks down different types of government, including oligarchy – when the rich call the shots. Aristotle didn’t just theorize; he studied 158 constitutions from Greek city-states and beyond, giving us deep insights into how governments really work.
Following our last video on tyranny, we now turn to oligarchy, another system Aristotle saw as problematic. We’ll examine how leadership based on merit can gradually shift into rule by the wealthy, and the various forms this can take. Aristotle’s keen observations help us spot the signs of wealth steering the ship of state, even in seemingly democratic systems.
We’ll also discuss Aristotle’s thoughts on the fall of oligarchies. How did these regimes topple if money speaks louder than the voices of ordinary citizens? Aristotle’s analysis of how money and power intertwine is as relevant now as it was in ancient Greece. His insights shed light on political dynamics that continue to shape our world today.
Win McCormack, September 12, 2024 [The New Republic]
What Is to Be Done? Wisdom of Crowds
On populism.
There is an underlying dynamic of solidarity and surplus that seldom gets the attention it deserves.
Ancient Greece at the end of the of the Bronze Age participated in the famous but mysterious collapse and entered a Dark Age of significantly diminished population, political organization and culture. They emerged beginning around 800 BCE, apparently with a new set of technologies, politics and agriculture and trade that generated surplus. People were healthy and well-fed (comparatively). Greece experienced a population boom, increasing in numbers roughly ten times over 400 years and a critical part of the competition among city-states was to found colonies. It wasn’t just Greece, Phoenicia and the Etruscans and others were involved.
Technological innovation is not a merely moral phenomenon; it is a matters of surplus and numbers. There must be a surplus to feed an artisan class and trade and a differentiation of labor.
The surplus that fed the urban civilization that Rome engineered diminished with soil erosion. The extraction of the tradeable surplus from a slave class on the great latifundia was inefficient and self-defeating on many levels, undermining the economic foundation of an urban civilization. People at the bottom of the system were unhealthy. Famines and plagues ensued. Trade declined with falling division of labor in a dimishing artisanal class, compounding the effects of declining agricultural surplus.
The rise of China followed on the creation of enormous agricultural surplus to feed vast armies and an urban civilization with a huge artisanal population, with trade driving deep division of labor and technological inventiveness. The surplus originated in vast hydraulic projects and the elaboration three-crop rice production.
There would be no social barrier in China to ever more labor intensive agriculture: more and more hands in the fields until the extraction of surplus was choked off by congestion losses. By 1500, Chinese peasants could barely feed themselves. Ordinary people were physically weak. The cities were huge, but represented only single-digit percentages of total population.
Europe recovering from the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of Rome saw a revival of surplus, especially after iron plows turned the heavy but fertile soils of Northern Europe and dug deeper in the south. But, the congestion losses of too many hands in the fields showed quickly too and the flowering of the High Middle Ages ended in overpopulation and the Black Death, which was driven as much by imminent famine as rats and fleas.
The contrasting aftermaths of the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death — two, long series of bubonic plagues sweeping thru Europe is worth contemplating. One destroyed a civilization and the other seemed to spark a new civilization.
Agricultural surplus feeding a growth of artisanal production and merchant trade, but being choked off by congestion and extractive oppression is a recurrent dynamic. It underlies the peculiar history of rivalry between England and France. France, with the greatest agricultural potential in western Europe, occupying an extensive well-watered plain, had a vastly greater population than England thruout the Middle Ages and well into the 19th century. But, France became overpopulated. Famine and hunger drove the French Revolution when bad weather triggered bad harvests that threatened the surplus that fed Paris.
England’s ability to feed its industrializing cities was a near-run thing in the 18th and 19th centuries. The additional surplus generated by the British Agricultural Revolution was a paltry thing and Ireland was kept on the edge of famine by overpopulation until pushed over the edge.
The productive often desperate competition that Ian draws attention to has a multi-path causal relation to the generation and/or extraction of surplus. That surplus may originate in accidents, be managed or neglected by elites and be extinguished without intention.