Jeffrey A. Winters [The American Interest, via The Big Picture 12-24-2023]
Winters is professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of Oligarchy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
Everyone is by now aware of the staggering shift in fortunes upward favoring the wealthy. Less well understood is that this rising inequality is not the result of something economically rational, such as a surge in productivity or value-added contributions from financiers and hedge-fund CEOs, but is rather a direct reflection of redistributive policies that have helped the richest get richer.
[TW: I would argue that this is, in fact, well understood: that’s why Biden’s polling is so terrible. People generally understand the economy is rigged, and the see no effort being made to unrig it, nor any effort to rein in the worst abuses of economic predators, such as private equity. ]
The tiny proportion of wealthy actors among eligible voters cannot account for the immense political firepower needed to keep winning these policy victories. While motivated and mobilized minorities—those organized over issues like gay marriage, for example—can sometimes win legislative victories despite broad opposition from the electorate, America’s ultra-rich all together could barely fill a large sports stadium. They never assemble for rallies or marches, sign petitions, or mount Facebook or Twitter campaigns. So how do they so consistently get their way?
One increasingly popular answer is that America is an oligarchy rather than a democracy.1 The complex truth, however, is that the American political economy is both an oligarchy and a democracy; the challenge is to understand how these two political forms can coexist in a single system. Sorting out this duality begins with a recognition of the different kinds of power involved in each realm. Oligarchy rests on the concentration of material power, democracy on the dispersion of non-material power. The American system, like many others, pits a few with money power against the many with participation power. The chronic problem is not just that electoral democracy provides few constraints on the power of oligarchs in general, but that American democracy is by design particularly responsive to the power of money….
Oligarchy should be understood as the politics of wealth defense, which has evolved in important ways throughout human civilization. For most of history, this has meant oligarchs were focused on defending their claims to property. They did so by arming themselves or by ruling directly and jointly over armed forces they assembled and funded. Every great increase in wealth required oligarchs to spend additional resources on armaments, castles, militias and other means of defense. The greatest transformation in the politics of wealth defense and thus of oligarchy came with the rise of the modern state. Through its impersonal system of laws, the armed modern state converted individual oligarchic property claims into secure societal property rights. In exchange, oligarchs disarmed and submitted to the same protective legal infrastructure that applied to all citizens (in theory if not always in practice). Property rights offered reliable safeguards not only against potential antagonists without property, but also, no less important, against other oligarchs and the armed state itself that administered the entire arrangement.
[TW: Here, I think Winters commits a grievous error of omission by not considering the mental and social pathologies which characterize the rich, and the society they dominate. Theorists of civic republicanism repeatedly warned of the self-glorification the rich engage in. ]
The Lever’s upcoming podcast series exposes the 50-year plot to legalize corruption in America. Listen to the trailer now.
In MASTER PLAN, The Lever’s journalists unearth never-before-reported documents showing how a group of extremists and tycoons legalized corruption and took over the U.S. government. In this epic journey from the 1970s to the present, you’ll hear the untold history of famous villains you already thought you knew—people like President Richard Nixon, Senator Mitch McConnell and Fox News boss Roger Ailes. You’ll also meet operatives and oligarchs you’ve probably never heard of, because they’ve wielded their power in the shadows.…
Mark A. Graber [The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-20-2023]
“Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion.’ Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose. Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government. What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.”
Chief Justice Boatright: “The framework that (Colorado’s election law) offers for identifying qualified candidates is not commensurate with the extraordinary determination to disqualify a candidate because they engaged in insurrection against the Constitution.” [Boatright] said the plaintiffs relied on the ‘breakneck pace’ required in Colorado’s election laws to pursue Trump’s disqualification and that they ‘overwhelmed the process.’ ‘This speed comes with consequences, namely, the absence of procedures that courts, litigants, and the public would expect for complex constitutional litigation,’ Boatright added.” Justice Samour called the challenge ‘a square constitutional peg that could not be jammed into our election code’s round hole’ and labeled the district court proceedings a ‘procedural Frankenstein’ for not following the strict deadlines in state election law.” Berkenkotter: “Three days to appeal a district court’s order regarding a challenge to a candidate’s age? Sure. But a challenge to whether a former President engaged in insurrection by inciting a mob to breach the Capitol and prevent the peaceful transfer of power? I am not convinced this is what the General Assembly had in mind.”
Critics of the court’s ruling are breezily dismissing the notion there should be any legal accountability for Trump’s actions on January 6….
Most abhorrent to me is the idea that Trump shouldn’t be disqualified—even if disqualification would be legally and constitutionally valid, as Chait conceded for the purposes of his argument—simply because Trump supporters do not like it. This is precisely the reasoning that got us into this situation in the first place. Trump and a few thousand of his supporters gathered in Washington on January 6, 2021, because they thought their beliefs mattered more than the Constitution.
Nancy Maclean, Arn Pearson, December 11, 2023 [progressive.org, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2023]
Frustrated by the surprise defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, a group of breathtakingly rich and highly strategic actors on the radical right, including the Koch brothers, quietly launched an ambitious new campaign to lock in their political control once and for all. They had used their immense wealth and institution-building savvy to capture a majority of state legislatures in 2010, so the groundwork was already in place.
This campaign would be spearheaded by a corporate pay-to-play group they had long funded to influence state laws—the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—and a dark money group with deep ties to Charles and the late David Koch (who died in 2019), as well as the Tea Party movement—Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG). When legislators arrived at ALEC’s annual meeting in August 2013, they were given detailed instructions and model text to bring back to their statehouses for a resolution demanding the first Constitutional convention since 1787….
In the decade since those first secretive meetings, Meckler’s Convention of States has managed to rack up wins in nineteen states for a convention that would address sweeping proposals to radically curtail the powers of the federal government. ALEC-led groups also claim to have twenty-eight states behind their call for a more limited convention to propose a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Should a convention be convened, what is it that the ultra-rich backers want? Their chosen so-called grassroots leaders mince no words when speaking to friendly audiences. Meckler has declared that the purpose is “to reverse 115 years of progressivism.” In fact, the endgame is even more consequential: to return this nation to its pre-Constitution roots under the Articles of Confederation, with a weak central government and sovereign states….
Indeed, most of what ALEC, CSG, and their billionaire backers want to achieve flies in the face of public opinion. And that’s what makes their plan so devious. “Voters have no role to play in the right’s vision of a Constitutional convention,” a report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) concluded. Delegates would be handpicked by legislative leaders, and here’s the kicker: The votes taken at such a convention would be based not on population but on one vote per state in order to grossly underrepresent the majority of Americans.
In audio obtained by CMD, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, told an ALEC audience in 2021 how this strategy could be used to circumvent what most Americans want. “Because their [Democrats’] population is concentrated and ours isn’t,” Santorum said, “rural voters [Republicans] . . . actually have an outsized power granted under this process.”
He added, “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though . . . we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
[TW: The most disconcerting aspect of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza is not the brutality and inhumanity of it, or the shamelessness of Israeli officials, but the complete lack of any plan or even proposal for a constructive alternative to the killing and destruction.
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]
Key elements that shaped the counteroffensive and the initial outcome include:
● Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting forcein a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.
● U.S. and Ukrainian officials sharply disagreed at times over strategy, tactics and timing. The Pentagon wanted the assault to begin in mid-April to prevent Russia from continuing to strengthen its lines. The Ukrainians hesitated, insisting they weren’t ready without additional weapons and training.
● U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces,in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days.
● The United States advocated a focused assault along that southern axis, but Ukraine’s leadership believed its forces had to attack at three distinct points along the 600-mile front, southward toward both Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and east toward the embattled city of Bakhmut.
Permissive airstrikes on non-military targets and the use of an artificial intelligence system have enabled the Israeli army to carry out its deadliest war on Gaza….
The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions….
Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.
In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.
“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”
Both US and British Operation Forces are collaborating with the I.D.F. (See this)
The 10 page document recommends “the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”, namely to a refugee camp in Egyptian territory. There are indications of Israel-Egypt negotiations as well as routine consultations with U.S. intelligence….
…it’s important to remember that Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should prioritize what the people want….
This has brought us a series of criminal Republican presidents and corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, who’ve legalized political bribery while devastating voting and civil rights.
None of this was a mistake or an accident, because none of these people truly believed in democracy.
This rejection of democracy and turn toward criminality and it’s logical end-point, fascism, started in the modern GOP with Richard Nixon….
[Nixon sabotaged peace in Vietnam to win the 1968 election]
Next up was Ronald Reagan. He not only didn’t believe in democracy, he didn’t even believe in the American government….During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
[This deal was sabotaged by Reagan by creating the illegals Iran-Contra arms deal.]
…Fifty-four years of Republican presidents using treason to achieve the White House (or inheriting it from one who did) has transformed America and dramatically weakened our democracy.
Those presidents have contributed their own damages to the rule of law and democracy in America, but their cynical Supreme Court appointments have arguably done the most lasting damage.
Republican appointees on the Court during this time have gutted the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, union rights, the Affordable Care Act, and legalized Republican voter purges. They legalized the bribery of politicians by billionaires and corporations….
In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”
Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.
This is absolutely staggering: wages are now set to remain below their 2008 level until 2028. That's a totally unprecedented TWO lost decades of pay growth pic.twitter.com/l2GQ4OR6mh
The speed is 1000 km/h. China has built a 2km low vacuum pipeline maglev train experimental line in Shanxi. It may be built between Hangzhou and Shanghai in the future. pic.twitter.com/lXg1KFqsW0
WB Palestinians are not only forbidden by israel from collecting RAINWATER, any cisterns found are destroyed. They're also not allowed to drill water wells, install pumps, and have no access to the Jordan river or water springs on their land. Wait till you find out about Gaza. https://t.co/Yi6PEwSOV3
Absolutely chilling words from @UNReliefChief Martin Griffith that really put into perspective just how historically atrocious what's happening in Gaza is:
"The. Worst. Ever. And I don't say that lightly. I mean I started off in my twenties dealing with Khmer rouge and you… https://t.co/Ijv3dT8ekA
[A Wealth of Common Sense, via The Big Picture 11-20-2023]
Bessimbinder found just 86 stocks accounted for half of all wealth creation in the U.S. stock market going back to 1926. All of the wealth creation in that time came from just 4% of stocks. Nearly 60% of stocks failed to beat T-bill returns over their lives. Close to 40% of stocks barely beat T-bills.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
[via Heather Cox Richardson, November 21, 2023 [Letters from an American]
…plenty of grocery prices are still rising, and Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) has taken on the issue, documenting how “corporations are making record profits on the backs of American families.” In a public report, Casey noted that from July 2020 through July 2022, inflation rose by 14%, but corporate profits rose by 75%, five times as fast. A family making $68,000 a year in 2022 paid $6,740 in that period to “corporate executives and wealthy shareholders.”
The torpedoes from the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission are exploding, and Wall Street is very angry. Here’s what they are planning if they win in 2024.
Last Monday, one of the large number of Washington, D.C. insider trade publications – Politico – called out Biden antitrust policy as the single most problematic area for financiers. “In taking on tech giants and forcing the collapse of lucrative deals,” said Politico Morning Money, “Lina Khan has earned the status of Wall Street nemesis.” It’s true. The torpedoes launched last year – from rule-makings to challenges of Google and Spirit-JetBlue – are now exploding.
In this issue, we’re going to describe how the establishment is hitting back, in ways you don’t see….
It’s not just certain Democrats making the case. After all, in 2020, it was Donald Trump’s administration which brought the major Google antitrust suit currently being litigated. In academia, today legal scholars and historians are trying to reorient the history of America as one grounded in anti-monopoly thought, as this interesting collection of essays put out by the Tobin Project shows. And in key ways, conservative legal thinkers are ahead of the curve on consolidation. Take the highly influential George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki, who interviewed Biden antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter on the new proposed merger guidelines, calling them a “moderate” way to split the difference between traditional Chicago School conservatives and a newer populist sentiment.
That interview happened at, of all places, the Federalist Society, which is the beating heart of the conservative legal movement, where law professors, high-powered lawyers, circuit court judges and Supreme Court justices spend time networking and learning from each other. Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanagh all attended last Friday’s black tie Federalist Society event….
And yet, in certain corners of the establishment, the pro-monopoly tradition that started in the 1980s remains dominant. Last week, an appropriations bill in the House – one of the spending bills that keeps government working – was amended multiple times to repeal antitrust laws.
Let’s look at a few of those proposals. There was a pro-junk fee amendment from Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), which would “prohibit funding for the FTC to make Unfair Competition rule-makings.” Such wording sounds anodyne. But if you strip away the legalese, Fitzgerald is seeking to do away with the rule-making authority the FTC is using to ban annoying junk fees, which deceive customers into paying higher prices for food, hotels, event tickets, car rentals and more. It’s also the authority the FTC is using to prohibit non-compete agreements, which trap people in their jobs and deprive workers of some $300 billion in wages per year.
There was another amendment which would prevent the FTC from enforcing its unfair methods of competition authority outside the bounds of the Clayton and Sherman Act. This one would effectively end or weaken key parts of the FTC’s case against Amazon, particularly its use of algorithms to raise prices in tacit collusion with other sellers, as well as its actions against pharmacy benefit managers on lower insulin prices and its work against price discrimination towards small and medium size grocers….
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, November 21, 2023 [Wall Street on Parade]
…So what’s really going on here?
Gruenberg is aggressively pursuing higher capital rules for the mega banks on Wall Street which pose systemic risk to the U.S. banking system. (No community bank would be impacted by the proposed capital rules.) Toppling Gruenberg from the Chairmanship of the FDIC would leave an evenly split vote by its Board when the FDIC votes on the new capital rules, with two Republican votes and two Democrat votes. Since it takes a majority vote to finalize a rule, the new capital rules would very likely not go forward – an outcome that Wall Street’s mega banks have heavily lobbied for and bankrolled with millions of dollars.
There is also some evidence that certain Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee are less than objective parties in efforts to discredit Gruenberg….
As readers know, my dream is that AI goes through the enshittification cycle with great rapidity and force. From my armchair at 30,000 feet, I don’t believe that AI is going to become a super-intelligence, or anything like it. Silicon Valley can’t even get self-driving cars to work, and surely that’s a simpler problem than artificial general intelligence. Rather, AI will bring about a Philip K. Dick-style dystopia, a world where it’s never possible to reach a human to resolve a problem. For example, consider the following value extraction chain: An AI at the hospital upcodes one of your medical treatments. An AI at the insurance company jacks up your bill. When you complain to the insurance company, your reach an AI, which sends you into an AI-generated fruitless phone-tree. The possibilities are limitless!
[Lambert Strether: “Again, I remember very well how the spooks, the press, Parliamentary Labor, and the Israeli embassy took down Jeremy Corbyn with a dogpile of false charges of anti-semitism. So my heuristic is that all such charges are performative and motivated until proven otherwise.”]
Bennett is a well-known astronomer and educator who has spent parts of his career at Caltech and the University of Colorado. Aimed at adults, this work is nonetheless a relatively basic explanation of the science behind human effects on the climate, well illustrated with numerous diagrams. The writing is clear and understandable, and countless questions about all sorts of aspects of climate change are posed and answered. Such a work ought to be mandatory for the climate deniers, who don’t grasp the basics of what is going on, or pretend (?) to be morons in front of cameras inside or out of the U.S. Capitol. Chapters cover the basics of the science, the skeptic debate, the expected consequences, present and future solutions, and a pathway for the future.
Sample questions are basic and the answers address the realities such that anyone can understand them. They start with asking how we know that carbon dioxide production makes a planet warmer, and goes from there. The walk through the data, both current and historical, explains away some of the naïve assumptions some climate deniers like to pose as potential arguments, such as natural temperature variations in Earth’s history. In short, this book makes clear the realities of climate change for anyone who is halfway intelligent and doesn’t have a private interest in sticking their head in the sand.
The second new book is Michael Mann’s Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis, 320 pp., hardcover, Public Affairs, New York, 2023, $30. Mann is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a frequent contributor to the press on climate change topics.
Mann’s new book offers a sweeping history of the conditions of our planet. It offers quite an intellectual analysis of what is going on, beginning with understanding the tapestry of Earth’s 4.54-billion-year record. As Mann demonstrates with substantial evidence and reasoning, the emergence of our earliest proto-human ancestors some 2 million years ago was enabled by the very thing that now threatens us — climate change. As the tropics eventually dried, creating savannas in what is now Africa, humans spread and could hunt more effectively than before. More recently, during the “Younger Dryas” just 13,000 years ago, thawing of the last Ice Age helped enable agriculture to take hold and cities to take root.
But Mann reminds us that human habitability is hardly guaranteed as a one-way street. Earth as a habitat is fragile, and always has been….
[The Conversation, via The Big Picture 11-23-2023]
…for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you – and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport – collectively known as electric micromobility – are cheaper to buy and run. But it’s more than that – they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
[Works in Progress, via The Big Picture 11-25-2023]
Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today.
[Detroit News, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-23-2023]
“U.S. Senate hopeful Hill Harper said Wednesday he was offered a sizeable campaign donation from a Metro Detroit businessman if he dropped out of Michigan’s Senate race and instead ran against Democratic U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Detroit… ‘I said no. I won’t be bossed, bullied, or bought,’ Harper said on X. ‘Yes, telling the truth here will put a target on my back. But if we ALL come together we can win.’: And: [Marshall Wittman, a spokesperson for AIPAC] stressed that AIPAC was ‘absolutely not involved in any way in this matter.” I guess that means they were? And the lot thickens: “Harper later said the offer was proof of a broken political system tilted toward the wealthy and evidence that ‘establishment donors’ don’t believe Harper’s Senate Democratic primary opponent, U.S. Rep Elissa Slotkin of Holly, can defeat him.”
The Daily Beast obtained a copy of the 2022 tax statement for the nonprofit American Compass, which is linked to a plan to assemble Trump’s cabinet for a potential second term. The document includes a list of five donor organizations.
Roger Sollenberger, November 22, 2023 [DailyBeast]]
A conservative nonprofit tied to a controversial “White House-in-waiting” for a second Donald Trump presidency has apparently unintentionally revealed its top donors—and two of them are foundations famously associated with liberal causes….
According to the tax statement, the Omidyar Network has contributed a total of $400,000 to American Compass since 2020. (In reality, Omidyar has donated $500,000, including forthcoming installments.) The Hewlett Foundation—a longtime supporter of National Public Radio—has accounted for more than one-third of American Compass’ total public support, giving a combined $1,486,000 over the same period, with an extra $475,000 dose this January.
American Compass also disclosed support from another center-left group, the Action Now Initiative, which has contributed a total $250,000 since 2020, according to the tax return. ANI is run by John Arnold, a billionaire former Enron executive and Democrat whose nonprofit network has funded aerial police surveillance in Baltimore, among other controversial philanthropic investments….
American Compass is part of the New Right movement—a group of young Republicans who are essentially reverse-engineering an intellectual framework to reconcile the populist, big-government tenets of Trumpism with conservatism. While the movement has attracted a growing number of adherents and think pieces, it is still a nascent and largely theoretical amoeba, which dwells in the broader nationalist environment and subsists on a diet of hyper-intellectual contrarianism.
In economic terms, its chief innovation seems to be the embrace of government intervention as a tailored and self-serving lever of power that Reagan conservatives dismissed for decades….
American Compass founder Oren Cass—a former Bain executive and adviser to Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid—has staked out what he casts as a more labor-friendly economic conservatism. While he has advocated for “genuine” bipartisanship, Cass is also aligned with the New Right. He rejects many of the absolutist tenets of laissez-faire capitalism that the GOP has held dear for so long, arguing that free-market fundamentals have failed the American worker. Last year, Cass drew a salary of $275,000 from his nonprofit—more than one out of every four dollars raised….
In reality, Project 2025’s labor platform appears to reflect Trump’s own identity crisis: He says he supports unions—a nod to political necessity—but his actions reveal otherwise. And Project 2025’s own proposals appear sharply at odds with Omidyar’s broad “pro-worker” cast. For instance, the group states that federal organized labor is “incompatible” with Trumpist policies, and its labor platform has been roundly criticized by organizations and journalists with pro-worker bona fides.
The labor policies in the original Mandate for Leadership were written by American Compass adviser Jonathan Berry, a former top official in Trump’s Labor Department. (Other American Compass advisers include Trump’s first attorney general Jeff Sessions, Trump’s tariff-war mastermind Robert Lighthizer, Democratic Hawley fan Matt Stoller, and anti-porn crusader Patrick T. Brown.)….
In an editorial published last week, titled, “If Attitudes Don’t Shift, A Political Dating Mismatch Will Threaten Marriage,” the Washington Post’s editorial board points out that political polarization in this country has reached the point where it is now a prominent, often decisive factor in determining who Americans settle on as their potential mates. They emphasize this trend is now so acute it may actually threaten the institution of marriage as a whole. In particular, it seems that Democratic women are rejecting potential Republican suitors not only for marriage but as relationship material, all across the board….
[The Garden of Forking Paths, via The Big Picture 11-22-2023]
One recent survey found that 52 percent of Americans can’t name a single US Supreme Court Justice. In 2011, a poll found that twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on American Idol than could correctly identify the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. And in 2006, three years after the war in Iraq began—the most important element of US foreign policy at the time—six in ten Americans couldn’t identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East. (A little over half could point to New York state on a map)….
From April 2009 to January 2011, I worked on the political campaign and transition team for the soon-to-be Governor of Minnesota (I got hired as his driver—which is exactly what it sounds like—but eventually served at various times as the Deputy Campaign Manager and Policy Director).
I spent weeks carefully crafting five and ten-point policy plans, on everything from education to taxes, health care to transportation. These were crucial for winning the support of interest groups, but when I looked at the total number of downloads for the PDFs of our policy agenda, I was dumbstruck. By the end of the campaign, the policy plan for education had been downloaded something like 47 times. This was the future governor of a state of five million people. We won more than 919,000 votes. At most, 47 of those voters looked at our two-page summary of education policy ideas.
I saw this first-hand when I did what every American political campaign staffer must do: march in parades with the candidate. People would come up to the candidate and say “We’re voting for you!” As the policy director, I’d ask why we won their vote. The most common answers were related to feelings of trust, character, party affiliation, his deep roots in Minnesota, and the idea that he was a good person with integrity. The least common answers, by far, were about policy.
Through those experiences, the campaign taught me one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about politics—and one that’s rarely taught in political science. Ever since, I’ve been acutely aware of ignorance bias.
This doesn’t mean that voters are stupid, or idiots, or that elites are right and the masses are wrong. Instead, it means that voters use cognitive and informational shortcuts—schemas—to make decisions about voting and to understand the sphere of politics. Those shortcuts rarely include in-depth analysis of policy ideas or deep-dives into issues related to governance. Whether that’s good or bad is beside the point. It’s our reality—and we make serious mistakes when we pretend otherwise.
A surge of lawmakers calling it quits the past three weeks is on the verge of putting Congress on pace to have more members retire before the next election than in any similar cycle over the past decade.… This month alone, nine members of the House and Senate have said they won’t run for reelection next year. That’s the second-most in any single month going back at least as far as 2011 — and there’s still two weeks left in November. A total of 34 members of Congress have already announced they’re not running again, and that doesn’t count those who plan to quit early or have already resigned.
Howie Klein, November 25, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]
…The neo-fascist PVV, led by Geert Wilders, came in first with 23.6% and 37 seats, up a startling 20. They won every province but Utrecht and didn’t do as well as in the rest of the country in North Holland (Amsterdam) either. In fact, Wilders– like Trump– lost all the big cities. In second place was Frans Timmerman’s left of center Greens + Labour, which had won 10.9% (17 seats) in 2021 and took 15.5% (25 seats) this time. The Socialist Party went from 6% and 9 seats to just 3.1% and 5 seats….
Former President Trump’s allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024, officials involved in the effort tell Axios. Why it matters: Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.
Much of what “Network of Lies” discovers is more validating than shocking, mainly that Fox News lies to appease its faithful because that’s what they want. Following Joe Biden’s election to the presidency in 2020, the audience wanted coverage of fraud that didn’t exist. So Fox ginned it up.
Revelations from summary judgment briefs related to Dominion’s defamation case establish this as fact, not suspicion….
The (anti)Federalist Society Infestation of the Courts
…But, the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, stacked with right-wing ideologues, plays by its own rules, as it recently demonstrated when it set aside a Board ruling that Tesla unlawfully interfered with its employees right to display union insignia at work. And, because an employer may challenge an NLRB ruling in any circuit where it does business, we can expect a lot more NLRB cases to end up at the Fifth Circuit….
The Fifth Circuit simply skipped over the ALJ’s findings that Tesla’s justifications for banning the union t-shirts did not hold up. Instead, the court got hung up on the Board’s ruling that a uniform policy is not an automatic defense to a prohibition on wearing clothing containing a union insignia. Quoting an earlier decision, the court announced, apparently as a matter of law, that a “uniform requirement fosters discipline, promotes uniformity, encourages esprit de corps, and increases readiness and having standardized uniforms encourages the subordination of personal preferences and identities in favor of the overall group mission.” Never mind that Tesla did not assert any of these rationales for its policy.
…A three-judge panel of Republican appointees held earlier this week that private plaintiffs cannot sue states to enforce a key provision of the landmark law known as Section 2, which imposes a permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in election and voting laws. Judge David Stras, a Trump appointee writing for the 2–1 panel, noted that courts had assumed Section 2 was privately enforceable for “much of the last half-century,” but concluded that a “deeper look” had “revealed that this assumption rests on flimsy footing.”….
Section 2 is enforceable by litigation from the attorney general of the United States. For decades, the courts have also concluded that Section 2 created an implied cause of action—that is, its text implicitly created a right for private parties to bring a lawsuit to enforce it even though it did not explicitly spell it out. The Supreme Court has handed down more than a few rulings since the VRA’s enactment based on this assumption. Congress has also allowed this assumption to persist throughout every reauthorization and amendment….
Duncan Hosie, November 25, 2023 [The New York Review]
In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test….
Earlier this month the Court heard oral argument in United States v. Rahimi, a case that will decide whether Section 922(g)(8) violates the Second Amendment. The Court’s conservative supermajority seemed inclined to uphold the law but struggled to reconcile this outcome with originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation it has nurtured and championed. At the basis of the Bruen decision was an idea central to originalism as the modern right has defined it—that constitutional meaning “is fixed,” as the majority opinion put it, “according to the understandings of those who ratified it.” Rahimi asks the Court to square that idea with common sense and modern needs….
In 2019 a Texas man named Zackey Rahimi violently assaulted his ex-girlfriend in a parking lot and shot at a witness. The ex-girlfriend, whom Rahimi threatened to kill if she told anyone about the attack, got a protective order that barred him from possessing guns.
Rahimi ignored it. He kept his guns and continued to fire them in public across at least six different incidents. Eventually the police searched his home, where they found guns and a copy of the protective order. He was ultimately convicted of violating Section 922(g)(8). Arguing that the law contravened the Second Amendment, Rahimi challenged his conviction, but the Fifth Circuit, an archconservative federal appellate court that covers Texas, upheld it.
That is where the story would have ended if not for Donald Trump’s overhaul of the federal courts, which he stacked with originalist ideologues. This past March, less than a year after the Supreme Court decided Bruen, a Fifth Circuit panel consisting of two Trump appointees and one Reagan appointee reversed their earlier decision, applying Bruen to strike down Section 922(g)(8). The Biden administration petitioned for review of that decision, and oral argument followed….
Garrett Epps, Washington Monthly, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-22-2023]
“All five sections of the Fourteenth Amendment can be seen as what must have seemed like a last, desperate attempt to retain power in the hands of the Union and prevent a reborn Confederacy from ruling for the next century. Section Three addressed the prospects of Lee and all those who served the Confederacy. The old Southern leadership, which had enjoyed federal office until 1861, then fought the United States until 1865, was not coming back; it was barred from state or federal office…. Gentle reader, can you seriously imagine that our 19th-century ratifier—an informed, loyal American who had just lived through a brutal war that took more than 600,000 lives for the sole reason that Southern whites would not accept that Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election—would have understood Section 3 to mean that a traitor couldn’t be a Senator, or a Representative, or a governor, or a state legislator, or for that matter a dog-catcher—but that Robert E. Frickin’ Lee could turn his coat one more time, swear he really would support the Constitution this time, and waltz into the White House? I cannot. This is what philosophers call “self-stultifying”— so self-contradictory that its very utterance undermines the idea of meaning itself.” • This is an excellent article with which I disagree on the main points (and I also don’t like the lack of links at key turning points; for example, that “Democratic newspapers speculated that their party’s strongest presidential nominee in 1868 would be former Confederate General Robert E. Lee” is a bare assertion). First, Epps urges that the phrase “officer of the United States” in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to Presidents. I disagree (and some legal scholars agree). Madison writes, in Federalist 68, of the President: “It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.” It makes no sense to me that a President, elected by the whole nation, is in the same category (“officer of the United States”) as an appointed official, who is not. Second, in regard to the finding of fact in the Colorado decision: It gives me the creeps that we might rely on decision from a non-elected State District Court judge to determine that Trump is an “insurrectionist.” Insurrection is a crime, and if the Biden adminstration’s Justice Department didn’t charge and convict him, and no special prosecutor did, it’s most likely because neither thought they could make the charge stick. So which ought to be controlling?
Guido Alfani [New York Times, downwithtyranny.com 11-25-2023]
…we should also consider whether the exceptional resilience of the rich to recent crises has been obtained in such a way as to make society as a whole less resilient— for the rich, protecting their fortunes from crises also involves protecting them from extra taxation, thus stripping public institutions of resources that could have been used for stronger mitigation policies, including those aimed at abating the sufferings (economic or otherwise) of the poorer strata. To some degree, governments compensated for this by expanding the public debt, which raises the question of who will repay it. Given the fact that many Western fiscal systems do not burden their wealthy to the same degree they once did, it seems probable that the bill for the Covid-19 crisis will weigh on the shoulders of the rich to an extremely low degree relative to the burden during past crises.….
The Frankfurt School in many ways embodies this danger, and the Left should not be afraid to say so. Its belief that authoritarianism was caused by sexual inhibitions — and reproduced by the nuclear family — strayed quite far from traditional Marxist understandings of material struggle and physical reality. The School might more usefully have imagined the best way to organise the working classes to lobby for higher wages — rather than trying to re-engineer the sexual expressions of the masses, in the belief that revolutionary change would necessarily follow. Instead, what followed was a major shift in Leftist analysis, which has resulted not in revolutionary change but in identitarian strife.
Patrick Lawrence [Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2023]
There is disgust and condemnation now, and they find expression not only on the streets of many cities but also in governing circles. Axios reported Monday that an internal State Department memo, signed by 100 officials at State and its aid agency, USAID, accuses President Biden of lying about Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and of complicity in war crimes. On Tuesday, The New York Times put the signatories of another letter to Biden at 400 representing 40 government departments and agencies, including the National Security Council — this in addition to an open letter to Secretary of State Blinken signed by more than 1,000 Agency for International Development employees. So far as I know, this measure of dissent in policy and governing circles is more or less unprecedented….
The devastation of America’s status in the community of nations—and I do not think we witness anything less—is altogether the consequence of a complacency long evident among America’s policy cliques. As Chas Freeman points out in his exchange with Chris Lydon, Israel is now breaking U.S. laws circumscribing the use of American-made armaments; it is in breach of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. And nobody in the U.S. says anything about it, Freeman says with obvious ire. It is the rest of the world that is beginning to speak up. I put it this way: We watch as the Age of Hegemonic Hypocrisy, as I propose we call it, draws to a close….
…We now have the Chinese preparing, by all appearances, to play a diplomatic role in the search for a settlement. We have Iran and Saudi Arabia summiting to determine a common course of action in response to the Gaza crisis. We have Turkey militantly denouncing Israel and talking to Iran after long, long years of animosity. We have a goodly number of America’s friends pulling the plug on their relations with Tel Aviv.
…There are a lot of possiblities to explain subjectively what CNN and the BBC are doing. Objectively what they are doing is re-establishing their credibility as news as opposed to propaganda providers. And I think this is especially obvious for the BBC. One of their senior journalists who has his own program now calls it “Unspun” and repeats in the trailer-adverts that he is delivering news without spin. Why would he be saying this if it were not obvious that everything the BBC has been saying about Russia for the past 20 months is “spun” and is being rejected by viewers for such tendentiousness.
This is all the more timely for these broadcasters now that the lies they have been disseminating about the Ukraine war are overturned by the latest news from the supreme Ukrainian military commander Zaluzhny in his widely cited interview in The Economist. Now, finally, we read in mainstream that the Ukrainian losses in the war may approach 400,000 dead, not 70,000 as official Kiev claims and that the kill ratio till now may be 10:1 or 12:1 in Russia’s favor….
Both Netanyahu‘s government and Hamas did their part to escalate the conflict: in addition to bombing Gaza, Israel launched a number of attacks against Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and even an “accidental” strike on targets in Egypt. US forces also launched strikes on Syria. For its part, Hamas called for the Muslim world to unite in a holy war against Israel. Recall, Hamas is the creation of Israel and western deep state structures which has been lavishly funded and supported, principally by western-allied Qatar, but also by Israel and western powers.
Five days after they lit the fuse on 7 October, Hamas leader and founder Khaled Mashal published a video message appealing to Muslims worldwide, asking them to carry out Jihad and become martyrs for Al-Aqsa. He urged Muslims to spill their blood for Palestine and even asked religious leaders to issue a fatwa compelling Muslims to take part in the holy war against Israel. Mashal himself wasn’t exactly volunteering: he sent his appeal from Qatar where he is safe from the mayhem he unleashed in Gaza.
Mashal has no links to Gaza since he never actually lived there… In the weeks that followed the war’s outbreak, Muslim world backed away from the impulse to attack Israel, and even Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah declined to open a new front from Lebanon.
In short, they didn’t take the bait. Had muslim countries united to attack Israel, many western nations would have united to defend her, and might even have been able to do so with substantial popular support. Instead, using a variety of paramilitary forces in the region, the Muslim powers began to attack US bases in Syria and Iraq. Instead of ensnaring the Muslim world in a devastating war escalation, the US itself has become ensnared in a trap that could ultimately force it out of the region entirely….
Jessica Wildfire [OK Doomer, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2023]
…We’re surrounded by people we care about who can’t change to save themselves, no matter how bad things get. They can’t bring themselves to do anything different. They can’t operate on a more realistic worldview. They can’t break with their political party. They can’t wear a mask. They can’t demand clean air. They can’t update their vaccines. They can’t call out genocide when they see it.
Why?
Two social psychologists at Yale proposed a theory to explain all of this two decades ago. It’s a theory of theories, a master theory.
It’s called systems justification.
According to John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji, we’re wired to resist change. Members of a group will go out of their way to defend the status quo. They do it to preserve social harmony and to boost their own self-esteem. Since most of us play varying roles in perpetuating the current systems, we all feel somewhat motivated to justify them to each other….
Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett, November 6, 2023 [Washington Post, via downwithtyranny.com]
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymityto describe private conversations.Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family….
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act….
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed….
Historian Heather Cox Richardson tells Salon about her book “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.” The “Letters from an American” writer explains how Republicans from Nixon to Trump have launched an attack on democracy and shares what Americans can do about it. Cox Richardson reflects on why she is still optimistic…
“… the modern day conservative movement — which is not intellectually conservative; it is quite radical and always has been — used language and history to convince Americans to give up on democracy. The Trump years are a bit different; he becomes a strong man quite quickly, and turns that intellectual and rhetorical strategy into a movement….
…People who think Trump happened from nowhere and is the sole cause of our current malaise are completely missing the previous almost 100 years in which there was a concerted movement to overturn the concept that the government should work for ordinary Americans….
[Trump] has become part of their identity, and they cannot be ripped away… Scholars [of authoritarianism] talk about this: once you have started to poison your own soul by buying into somebody who is abusing others, you can’t turn away without admitting you’re the one who is the problem.
Willful ignorance occurs when someone intentionally avoids information about the negative consequences of their actions. A new meta-analysis found that 40% of people will choose to remain ignorant of how their decisions affect others. The evidence suggests that willful ignorance provides people with a built-in excuse to act selfishly.
[TW: and keep in mind that the central idea of economic liberalism — and neoliberalism — is that the “free market” of everyone following their own selfishness will result in the best allocation of society’s resources. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness” — John Kenneth Galbraith. Here’s the full quote:
The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor. The man who has struck it rich in minerals, oil, or other bounties of nature is found explaining the debilitating effect of unearned income from the state. The corporate executive who is a superlative success as an organization man weighs in on the evils of bureaucracy. Federal aid to education is feared by those who live in suburbs that could easily forgo this danger, and by people whose children are in public schools. Socialized medicine is condemned by men emerging from Walter Reed Hospital. Social Security is viewed with alarm by those who have the comfortable cushion of an inherited income.
— “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
[Also note the effects of the institutionalization of selfishness in the links under “Health care crisis” ]
“Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus.Finally, there was only one other family between us and the ticket counter. This family made a big impression on me. There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. The way they were dressed, you could tell they didn’t have a lot of money, but their clothes were neat and clean. The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, animals, and all the acts they would be seeing that night. By their excitement you could sense they had never been to the circus before. It would be a highlight of their lives.
The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband’s hand, looking up at him as if to say, “You’re my knight in shining armour.” He was smiling and enjoying seeing his family happy.
The ticket lady asked the man how many tickets he wanted? He proudly responded, “I’d like to buy eight children’s tickets and two adult tickets, so I can take my family to the circus.” The ticket lady stated the price.
The man’s wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, the man’s lip began to quiver. Then he leaned a little closer and asked, “How much did you say?” The ticket lady again stated the price .The man didn’t have enough money. How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn’t have enough money to take them to the circus?
Seeing what was going on, my dad reached into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill, and then dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father bent down, picked up the $20 bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.”
The man understood what was going on. He wasn’t begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking and embarrassing situation. He looked straight into my dad’s eyes, took my dad’s hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied; “Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.”
My father and I went back to our car and drove home. The $20 that my dad gave away is what we were going to buy our own tickets with. Although we didn’t get to see the circus that night, we both felt a joy inside us that was far greater than seeing the circus could ever provide.
That day I learnt the value to Give. The Giver is bigger than the Receiver. If you want to be large, larger than life, learn to Give. Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get – only with what you are expecting to give – which is everything.The importance of giving, blessing others can never be over emphasized because there’s always joy in giving. Learn to make someone happy by acts of giving.”
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, November 9, 2023 [Wall Street on Parade]
On October 20 we reported that JPMorgan Chase, a serial recidivist when it comes to crime, had paid $1.085 billion in legal expenses in just the last six months. A nice chunk of that money went to the Big Law firm, WilmerHale, which has been representing JPMorgan Chase this year in multiple lawsuits involving the bank’s dark history of financial dealings with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. (See Related Articles at the bottom of this article.)
When the largest bank in the United States pays big bucks to a law firm with a roster of 1,000 attorneys, it doesn’t expect its $290 million class action settlement with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims to blow up in its face just days before the final Fairness Hearing – a legally required court event to determine if the terms of the agreement are “fair, adequate and reasonable.”….
We had anticipated that WilmerHale might file a respectful response to the Attorneys General objections, perhaps agreeing to change the language in the settlement that the Attorneys General found improper. These are, after all, the highest law enforcement offices in 16 states and the District of Columbia.
We could not have been more wrong. The response from WilmerHale effectively blasted the Attorneys General for sticking their nose where it didn’t belong.
What the Attorneys General are challenging boils down to this: Under the federal law known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), Attorneys General have the right to bring claims on behalf of sex trafficked victims. The language in the JPMorgan Chase settlement proposes to extinguish those rights. The State Attorneys General explained it as follows in their filing with the court:
William Mitchell [Modern Monetary Theory, via Mike Norman Economics, November 9, 2023]
On November 6, 2023, the Governor of the Bank of Japan, Ueda Kazuo gave a speech to ‘business leaders’ in Nagoya – Japan’s Economy and Monetary Policy….
The strategy of the Bank of Japan is very different to that of the Western central banks.
The latter have been attempting to scorch the demand-side of their economies with interest rate rises, designed to push up unemployment to reach some ill-defined NAIRU, because they claim that wages growth may break out….
In contradistinction, the Bank of Japan is holding rates around zero and controlling the bond market to keep government bond rates stable across the yield (maturity) curve, exactly because they want to encourage much faster wages growth to underpin a higher stable inflation rate.
In the West, the thought of accelerated wages growth is met with fear and derision from corporate types and government.
Is neoliberalism effectively dead or at least on its way out?
The implications of 40 years of foreign policy have become clear. China is not our friend. Rather than normalizing and entering into the first world order, China’s in many ways become the opposite; more intractable today than it was 40 years ago. There has been a great shift away from China basically providing the U.S. consumer with lots and lots of flat-screen TVs and cheap T-shirts.
We’ve lost our ability to make a lot of critical things, so there’s been a resilience impact as well. It’s kind of insane that we had to go to a T-shirt manufacturer in a panic as the federal government and say, we need you to convert [because] we couldn’t make medical gowns. We couldn’t make medical masks. That has really started to hit policymakers in the face, almost unavoidably so.
The most interesting thing about the Trump-Clinton [2016] election cycle was all of the energy in the electorate was with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both of whom were getting at this deep sense of malaise among working-class Americans and this intuitive understanding that we fucked things up over the last 40 years.
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 11-06-2023]
There is a growing awareness that all nations use industrial policy on an ongoing basis, whether or not they acknowledge it as such. Many conventional policy measures—from public investment allocations and trade measures to environmental regulations and public procurement rules—influence which industries and production methods thrive and decline, which economic (and social) actors win and lose power, who creates value, and who captures it. Therefore, whether or not policymakers frame such policy measures as industrial policy, that is precisely what they are….
Today, the existential threat of climate change and environmental degradation, rooted in a system of production that has been unambiguously diagnosed as terminally self-destructive from a range of scientific perspectives, necessitates a similarly ambitious transformation of the production systems that make up the American economy. The emerging US industrial strategy recognizes climate change as a central problem, but the full scope of existential threats we face (e.g. biodiversity loss, soil depletion, and water pollution) have yet to be integrated as priorities.
…Those strikes weren’t just about better wages and working conditions for auto workers, which are important on their own. What caught my eye is that the labor unions were able to affect corporate decision-making on a more structural level, as I’ll discuss below. Indeed, Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW, is now the single most important business leader in America, a generational figure who is, ironically, like the reverse image of transformational anti-union General Electric icon Jack Welch.
So today’s issue is about the significance of that shift, and how labor unions and antitrust are being used to wrest control over critical corporate investment decisions from financiers, to empower workers, and to teach Americans how to build again….
…If Turkish President Erdogan is sincere about wanting to help, there’s a simple way to do it. Send a squad of military cargo planes with pallets to drop (ie. with parachutes) into Gaza. Tell Israel that if they are shot down, it’s an automatic declaration of war: pass a bill saying that before the planes go.
Meanwhile, the real part of the genocide has begun. It was never about killing them all with explosives, most will die from disease, hunger and lack of water.
[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 11-05-2023]
…eager to complete the ‘pivot to Asia’ initiated in the early 2010s, the US has sought to partially disentangle itself from the region. Its goal is to establish a model that would replace direct intervention with oversight from a distance. To contemplate any real reduction in its presence, though, it first needs a security settlement that would strengthen friendly regimes and constrain the influence of nonconforming ones. The 2020 Abraham Accords advanced this agenda, as Bahrain and the UAE, by agreeing to normalize relations with Israel, joined a wider ‘reactionary axis’ spanning the Saudi Kingdom and Egyptian autocracy. Trump expanded arms sales to these states and cultivated connections between them – military, commercial, diplomatic – with the aim of creating a reliable phalanx of allies who would tilt towards the US in the New Cold War while acting as a bulwark against Iran. Obama’s nuclear deal had failed to stop the Islamic Republic from projecting its influence….
[War on the Rocks, via The Big Picture 11-06-2023]
What Israel missed is the growing democratization of technology, which is rapidly providing new and dangerous capabilities to non-state actors. Stephen Biddle, in his book Nonstate Warfare, argues that this is allowing violent non-state actors to achieve military capabilities that had previously been reserved for states. When carefully integrated into hybrid military-terror campaigns, these can challenge states that insist on maintaining dated misperceptions of their foes. Our research finds non-state actors are increasingly developing special operations capabilities, which are creating strategic and political effects beyond their tactical use.
[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 11-06-2023]
Good overview. On the tunnels:
“A source close to Hamas’s political leadership says the group believes it can defeat Israel but acknowledges the heavy price being paid by those on the ground.”…
While Hamas did not foresee an Israeli response on this scale, it has an extensive network of tunnels, which run for “many hundreds of kilometres”, MEE was told by another source.
The idea that Hamas would cease to operate if it lost Gaza City, which the Israeli forces are trying to encircle, is therefore less likely.
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 11-09-2023]
[Lambert Strether: “IOW, AI cannot function as a business without the theft of intellectual property, on a positively grandiose scale, to create its training sets. That sounds rather like “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” to me.” ]
The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter, via Naked Capitalism 11-10-2023]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-10-2023]
The pandemic school closure debate is now often framed as being solely about the kids. However, it's important to acknowledge that in 2020, the focus was mostly about using the kids as guinea pigs (ie subjecting them to a new virus) to achieve herd immunity + faster reopening.👇🏽 pic.twitter.com/PjwdDSAcHO
Daniel Immerwahr [The New York Review, November 23, 2023 issue]
A recent book contends that the global economy has a new geography of special zones, islands, and enclaves that benefit the world’s wealthiest residents.
If America is to recover any semblance of meaningful democracy in our country, we must cut out the cancer of big money in our political system by overturning Citizens United….
Republicans on the Supreme Court having legalized political bribery (and, thus, functional ownership) of judges and legislators, both federal and state.
In 1976, in response to an appeal by uber-rich New York Republican Senator James Buckley, the Court ruled that wealthy people in politics couldn’t be restrained from using their own money to overwhelm their political opponents. They then went a step farther and struck down other limitations on billionaires using their own money to “independently” promote the campaigns of politicians they like.
In other words, for morbidly rich people to have “free speech,” they must be able to spend as much money on politicking as they want. If you don’t have millions or billions, your free speech is pretty much limited to how loud you can yell: this was a decision almost entirely of, by, and for the morbidly rich.
Two years later, in 1978, four Republicans on the Court went along with a decision written by Republican Lewis Powell himself in declaring that corporations are “persons” entitled to human rights under the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution), including the First Amendment right of free speech.
And free speech, as they’d established two years earlier, meant the ability to shovel money into political campaigns. Effective in April of 1978, elections could go to whoever spent the most money….
Prior to the Court’s Citizens United decision, for example, there was a bipartisan consensus in Congress that climate change was caused by burning fossil fuels and that we should do something about it, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse so eloquently documents….
Clarence Thomas, actively groomed for decades by fossil fuel and other billionaires, became the deciding vote in Citizens United, legalizing not only his own corruption but that of every Republican in Congress.
Once the fossil fuel industry could pour unlimited money into either supporting — or, perhaps more importantly, destroying — the candidacy of any Republican politician, every Republican in the House and Senate began to say, “What climate change?”
As Senator Whitehouse said on the floor of the Senate:
“I believe we lost the ability to address climate change in a bipartisan way because of the evils of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Our present failure to address climate change is a symptom of things gone awry in our democracy due to Citizens United. That decision did not enhance speech in our democracy; it has allowed bullying, wealthy special interests to suppress real debate.”
Meatpackers used to make twice as much, in real terms. Now we make half as much in Storm Lake as someone in Illinois, which we like to scoff at as corrupt. Who owns Iowa? Koch Enterprises and Bayer. How do you fix pollution in the river? You don’t. You tell yourself it is the price of feeding starving children in Gaza with No. 2 yellow corn. Or it is the price of us not being involved in Middle East wars. You put up with the stench near Iowa Falls because Iowa Select is the only game around, so you play that game. We could have open markets but we elect politicians who let them lock up.
You should be damn glad for your $50,000 in median household income. Your kid doesn’t really need to go to college. So few jobs around here call for it. Yeah, we used to make twice as much, relatively speaking, but we sure are glad to be free of the union dues. The best you can hope for is a tax cut, even though you barely make enough to pay tax….
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-10-2023]
“Robert Bigelow, one of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) most prominent donors, said he is switching his support from the Florida governor to Trump. Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites of America and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that DeSantis is ‘not strong enough,’ nor is he the commander in chief the U.S. needs…. Top GOP donor and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus also announced his endorsement of Trump on Thursday, arguing the former president is the ‘simple choice’ in a high-stakes political world…. The support comes on the heels of the third GOP presidential primary debate, which Trump notably did not attend. Despite his absence from the past GOP debates and his ongoing legal battles, the former president continues to hold a strong lead over his rivals.”
The conservative student newspaper cofounded by Peter Thiel in 1987 has been riling up the left-leaning Stanford community for more than three decades. But it’s also quietly become one of the surest paths to an enviable job in Silicon Valley. Here’s a look at the extensive network of tech investors and founders who got their start writing for the Review
Will Bunch [Philadelphia Inquirer, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-06-2023]
“the real high-stakes players — like Jeff Yass from the Philadelphia suburbs, whose bets that started with his college poker game and led to a major investment in TikTok have made him the richest man in the state — know where the real action is: state courts. The power wielded in places like the Pennsylvania Supreme Court — over important things like drawing congressional maps, funding schools, punishing polluters, rewarding tax evasion, or crimping worker power — is enormous. And those justices are elected here, as in other key states…. I doubt that Yass cares much about the issue making the most noise in this election — abortion rights — but I imagine he cares quite a bit about having a court that won’t rule for organized labor or against Big Oil and Gas. ProPublica recently chronicled how Yass aggressively fought to lower his taxes by an estimated $1 billion, even suing the IRS in federal court. If Yass’ tax strategies are ever litigated in Harrisburg, does he really desire judges “who apply the law as written” — or something else?”
[Seeking Rents, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-08-2023]
“A conservative think tank funded by a far-right billionaire wrote a controversial new bill in Florida that would weaken the state’s child-labor laws, according to records obtained by More Perfect Union. The records show that representatives for the Foundation for Government Accountability wrote the original draft of the Florida legislation, which would allow employers in the state to make 16- and 17-year-old teenagers work the same schedules as adults — including overnight shifts on school nights. ‘Attached is draft language on the Youth Worker Freedom issue that Rep. Chaney expressed interest in to FGA,’ a lobbyist for the FGA’s advocacy arm wrote in an Aug. 28 email to an aide to Rep. Linda Chaney, a Republican legislator from St. Pete Beach, which More Perfect Union obtained through a public-records request.’”
“Tuesday’s election results drove home to some Republicans in Congress what they already know and fear— that their party has alienated critical blocs of voters with its policies and message, particularly on abortion. And the results stiffened their resolve to resist such measures, even if it means breaking with the party at a critical time in a high-stakes fight over federal spending… In the House, however, gerrymandering has made most Republican seats so safe that lawmakers routinely cater to the far-right wing of their party, and a slim majority has given hard-right lawmakers outsized influence. The result has been that House Republicans continue to draft legislation that is out of step with a vast majority of voters, including some of their own constituents, on social issues.”
Howie Klein, November 9, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]
“The House Republican leadership had to pull two critical spending bills this week. Neither would’ve become law, yet both illustrated the divides in the House Republican Conference and members’ complete unwillingness to bridge them. Both moderate New York Republicans and hardline conservatives were unmoved by the leadership’s entreaties on the Transportation-HUD spending bill. New York Republicans were peeved that the bill cut too much from Amtrak and public transit, while hardliners thought it didn’t cut enough. On Thursday, the GOP leadership abruptly pulled the Financial Services-General Government spending bill when both conservatives and moderates revolted. Conservatives didn’t like that the legislation failed to explicitly ban funding for a new FBI headquarters. Moderates opposed the repeal of a provision that prohibited D.C. companies from discriminating against employees who get an abortion. Johnson and party leaders lobbied their members for two days to back the FSGG measure, only to come up short. In fact, the leadership was bested by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who whipped conservatives against the FSGG bill. ‘Us pragmatic conservatives— the guys in Biden districts— we felt like we were walked on for nine months,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) noted. He added: ‘What you’re seeing is the pragmatic conservatives, the common sense conservatives, say we’re not going to get run over anymore. It’s probably a bigger challenge for Mike— Speaker Johnson— to overcome. But we’re tired of being treated like second-class citizens.’ This dynamic is about to become much more important. The federal government will shut down in a week and Johnson has yet to unveil how he plans to fund agencies beyond Nov. 17. Other GOP leaders have been kept in the dark. Rank-and-file Republicans have been frustrated with the lack of information.
New York Magazine, via The Big Picture 11-04-2023]
Here are some not very fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency….
1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup.
If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president….
3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade….
6. He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts.
While serving as chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2021, Johnson proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these cuts wouldn’t be necessary if forced birth were the law of the land….
8. He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park….
9. He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana….
Laura Jedeed, November 10, 2023 [Poltico, via downwithtyranny.com]
For the last 10 years, the “Convention of States” movement has sought to remake the Constitution and force a tea party vision of the framers’ intent upon America. This group wants to wholesale rewrite wide swaths of the U.S. Constitution in one fell swoop. In the process, they hope to do away with regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC, virtually eliminate the federal government’s ability to borrow money, and empower state legislatures to override federal law.
As far-fetched as this idea might sound, the movement is gaining traction — and now, it believes, it has a friend in the speaker of the House.
“Speaker Mike Johnson has long been a supporter of Convention of States,” Mark Meckler, co-founder of Convention of States Action (COSA), told me when I asked about Johnson’s ascension. “It shows that the conservative movement in America is united around COS and recognizes the need to rein in an out-of-control federal government which will never restrain itself.”
Howie Klein, November 7, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]
As if their abortion hubris wasn’t bad enough, House Republicans are literally bringing up Social Security and Medicare again. Rather than get behind Democratic proposals to make the rich pay their fair share to keep the programs rolling, the rich— and their pawns in Congress— want to fight the battles they lost for the last 80 years: ending Social Security and Medicare. And MAGA Mike is leading the charge by reviving Paul Ryan’s failed deficit commission. MAGA-Mike’s “fervent support for trillions of dollars in cuts,” reported Nathaniel Weixel, “during his time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) could be a blueprint for GOP budgets if the party wins control of the government… Johnson promised to establish a bipartisan debt commission ‘immediately,’ and indicated at a press conference this past week that he was close to naming members. The idea for a 16-member debt commission that would examine Social Security and Medicare solvency was initially floated by McCarthy as part of debt limit negotiations… Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid currently make up nearly half of the entire federal budget, with a total annual price tag of $2.7 trillion.”
Corporate media seems to lack the vocabulary to accurately describe the modern Republican Party. The latest example, of course, is the election of a new Speaker of the House: Mike Johnson, an insurrectionist anti-gay right-wing extremist Trump proxy. Those words accurately describe the little-known congressman from Louisiana. In fact, they’re quite restrained. It would be even more accurate to call him a bigoted Christofascist member of the Trump cult willing to end democracy as we know it.
[FOX, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-10-2023]
“Another election night in which the Republicans had to put away those champagne bottles they had on ice and keep them for perhaps another day. It wasn’t a disaster for them, but it also wasn’t the results they were expecting to hear from the voters, either. What is the message the voters are sending? A lot has been written about how the abortion issue is backfiring on the Republicans, and it is. But that’s not really the reason they are failing to win over swing voters unhappy with the economy and other issues. What voters are saying is that they want more personal freedom. Abortions over the last several decades have been greatly declining in numbers, down about two-thirds from their peak numbers. People don’t really want more abortions, as today most women have access to and use contraception — but they do want the personal freedom of having the choice of abortion — hence the very name ‘pro-choice.’”
In October 2022, ProPublica broke a story about a little-known company, RealPage, which was artificially increasing rental rates on apartments. Later that month, lawsuits were filed against RealPage alleging price-fixing and market manipulation. In November 2022, the Department Of Justice opened an investigation into them. This is all based on the research of James M. Nelson, ‘The Man Behind the RealPage lawsuit’. But Who is RealPage and why is this connection important for you to understand?
He is the son of the late development tycoon Trammell Crow (1914 – 2009), the creator of the Trammell Crow Company (TCC). Trammell is recognized as the grandfather of the “speculative building” industry, which he began in 1948. Forbes in 1971 and The Wall Street Journal in 1986 called TCC the largest landlord in the US, and by 1993 they had also become the nation’s largest developer.1
Harlan Crow wields his inherited wealth and politics with great power. In 1999 he co-founded the ultra-conservative Club for Growth, that amongst other achievements, claims to be the driving force behind Citizens United, which opened the door for unlimited dark money in politics. They also invested over $20 million with 42 congress members who voted to invalidate the 2020 election.
In the forthcoming book, the New Landlord, we read: In 2005, at the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession and the ensuing chaos, the Crow Empire was at the center of the financial crash. Crow had violated their own strict policy of not investing in speculative residential land. In the blink of an eye, one of the oldest and largest real estate empires, known as the grandaddy of the construction industry, the titan of Wall Street—the Crow Empire, collapsed financially alongside the non-banking giant Lehman Bros. The collapse would send shock waves throughout the industry resulting in the industry spiraling into the financial abyss.…
Harlan Crow’s influence over the rental housing industry is powerful. Greystar CEO Bob Faith detailed that over the decade’s Crow has formed a tight-knit group of managers that now dominate the industry. Just how powerful is that reach? Our concentration study concluded that half of all rental units in the metro Seattle area are priced by a small group of 13 managers who all originated from–the ‘Crow Empire.’
