Category: Uncategorized Page 10 of 95

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

‘The whole supply chain is subsidised’: inside the EU’s blockbuster Chinese EV probe

[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 06-13-2024]

…the tariff percentages the EU would slap on electric vehicle imports from China landed with a bang.

In the Belgian capital, officials set about briefing reporters on what had been uncovered in an investigation that saw dozens of case handlers spend 250 mission days on the ground in China, conducting 100-plus company visits, piecing together thousands of pages of evidence, which cumulatively tore a new rift in an already fraught relationship.

“The whole supply chain is subsidised,” said a senior official, who read through the charge sheet on a case that many predict could launch a trade war.

“This means that the Chinese government provides subsidies to all operators,” he continued. “Starting from the refining of lithium used in the batteries, to production of cells and batteries, to the production of BEVs [battery electric vehicles], and even transport of BEVs to EU markets.”….

Between January 2020 and September 2023, Chinese companies increased their EU market share from 4 per cent to 25 per cent, while local rivals’ share dropped from 69 per cent to almost 60 per cent, officials said.

[TW: If you really want to transition off of fossil fuels, it is basic common sense you should support in any way possible the design, manufacture, and sale of electric vehicles. This is a monstrous example of how the leadership of the West has been lobotomized by neoliberal “free market” ideology.” ]

Global power shift

MAJOR: Russia Officially Becomes World’s 4th Largest Economy, Passing Japan

[Simplicius the Thinker, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2024]

China has become a scientific superpower

[The Economist, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2024]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 06-14-2024]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

How ‘Israel’ Has Lost The North

[indi.ca, via Naked Capitalism 06-14-2024]

‘Israel’ has completely lost the north of occupied Palestine. It’s under fire and on fire every day now. Hezbollah has methodically eye-poked ‘Israel’s’ intelligence outposts and is literally blasting them in the nuts every day, on camera. The map above shows the new line of control for occupied Palestine, as reported by the thinking man’s Der Stürmer, Haaretz. ‘Israel’ has lost it.

It’s fascinatingly boring how Hezbollah did this. For months their videos have been methodically mundane, blowing up this communication tower, that building, that listening station. It seemed like a bunch of nothing, but it adds up. Hezbollah had a list of ‘Israel’s’ eyes and ears in the north and has spent months methodically eye poking them, like Odysseus and the Cyclops. Now—however big the IOF might be—they’re effectively blinded.

As Hezbollah opens bigger and bigger gaps in ‘Israel’s’ air defenses, they can send bigger and more missiles in, with better and better penetration. For ‘Israel’, this attrition is a compounding problem. Their air defenses are a connected system and the network is increasingly returning 404. Take for example, the destruction of the $230 million dollar SKYDEW blimp/spy balloon….

Each time a hole in ‘Israeli’ air defenses opens, the hole only gets bigger, because of Hezbollah is damaging complex, interconnected systems.

Now the Meron base can barely defend itself, let alone the region. ‘Israel’ has responded by assassinating Hezbollah (and Iranian) leaders, but the Resistance just names missiles after the martyrs and send more. This is a battle of attrition and Hezbollah is paying attention while ‘Israel’ is mindlessly lashing out. ‘Israel’ is completely distracted by a genocide in the south, and has lost the battle for the north….

Suppressing Palestinian Drone Forces: U.S. Uses Aid Pier to Deploy Anti-Drone Combat Vehicles to Gaza

[Military Watch Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 06-09-2024]

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On June 15, 2024

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 09 2024

By Tony Wikrent

On June 9, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

骑虎难下

Average Old Democrat, June 02, 2024 [DailyKos]

…What happens to the Republican Party? Where do they go and who will lead them?

The Chinese have an adage — 骑虎难下 – “When you ride the tiger, it is impossible to dismount.”

For the past several decades, the GOP has mounted up on a lot of tigers, none of which will be happy when, post-Trump, the Republican Party tries to dismount and return to being the Republicans I grew up with – responsible, reasonable, fiscally cautious, internationalist, willing to compromise . .

… with Reagan’s August 1980 speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the GOP mounted the Southern white supremacist tiger.

Then there’s the NRA tiger, which the GOP is only to happy to ride.

The list of tigers they must get down from is long — the anti-abortion tiger that now is the anti-contraception tiger; the “great replacement theory” tiger; the reduce and kill Social Security and Medicare tiger; the “teachers are grooming your children” tiger; elections are rigged tiger . . . I could go on and on but you get the picture.

How 1978 Shifted Power In America And Laid The Groundwork For Our Current Political Moment

Joshua Green, January 12, 2024 [Talking Points Memo]

…There is a backstory that illuminates the Democratic Party’s embrace of finance in the years leading up to the [2008] crash — a story that begins in 1978. At the time, Democrats were still reliable partisans of the New Deal, but the steady economic progress of the American middle class was coming to a turbulent end. Jimmy Carter was president. He was struggling, without much success, to manage an economy buffeted by inflation, oil shocks and recessions — problems for which his party had no answers. A conservative countermovement of business groups and Republican politicians was beginning to gather force. One of history’s critical inflection points arrived that fall, when Wall Street made its first deep incursion into the Democratic Party in a way that would have lasting significance, although it passed mostly unnoticed at the time.

The great irony of this early conquest is that it began with Carter’s ambitious attempt to change the tax code to favor workers at the direct expense of Wall Street investors. Instead, Carter and his fellow reformers suffered a defeat so thorough that the financial lobby not only got to preserve its favorable tax treatment, but was able, with Democratic help, to rewrite the rules of the economy in a way that gave Wall Street an enduring structural advantage at the expense of the middle class — the opposite of what Carter had set out to do….

Soon after Carter launched his presidential bid, [Charls] Walker took over a sleepy financial industry trade group called the American Council on Capital Gains and Estate Taxation and rebranded it as the more exalted-sounding “American Council on Capital Formation,” a euphemism for the aggressive accumulation of wealth. Walker began pushing the idea that the economy’s productivity crisis could be solved if the government changed the way it induced business investment. Since the New Deal, the preferred method had been the investment tax credit, which rewarded companies for building factories. This generally satisfied labor interests, since factories produce jobs. The major business lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers liked the investment tax credit because many of their members were large industrial corporations. Carter’s plan to eliminate the capital gains preference didn’t threaten them.

But it terrified Wall Street. Walker’s project was to pull off a feat of legislative legerdemain by persuading lawmakers that the solution to U.S. economic malaise lay in shifting the government’s focus to encouraging capital formation — a move that would, its backers insisted, revitalize the supply side of the economy by spurring investment, unleashing entrepreneurial energies and turbocharging productivity. In practical terms, this meant preserving the biggest giveaway to investors in the tax code: the capital gains preference….

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 02 2024

By Tony Wikrent

On June 2, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Can Democracy and Billionaires Coexist?

Sam Pizzigati, May 30, 2024 [inequality.org]

…Back in that same 1976, the always helpful World Inequality Database reminds us, the 40 percent of Americans in the nation’s statistical middle held just over a third of America’s wealth, 33.7 percent. The top 1 percent’s considerably smaller share that year: 22.6 percent. Today’s story? Our richest 1 percent hold just about 35 percent of our nation’s wealth, our middle 40 percent less than 28 percent.

The wealthiest of our wealthy, a just-released report from Americans for Tax Fairness points out, are doing their best to keep these good times — for America’s rich — rolling.

“Just 50 billionaire families,” the new ATF report details, “have already injected more than $600 million collectively into the crucial 2024 elections, with that number sure to show accelerating growth in the final six months of the campaign.”….

What can we do to significantly limit how deeply political candidates can feed at the billionaire trough? The Billionaire Family Business — the new Americans for Tax Fairness report — advances two core recommendations.

Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat

Ken Silverstein, May 30, 2024 [The New Republic]

Military contractor Erik Prince started a private WhatsApp group for his close associates that includes a menagerie of right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and journalists. We got their messages….

All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”….

Off Leash was launched less than two months after Israel commenced its assault on Gaza following Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on Israel, and that topic has been one of the group chat’s main concerns since it was established by Prince on December 2….

But Biden was merely a figurehead controlled by “elements that are actually ruling for the Deep State,” he continued. The real problem was that Democrats had been “in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood and infiltrated by their proxies and agents, as well as Ayatollah sympathizers” ever since President Bill Clinton’s administration.

With the Democratic Party captured by Islamic terrorists, Marxists, globalists, and other foreign and domestic evildoers, the U.S. was “being destroyed from within,” warned Kasraie, whose fears were shared by many among the Off Leash crew.

US Immigration: How many people are coming to the US and where are they coming from?

[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2024]

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On June 1, 2024

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 26 2024

By Tony Wikrent

On May 26, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Middle-Out Moment Is Here

[Democracy Journal. Spring 2024, No. 72]

Eleven years ago, this journal published a symposium called “The Middle-Out Moment,” touting a new theory of growth no one had heard of. Today, everyone has heard of middle-out economics, but most people still don’t know exactly what it is. With this issue, we revisit the topic: naming its core tenets, touting its successes, acknowledging its hurdles and complexities—but still arguing forthrightly that this is the economic future the country needs.

A New Economics Takes Hold
BY NICK HANAUER DAVID GOLDSTEIN

Industrial Policy’s Triumphant Return
BY FELICIA WONG

Moving Past Global Neoliberalism
BY TODD TUCKER

Vladimir Roosevelt and Franklin Putin

Chuck Lindeberg, January 8, 2023 [VoteNo2BigDough Newsletter]

The prevailing popular understanding is Roosevelt and Churchill saw eye to eye on World War II grand strategy. In fact there were fundamental differences between them from the outset, as indicated by this exchange between the two heads of government at the Atlantic Charter conference held aboard ships anchored in Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941:

“I [Roosevelt] am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now – “

“Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?” [replied Prime Minister Winston Churchill]

“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation – by making sure they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”

This disagreement was no mere tempest in a teapot. It played out in the deliberations of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that established the joint UK/USA strategy to be pursued, which in turn determined why, where and how many soldiers, sailors and airmen would be dying. From FDR down the Americans were determined no Americans should die to preserve the British colonial empire, and Churchill was determined the sun would not set on that Empire on his watch….

As we have seen President Roosevelt believed colonialism was the underlying cause of the wars of the 20th century. However he saw that a much more imminent threats existed and that were Facism and Nazism. Their appeal extended beyond Europe to the dictators the USA supported in Latin America and also, most disturbingly, to more than a few of America’s elite financiers and industrialists. Not to mention the southern wing of his own party, representing states the racist laws of which Hitler used as templates for Nazi legislation. Roosevelt felt it was so urgent the USA join the hostilities against Germany that he risked political suicide by deliberately putting the Pacific Fleet at risk. He understood that only a direct attack on the USA would overcome the America First movement that held sway right up to December 6, 1941. For Roosevelt, World War II was all about defeating Nazism in Germany so thoroughly the movement would never raise its ugly head again. Also it was likely the reason he pushed for the controversial phrase “unconditional surrender” as the ultimate war objective to be included in the Casablanca Conferences communique.

Well before World War II ended President Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Treasury economist Harry Dexter White and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles began planning for a post-war international structure intended to promote widespread prosperity, while minimizing incentives toward war. Historians have dubbed their program “Rooseveltian Internationalism,” and it envisioned two main thrusts: to foster the recovery of the war-torn countries; and to assist former colonies to become prosperous and truly independent sovereign states now that the decolonization movement was re-energized by the exhaustion of the European colonial metropoles. The plan was fully fleshed out when it was presented to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in the summer of 1944.

That gathering is better known by the name of the small resort town in New Hampshire where it was held, Bretton Woods….

But President Roosevelt died in April of 1945, 26 days before the end of the war in Europe and 4 ½ months before the surrender of Japan. This is widely assumed to be the turning point toward the demise of the Rooseveltian vision of the post-war world, however an equally significant pivot took place nine months earlier during the Democratic National Convention. About 10:00 PM July 20, 1944, the delegates were returning to their seats after marching around the floor of the Chicago Stadium celebrating the renomination of President Roosevelt by acclamation, and they were in a mood to do likewise for the incumbent Vice President Henry Wallace. At that point a cabal of southern Democrats and big city party bosses buttonholed the temporary chairman and leaned on him to gavel the session closed. There followed a sleepless night of wheeling and dealing. Wallace led the votes on the 1st ballot the following day, but he was short of the majority needed for the nomination. His support collapsed and Harry Truman, a machine pol from Kansas City in the border state of Missouri won the necessary majority on the 2nd ballot. Wallace was fully on board with Roosevelt’s domestic and internationalist agendas. Truman was not….

These Choke Points Pose Global Shipping’s Biggest Risks

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 05-24-2024]

Global power shift

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 19 2024

By Tony Wikrent

On May 19, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

You Can’t Run Industrial Policy OR A War Economy Under Neoliberalism

Ian Welsh, May 13, 2024

…Neoliberalism is about unearned profits. This is seen most clearly in the stock market and in real estate…. But this isn’t just true of housing and stock prices, it’s true of almost everything. Profit margins have soared during the neoliberal era. Our companies don’t compete on price or quality, they try to create oligpolies or monopolies so that they can charge more without having to provide significantly more value. The way they took advantage of Covid to raise prices far faster than their costs were rising is instructive.

Simply put, neoliberalism is about unearned money: about capital gains; PE plays where you buy a company with debt, load it with the debt and then dump it; monopolies and oligopolies and getting government to juice asset prices or pay you far more than you deserve for shoddy goods (see mil-industrial complex.)…

For about six years, I’ve heard constant complaints from Chinese that it was no longer possible to buy a home. Their housing market, like ours, was being bought up by investors, pricing out young people.

What was the Chinese response? They crashed their housing market and the government has stepped in….

We can’t compete with this. It’s impossible. Not because it’s impossible in theory, but because we don’t believe in doing such things and to pursue such policies we would have to hurt rich people, a lot, and they own Congress and the Presidency and our politicians in other countries.

China has repeatedly shown that if a policy is good for the majority, but hurts the rich, they’ll do it anyway. We’ve repeatedly shown the opposite.

And you can’t run industrial policy or a war economy if you want fake profits based on not actually producing good new goods at cheap prices. It can’t be done. If an entire society is based around “give me money for the least possible effort”, you’re cooked….

The West is toast. We can’t compete. It’s that simple. To compete we will have to change significantly, and while putting up tariffs isn’t actually a bad idea, it’s not enough alone. Without changing our fundamental governing and economic policies and ideology so that to get rich and stay rich you have to actually make good cheap new products in a way that improves the majority’s lives, we will never be able to compete.

When Your Rulers Ignore Voters But Are Terrified Of Protesters, That Tells You Something

Caitlin Johnstone [Caitlin’s Newsletter, via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2024]

It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one.

Oligarchy

US Oligarchs Started One Civil War — and They Could Do It Again

Thom Hartmann, May 17, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The ideology of the Republican Party and the stranglehold of powerful corporations of our political system overall has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible….

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairnessreports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United….

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that….

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things….

[TW: I hope that regular readers, familiar with my dogged insistence on the need to revive civic republicanism as a philosophy of government, know how completely wrong Moore is. ]

Global power shift

The Dragon-Bear-Hug Signals Unprecedented Expansion of Ties