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Category: Uncategorized Page 4 of 97
By Tony Wikrent
Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine
[The Register, via The Big Picture 01-01-2025]
Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many.
Stand Out: How to Prevent Obeying in Advance
[3 Quarks Daily, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Wikileaks has just put all its files online. It’s all there!
DefendDemocracy.Press, January 1, 2025
Wikileaks has just put all its files online.
It’s all there: Hillary Clinton’s emails, McCain’s guilt, the Vegas shooting perpetrated by an FBI sniper, Steve Jobs’ letter on HIV, Pedo Podesta, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Israel, the military-financial complex, the mafia/mafias, CIA agents arrested for rape, conspiracies, CIA false-flag attacks, the WHO pandemic, etc…..
Strategic Political Economy
Chris Hedges, December 29, 2024
For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.
“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”
President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease….
The End of New Deal Liberalism, by William Greider, exactly 14 years ago
Tony Wikrent, January 04, 2025 [RealEconomics]
Bill Greider was the former national affairs editor at Rolling Stone, who left us in December 2019. The man was a prophet — from exactly 14 years ago:(reposted by Physicians for a National Health Program)We have reached a pivotal moment in government and politics, and it feels like the last, groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government’s extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must be the end of the line for the governing ideology inherited from Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson.
Political events of the past two years have delivered a more profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled or captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of most major media.
What the capitalist system wants is more—more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of government interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections….
Sanders Lays Out Plan to Fight Oligarchy as Wealth of Top Billionaires Passes $10 Trillion
Jake Johnson, December 31, 2024 [CommonDreams]
I hope you had a good year and that next year is good for you. It’ll be a bad year for the world, but that doesn’t mean it has to be for individuals.
I’ll probably hold off on the promised “what can Europe do” post till next week.
Feel free to use as an open thread.
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
A Newly Declassified Memo Sheds Light on America’s Post-Cold War Mistakes
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2024]
…The newly discovered memo, written in March 1994 by Wayne Merry, chief of the U.S. Embassy’s [in Moscow] internal politics division at the time, didn’t make the same impact as Kennan’s for two reasons. First, Merry did not go public. Second, unlike Kennan’s memo, Merry’s was at odds with U.S. policy and was ignored, then buried, and its author was blackballed, by the policymakers at the time. In fact, it was buried so deeply that it was declassified just last week as the result of a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research firm at George Washington University.
Looking at it today, more than 30 years after the fact, it’s a remarkably prescient document that should prompt several lessons about how to run foreign policy.
Merry’s memo, titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway: Toward a Policy of Benign Respect,” was written as Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s experiment with democracy and free-market economics was in heightened turmoil. The party of his prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, the architect of his economics policy, had recently lost an election—the result of popular discontent with the policy’s extreme inflation and displacement. Yeltsin mobilized tanks in downtown Moscow to put down an attempted putsch—launched for a variety of motives—in Russia’s Parliament. Yet, to the frustration of specialists in the U.S. Embassy, including Merry, many senior officials back in Washington saw Yeltsin as a still-strong figure and his “shock therapy” economics—which they had been pushing, along with a bevy of academic advisers, many of them from Harvard—as a success.
Merry stressed the urgent need for a course correction:
Democratic forces in Russia are in serious trouble. We are not helping with a misguided over-emphasis on market economics. There is no reason to believe the Russian economy is capable of rapid market reform. There is reason to fear that an intrusive Western effort to alter the economy against the wishes of the Russian people can exhaust the already-diminishing reservoir of goodwill toward America, assist anti-democratic forces, and help recreate an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.
The West, Merry continued, should focus more on helping Russia develop “workable democratic institutions” and a “non-aggressive external policy.” U.S. interests “are directly tied to the fate of Russian democracy but not to the choices that democracy may make about the distribution of its own wealth” or “the organization of its means of production and finance.”….
Nick Corbishley, December 24, 2024 [Naked Capitalism]
…Mexico has lost the dispute settlement panel brought by the US and Canada over its attempt to ban imports of genetically modified corn for direct human consumption. On Friday (December 20), the arbitration panel ruled in favour of the United States, asserting that Mexico’s 2023 decree banning the use of genetically modified (GM) white corn for human consumption violated the terms of the trade agreement.
It wasn’t even a close run thing: the panel’s three judges agreed with the US on all seven counts in the case. The panel has given Mexico 45 days to realign its policies with the ruling. Failure to do so could result in stiff penalties, including sanctions.
As we’ve noted before, this case may be an important battle for Big Ag lobbies and biotech companies but it is an existential one for Mexico, for whom corn is the cornerstone not only of its cuisine and diet but also its culture….
Support for Luigi Mangione Reflects Working Class Weariness of Top-Down Violence
Megan Thiele Strong, December 28, 2024 [Common Dreams]
Some fear the positive regard of Mangione is indicative of a shift into a new era where violence is glorified and humanity is lost. As a sociology professor who teaches Poverty, Wealth, and Privilege, I disagree. This failure of subsets of the public to broadly denounce the actions of Mangione does not herald a cultural shift in appreciation of violence….
Second, the working classes are weary from surviving an unnecessarily violent and unjust society. We live amid staggering class, race, and gender-based stratification and life and death stakes everyday. The ruling class profits from our blood, sweat, and tears. And yet, when one of the elite passes, they want us to give them more. They ask us to give them our love. Yet, they remain calloused to our pain and ignore our pleas for fairness.
We all deserve the same sanctity of life given to wealthy insiders. However, when it comes to many of our social systems, such as healthcare, respect and care are not institutionalized; instead, harm is normalized. We see “out-sized returns” to private equity investors….
Our healthcare system is not pro-health. The World Health Organization (WHO) names universal healthcare as a worldwide goal. The United States has not complied. Most Americans are insured through private companies. Many Americans struggle to pay for healthcare, they postpone receiving care, and are in medical debt. The healthcare system has practices, such as using AI to deny a high number of healthcare claims, which put profits over people. There is something deeply inhumane and harmful about this disregard for health in a healthcare system. It may not be illegal, but it is savage.
The elite and their apologists ask, “How could they not be appalled by Thompson’s murder?” Instead we, as a community, might ask, how are the elite and their apologists not appalled by a harm-rich system that normalizes the idea that humans are only as valuable as their economic worth? Decades ago, Larry Summers, currently on the board of directors of OpenAI, famously wrote that people who produce less are more expendable. This classist ideology pervades our healthcare system….
Global power shift
Hope you’re having a good one. If not, hope it isn’t too awful.
Use as an open thread for nice things if you wish.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 22, 2024
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Joe Biden, December 16, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…When I took office, the economy wasn’t working for most Americans…. economic policy was in the grip of a failed approach called trickle-down economics. Trickle-down tried to grow the economy from the top down. It slashed taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and tried to get government “out of the way,” instead of delivering for working people, investing in infrastructure, and ensuring America stays at the leading edge of innovation.
But this approach failed. Too many Americans saw an economy that was stacked against them with failing infrastructure, communities that had been hollowed out, manufacturing jobs that were offshored to China, prescription drugs that cost more than in any other developed country, and workers who had been left behind.
[TW: I was surprised BIden’s writing in The American Prospect did not attract much interest. Probably because after the electoral victory by Trump, everything Democrats do seems anticlimactic. There were many more articles on why Bidenomics failed, such as James Galbraith’s article in The Nation on December 9, Why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust. But I think even these pulled back from fully exploring the anger and rage most working people have towards elites, which was fully revealed by the murder of a health insurance CEO in Manhattan. It is exactly that anger and rage that Trump is able to manipulate — “I am your retribution” — but which Democrats are too cowardly to acknowledge and condone. As I posted in April 2008, Euthanize Wall Street to save the economy.
[LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?
– Psalm 94:3 ]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
By Tony Wikrent
How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition?
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024]
An aggregation of quotes from experts in the field. Here’s the most optimistic one: Even the best neural networks struggle with low-quality photos that lack information-rich pixels of the human face, especially when matching against a large list of potential identities. Thus the first step is to deny the algorithm those pixels by occluding the face. Cover the face in cases where that isn’t suspicious, e.g., wear a scarf in the wintertime, sun glasses on a bright day. Hats with wide brims are also a confound, as they can hide the forehead and hair, and cast a shadow on the face. Holding a hand over the face is also good for this. The second step is to look down while in motion so any camera in the vicinity will not capture a good frontal image of the face. Third, if one can move quickly, that might cause motion blur in the captured photo—consider jogging or riding a bike. My best practical advice for evasion: know where facial recognition is being deployed and simply avoid those areas. How long this advice remains useful though depends on how widespread the technology becomes in the coming years.”
Strategic Political Economy
The early American rejection of John Locke
[TW: I want to begin with this, because you will see echoes of the argument over masses versus elites in almost all the subsequent stories. USA is stumbling and faltering because so much of what we are taught and believe is based on lies. One of the biggest lies is that the founding of the republic was based on the ideas of John Locke. It is true that Locke’s ideas later came to predominate American political economy, but it was after a period of ideological combat. Unfortunately, the opponents of Locke lost.
[In the 1820s and 1830s, the Transcendentalist movement in USA, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman quite explicitly rejected the ideas of John Locke. Universalist minister Orestes Brownson, wrote in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839,
Locke was a great and good man, but his philosophy was defective… Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.
[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….
The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s soul, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive the storms of human passions.
But the disciple of Locke denies the reality of this light, he denies the teachings and the authority of the universal Reason…. It is folly, therefore, to repose confidence in the people, to entertain any respect for popular decisions. The disciple of Locke may compassionate the people, but he cannot trust them; he may patronize the masses, but he must scout universal suffrage, and labor to concentrate all power in the hands of those he looks upon as the enlightened and respectable few.
[Merriam-Webster offers this definition of “scout”: “to reject scornfully.”]
[ — The Transcendentalists – An Anthology, edited by Perry Miller. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1950, pp. 207-208. ]