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Category: Uncategorized Page 7 of 94
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
In 2023 the world’s forests stopped acting as a carbon sink
[REDD Monitor, via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2024]
At the recent International Carbon Dioxide Conference in Manaus, Brazil, scientists presented preliminary findings that in 2023 the world’s forests stopped acting as a carbon sink. An intense drought in the Amazon rainforest and record wildfires in Canada were part of the reason that forests and other land ecosystems emitted almost as much carbon dioxide as they removed from the atmosphere.
Usually, forests remove about one-quarter of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions from the atmosphere. But in 2023, that carbon sink collapsed, study co-author Philippe Ciais of the French research organisation the Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences told Reuters.
As a result, in 2023, the growth rate of CO₂ in the atmosphere shot up by 86% compared to 2022. Yet CO₂ emissions — which come mainly from burning fossil fuels — only increased by between 0.1% and 1.1%. The explanation is that natural carbon sinks absorbed much less….
‘Holy Sh*t This Ad Is Powerful’: UAW Says It Knows How to Defeat Trump and the Billionaire Class
Jon Queally, August 10, 2024 [CommonDreams]
“This is brilliant,” said author Naomi Klein in response to new United Auto Workers ad….
“There is only one answer to the threat we face as a nation. The answer is solidarity.”
That is the core message directed at the American working class from the United Auto Workers (UAW) in a new ad that frames the nation’s current political battle as one between organized workers and the billionaire and corporate classes.
“We stand at a historic crossroads in this country right now,” says UAW president Shawn Fain to begin the 2-minute video. “And it’s clear Donald Trump represents the billionaire class—that’s his base.” ….
“The dream of a man like Donald Trump is that the vast majority of working class people will remain divide,” says Fain. “They divide us by race. They divide us by gender, by who we love, or where we were born. That’s the game of the wealthy, divide and conquer
The battle over who makes the rules for US companies
[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 08-06-2024]
….Over the past autumn and winter, the Chancery trial court ruled on three highly esoteric matters of corporate law, making certain long-accepted dealmaking practices impermissible.But, this summer, the state’s legislature and governor were quickly persuaded by the influential law firms that represent big companies to enact changes to the Delaware General Corporation Law that nullified the rulings. The convention of waiting for the Delaware Supreme Court, often a tempering mechanism, to hear any appeals was ignored.Lawyers representing pension funds, asset managers and individual shareholders fret that the changes will unduly limit their ability to bring lawsuits against misbehaving corporate boards and overmighty founders.And many law professors worry that the foundations of Delaware corporate law have been carelessly erased without an understanding of the broader consequences….
Global power shift
China Is Done With Global Carmakers: “Thanks For Coming”: Dwindling Sales and Vanishing Profits
Michael Dunne, August 06, 2024 [via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2024]
For most of this century, foreign brands totally dominated China’s car market. Every year, they sold millions of cars and earned billions in profits.
Chinese consumers swarmed into Buick, Volkswagen, BMW and Toyota showrooms nationwide, happy to pay cash for the prestige of owning a brand that wasn’t Chinese.
“China is our forever profit machine,” my colleagues at GM liked to humble-brag a decade ago, back when I ran GM’s Indonesia operations. “We can bank on an easy $2 billion dividend every year.”
Now, suddenly, that golden era is over.
Sales and profits in the People’s Republic are vanishing. And boards in Detroit, Wolfsburg and Tokyo are stunned by the speed and intensity of the changes.
Ford has lost more than $5 billion in China since 2020. Sales are down 70% from their peak. “We’ve never seen competition like this before,” says CEO Jim Farley.
GM is hurting, too. The former poster child for sunny US-China relations, GM has lost more than $200 million so far this year alone. That marks the first time in two decades that GM’s China operations have printed red ink….
Driving China’s ascendancy is a massive and abrupt shift to electric vehicles. The EV share of total car sales will jump to almost 50% this year, up from just 6% in 2020.
Think about that. China has sprinted from 1 million to more than 10 million annual EV deliveries in just four short years. (I already see you dealership folks scratching your heads in amazement.)
Global automakers were caught flat-footed on EVs, lulled into complacency by years of winning at selling gasoline-powered vehicles.
TSMC Arizona struggles to overcome vast differences between Taiwanese and US work culture
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2024]
[NC commenter Micael T: “So all this American Talwan vs. China nonsense iis really about importing new management practices to the US?” Moi: Some of you may remember that Toyota went into a joint venture with GM to take over GM’s worst plant, which feature regular absenteeism and drunkenness in its workforce, and of course high defect rates. Toyota got the plant performance to above average for Toyota plants, which was much higher than GM levels.”]
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by Tony Wikrent
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
US Urged to Condemn Israel’s ‘Summary Execution’ of Two Journalists
Edward Carver, August 02, 2024 [CommonDreams]
A Palestinian journalist on Thursday pressed a U.S. State Department spokesperson to characterize the killings of two Al Jazeera journalists by Israeli forces as summary execution.
The heated press briefing followed an airstrike on Wednesday that killedAl Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifee, and sparked global outrage. Israel’s military acknowledged targeting al-Ghoul, saying he was “eliminated” because he was a Hamas “terrorist,” an allegation the Qatar-based network said was “baseless.”
The death toll of Palestinian journalists and media workers now stands at least 108, including several intentionally targeted by Israel forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2024]
It’s telling Israel (allegedly) can conduct pinpoint operations thousands of kilometers away to a capture target with precision, yet just two kilometers from home, they use 5-ton bombs on families to eliminate minor threats.
Oligarchy
[Exposed by CMD, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2024]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Uber, Lyft and Others Win California Ruling to Treat Drivers as Contractors
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 07-28-2024]
Big Law Confronts Tail Risk Threat to Private Equity Bankruptcy
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 07-29-2024]
Big Law partners are looking at a ruling that sent shock waves through the bankruptcy world as a lesson rather than a serious threat to their model of representing both private equity sponsors and their distressed portfolio companies.
The fallout comes in the wake of a decision this month in the Eastern District of Virginia. The court declared Vinson & Elkins could not represent wood-pellet maker Enviva Inc. in its bankruptcy case due to the law firm’s longstanding relationship with Riverstone Investment Group LLC, a private equity firm that held 43% of Enviva’s publicly traded shares.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax this week.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
David Sirota, July 18, 2024 [The Lever]
In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the left and right to harness the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests.
It was the twilight of the Bush era, and the country was beginning its nose-dive into recession and turmoil, but hope and change seemed just over the horizon. I predicted that with elements of both political parties in a warrior stance, simmering conflicts over deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism would soon explode and realign politics, birthing some American version of either social democracy or authoritarianism.
The 16 years since The Uprising was released have delivered much of the tumult I imagined. It has been a period of unrest, chaos, and flip-flopping control of government — and yet, amid all that volatility, the decline persisted. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything — life in America just kept getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.
In the political arena, there was a sensation of change, but in real life, there was more of the same.
Donald Trump’s 2016 win was a reaction to the dissonance — a pressure cooker that finally exploded — but still possibly just a weird anomaly. For shellshocked liberals, the end of his first term felt like the conclusion of a roller-coaster ride, a reversion to a mean, and proof that the competition to harness the discontent had finally been won on the center left.
But as Trump surges and Democrats teeter in this blazing summer of discontent, it’s the 2020 election that seems more like the anomaly — a last rest stop on a wild Natural Born Killers-style jaunt. 2024 feels like the final destination in a journey bookended by two iconic roadside billboards: the “HOPE” poster featuring Barack Obama’s cool gaze, and now the photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump defiantly calling his armies to battle….
Can J.D. Vance’s Populist Crusade Succeed?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2024]
On Monday, Donald Trump unveiled his choice for Vice President, and picked a young Senator from Ohio, best-selling author and populist J.D. Vance. Last night, Vance spoke to the Republican National Convention, attacking Wall Street barons, the war in Iraq, multi-national corporations, and trade deals like NAFTA. What he said was shocking for a Republican. “We’re done catering to Wall Street,” he said. “We’ll commit to the working man.”
But what he *didn’t* say was equally shocking. There was no talk of tax cuts, deregulation, or attacks on government, and while he levied plenty of fire at Democrats over immigration, environmentalism and overall weakness, he did not go after the substantially populist pro-labor and competition focused elements of the Biden administration. Vance’s fight is not just with Democrats, it’s within the Republican Party.
It’s hard to overstate the earthquake this pick has fostered in the citadels of power. CNBC, libertarians, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are in mourning. “Wall Street will be begging for the return of Lina Khan after two months of the Trump-Vance administration,” said one New York dealmaker to the Financial Times. CNBC is replaying clips of the Vance speech, with Jim Cramer analogizing it to William Jennings Bryan’s famous 1896 Cross of Gold oration….
At first, Vance bought into standard libertarian ideas, consistent with Thiel’s thinking. Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk, and the alums from PayPal, the so-called “PayPal mafia,” are hugely influential in Silicon Valley today, though they are not entirely aligned with big tech. Thiel, for instance, hates Google, and this group is one of Vance’s core influences….
So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing of the family that animates this new group, not worship of the market. At Remedy Fest, Vance was explicit in his agreement with this notion, saying “I don’t really care if the entity that is most threatening to that vision is a private entity or a public entity, we have to be worried about it.”….
Musk, Andreessen, and the crypto world are aligned in their own ways with Vance, though the extent of the alignment isn’t wholly clear. The arguments of these venture capitalists and crypto purveyors deserve to be taken seriously. Fortunately, Andreessen and Horowitz laid them out in a recent 90 minute podcast describing why they are supporting Donald Trump with vast financial resources. It comes down to the basic thesis that they believe that Joe Biden, far from a do-nothing President, is an existential threat to the status quo….
Andreessen and Horowitz have a view of America in which our might, and thus the world’s peace and prosperity, rests on three pillars: a strong economy, world-leading technology, and a powerful military. American culture is, as they put it, “depraved” and full of drug addiction, but our strength is that talented people can build things. We are not, as they put it, Argentina, or the Soviet Union. In World War II, America won because we invented better technology – not the government – but the private sector, the ‘Little tech’ guys like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, whose legacy Andreessen and Horowitz see themselves as upholding….
[TW: Stoller summarizes what Andreessen and Horowitz believe: ” In World War II, America won because we invented better technology – not the government – but the private sector, the ‘Little tech’ guys like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, whose legacy Andreessen and Horowitz see themselves as upholding.”
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