Spent the last week dealing with bureaucracy and various paperwork. Given it was the week of both Canada Day and Independence Day, this seemed like a good time to reduce posting.
Regular posting will resume this coming week.
In the meantime, feel free to use this as an open thread.
TC
I keep hearing firsthand that escalating input costs have construction firms on the ropes. Rising construction costs seem to be baked into most serious infrastructure cost projections.
The latest Toronto subway expansion bankrupted many subcontractors, who were paid mere pennies on the dollar by the city after the project overran its budget.
Is this a hiccup or a harbinger of the whole system slamming into the wall?
bruce wilder
I probably rely way too much on Naked Capitalism for political news and analysis, and so when i see a theme in my reading, i suspect i may be detecting only a theme in the NC link feeds.
Still, the last couple of days, i have been reading a series of sober articles on mainstream news media propaganda campaigns. I won’t link here, but they are easy to locate.
Jonathan Cook has written “The Plot to Keep Jeremy Corbyn Out of Power” reproduced from the author’s blog at several leftish outlets. It is not about the Labour leader’s failure to magically thread the Brexit needle, though that may be taken as part of the subtext given that the Blairites are europhiles for class reasons. Cook focuses on the ruthless way “antisemitism” charges have been used to knock out Corbyn allies.
Katie Halper at FAIR reviews the work of the NY Times reporter assigned to the Sanders campaign, Sydney Ember. Ember is well-connected, apparently, with Big Finance and those who love them and these affections color her work and corrupt her practice of journalism.
Aaron Maté, writing at RealClearInvestigations, reiterates his critique of the Mueller Report’s claims that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. Maté has had a lot of practice writing variations of this article and he is good at it now.
Jonathan Cook’s essay stood out for me because of its peroration. Having chosen in his headline the provocative and conspiratorial, “plot”, Cook argues in the end for something broader and structural driving the relentless propaganda.
I am far less optimistic than Cook. These are not contested narratives in the “tribal” communities that swallow them whole and reproduce them with enthusiasm and arrogance. Always arrogance.
Hugh
Naked Capitalism’s take on Russia and MMT both damage its credibility. Russia did meddle in the US election. It is entirely conceivable that its actions shifted more than 80,000 votes but whether these were THE 80,000 votes Trump needed to eke out an electoral college victory is an entirely different question. That Russia and Putin are bad actors or that Democrats overplay the Russia, Russia, Russia thing is not an either/or choice. I think both are correct. And of course all of this ignores what a rigged primary process the Democrats ran and what a shit awful candidate Hillary Clinton was.
Speaking of dreadful candidates, about the only thing the first debate showed was that after 50 years in the public eye, Biden is still not ready for prime time.
My take on Labor in the UK is that Corbyn failed to purge the Blairites, and so the internal divisions in Labor that were there when he became party leader remain. It doesn’t help that Labor’s position on Brexit also remains murky and out of touch with British voters.
I have often thought about writing a post on the Mueller report. There are many things wrong with the whole process, but if anything he underplayed the Russian role in the Trump campaign.
Finally, the Establishment hates Sanders. He is what they call THE FAAAR LEFT. They wouldn’t know a real leftist until they were strung up by one. They lament that he “pulls” other candidates toward this mythical Far Left that Sanders is supposed to represent and which the majority of Americans do not support, if by majority we take to mean the top 10% to which they belong. At the same time, if you went by the time they actually spent covering Sanders you would think he must be polling somewhere at the bottom of the Democratic field. With them, it was Beto, Beto, Beto, and when that didn’t work out it was Buttigieg, then Biden got in and it was Uncle Joe until they started remembering what a long and bad record he had both as a Senator and a campaigner. So they started edging their bets with capitalist to the bone Warren. Even if she didn’t pan out, she might undercut Sanders so a win-win. And most recently it’s been Kamala Harris. She’s ethnic. She’s female. She’s a good corporate Democrat and can deliver some of the Sanders lingo with a straight face without ever meaning it. What’s not to like about that? I have said Sanders could give the Sermon on the Mount and the Establishment media would cut it to pieces. Woefully short on specifics. Repetitive. Wouldn’t appeal to suburban Republicans. Weak on defense: “blessed are the peacemakers, the meek, etc.”
Willy
It seem’s more like Goodfellas rules. Not so much a cohesive plot as a loosely structured culture where ‘more for our kind’ trumps all.
It’s been a while since any conservative (neoliberals, libertarian, neocon…) has tried to convince me of anything in a way that doesn’t involve cherry picking, logical fallacies, gaslighting, obfuscation, deception, shaming, or some other form of emotional manipulation. Economic progressives aren’t always right, they don’t always agree, their solutions aren’t always practical, but the intellectual honesty is far greater in that camp. If you’re ‘more for our kind” status quo, why not try to take advantage of that disharmony?
Tom
@Hugh
Corbyn didn’t just fail to purge the Blairites, he let the Antisemitism Charges walk all over him instead of throwing it right back in his accusers’ faces and labeling them Antisemitic Apartheid Apologists.
He like Sanders won’t fight it out and leave blood on the floor. He is worthless and should step aside for someone who will fight it out.
450.org
Homelessness is no doubt a feature of civilization in general and capitalism more specifically. However, that being said, it’s not a static feature. It’s dynamic and ever-evolving — the face and manner of it. The homeless of yesteryear are not necessarily the contemporary homeless in shape and form.
As I’ve mentioned, there are many paths, roads, boulevards and super highways to homelessness and new tributaries to that ignominious living arrangement are forged daily. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for this very reason. What is crucial and mandatory though, is that it’s a national issue that deserves and requires a national-level response and/or solutions. Salt Lake City and Seattle are prime examples. If you just throw free at the conundrum, the word gets out and soon enough you are inundated with an influx of the nation’s homeless seeking the latest in local accommodations. Local budgets are not sufficient to solve a national homeless epidemic. Local for sure needs to play its part but considering the homeless are paradoxically mobile these days, they can come from all over and quickly overwhelm and sink otherwise constructive and sustainable local homeless solutions.
Curiously, this article fails to investigate what happened in Salt Lake City and in that sense, like all news these days from whatever source, it’s as much Fake News as Pravda was Fake News during Soviet times. Once you dig deep and start separating the wheat from the chaff of Fake News, meaning you do your due diligence, you soon enough learn that Salt Lake City’s solution was quickly overwhelmed once word of its beneficence got out, underscoring the FACT that this is not just a local predicament but more importantly a national predicament and embarrassment that requires localities and the federal government to come together and resolve effectively. Fat chance of that in these increasingly insane times.
Once A National Model, Utah Struggles With Homelessness Again
450.org
Our system is so rapacious and predatory. At every turn, its many legions of trolls are preparing ways to exploit you even further and push you into homelessness where you can be exploited and raped even further on your way to your last breath. It’s vampiric and that’s an understatement.
Here’s the latest and greatest in that endeavor. This is progress in the early 21st century. Yet another app. So many apps. Apps R Us.
The Earnin App
450.org
As you all know or should, Jeffrey Epstein has finally been arrested and maybe, perhaps, miraculously, he will finally be held to account. But what about all of his friends and confidantes who have protected him all these years and provided cover for him? Friends like the Clintons and Donald Trump? Will they also be held to account.
LOCK THEM UP would be my campaign slogan if I was running for POTUS and unlike Trump, the words would not be hollow. I’d really do it and the Trumps and the Clintons would be the first to be marched into the Hague to serve their life sentences.
The Miami Herald, unlike the NYT, has done an excellent job covering this story over the years especially as of late. It’s obvious why the NYT has refused to give it proper shrift. Epstein has so many oligarchic touch points, if the NYT was to cover it, it would implicate nearly the entire establishment in the process. Even the Miami Herald, despite its excellent coverage, fails to underscore how bipartisan Epstein’s clients are when you consider both Trump and Bill fit under his prodigious umbrella.
Let’s see if any of this sticks to Epstein or if the Usual Suspects (Spacey was one of Epstein’s friends and clients too) come to his defense and provide him with legal cover once again.
Jeffrey Epstein Arrested On Sex Trafficking Charges
StewartM
Re: Hugh
About the dissing of Sanders, I note that the only polls shown post-debate on the Teevee shoes were the ones that had Sanders falling onto 3rd or 4th place behind Harris and/or Warren. Post-debate polls such as these:
Reuters / Ipsos Poll
June 28 – July 2
Joe Biden: 22%
Bernie Sanders: 16%
Kamala Harris: 10%
Elizabeth Warren: 9%
ABC News / Washington Post Poll
June 28 – July 1
Joe Biden: 29%
Bernie Sanders: 23%
Kamala Harris: 11%
Elizabeth Warren: 11%
Were not even friggin’ mentioned.
This probably just means that the polls are all over the place. There are many ways to manipulate a poll; if you wanted to depress the Sanders fraction one would only a) use landlines, which only reach older voters (which was infamously done in an early CNN poll that had Biden up by a zillion); and b) sample only Democrats and ignore independents (because of past Democratic betrayals, Sanders does better among indies than “Democrats” who have been diluted by an influx of ‘moderate’ (but still rightist) never-Trump Republicans)).
Z
“These are not contested narratives in the “tribal” communities that swallow them whole and reproduce them with enthusiasm and arrogance. Always arrogance.”
Beltway’s siren songs of savviness have something to do with this. Not only does it serve as a cynical excuse … “you just don’t understand the limitations of the political system” … for not fighting for policies that the vast majority of the populace want, it also plays to the egos of the fools who are as anxious to swallow it as a catfish on cheese bait because it makes them feel intellectually superior and wiser than the people they are debating with.
Our rulers get these fools defending the one percent’s interests by getting them to emotionally defend their own ill-founded egos.
Z
Z
This dynamic is the largest reason IMO why Obama has a 90% approval rating among democrats. They felt so proud of themselves for playing a part in voting a half-black man into office that they don’t want to let go of that ego-enrichening experience and admit that they were played for fools and the people that they believed they were morally superior to were often just smarter, less childish, and more principled than they were.
The fall from identifying themselves as morally superior beings to realizing they were vacuous fools is too harsh for their egos to sustain, so they defend the piece of trash and everything he did.
Z
S Brennan
“They felt so proud of themselves for playing a part in voting a half-black man into office that they don’t want to let go of that ego-enrichening experience and admit that they were played for fools….The fall from identifying themselves as morally superior beings to realizing they were vacuous fools is too harsh for their egos to sustain, so they defend [Obama] and everything he did”. – Z
Concur with Z’s take on Obama’s continued popularity among today’s “liberal” [D]’s…and so it goes.
nihil obstet
You might provide some deep digging links. The article says that the City stopped because “funding for its groundbreaking housing program dried up,” and that land, building, and rents were cheap during the recession but have become significantly more expensive with economic recovery. Swarms of homeless descending on the city for the free isn’t even implied.
450.org
Musical homeless people. Nice. No doubt part of the process of how some of the non-local homeless made their way to SLC.
Bussed Out: How America Moves Its Homeless
450.org
You might have looked yourself if you were interested in truth versus the tribal politicization of the issue. I can’t wait to be told Richard Markosian of Utah Stories clandestinely, or not so clandestinely, works for Trump and the Koch Brothers. Nothing shuts down discussion more than that dismissive labeling and in this case that marginalizing characterization couldn’t be further from the truth.
Tune to 3:30 specifically for the part of the discussion that indicates the nation’s homeless descended on SLC in droves when SLC’s homeless program received national attention. My question is, how many of the homeless were enticed with free bus tickets to to migrate to SLC by other localities and municipalities? I bet that percentage is not insubstantial. This is precisely why any local efforts will fail without a national response in partnership with localities.
How To Solve The Homeless Crisis
nihil obstet
Governments come up with ways of getting rid of the unwanted. In the U. S., we frequently criminalize social problems — the homeless are breaking loitering laws, so they’re thrown in jail. Municipalities have been putting the unwanted on buses for over thirty years. That includes people picked up panhandling, people coming out of soup kitchens, people found sleeping under bridges. They don’t research where the people will be better off, just how far away can they send them most cheaply.
Sorry if I have misguided expectations, but when you argue a point against what the evidence seems to say, assuring us that you’ve done more research that supports your contention, you probably shouldn’t play I’ve got a secret with your research.
450.org
I don’t think your expectations were misguided. I think your comment was dismissive and marginalizing. That’s what people do when they experience cognitive dissonance. They dismiss and marginalize the source of that cognitive dissonance rather than understand the root of their discomfort.
Maybe localities could ship the homeless to the white house lawn and the national mall. There’s plenty of space. In fact, AOC and Bernie should insist on it.
The resolution of the homeless problem at this point is more than just free and/or affordable housing and a living wage and free healthcare and free education. The system will not resolve it precisely because it’s a feature, not a symptom, of our current winner-take-all system.
Who Let The Dogs Out
nihil obstet
I don’t think that “cognitive dissonance” is just another term for “reaction to unsupported assertions”.
bruce wilder
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/as-cities-try-to-fix-housing-boomers-are-radicalizing-to-stop-progress_n_5d1bcf0ee4b07f6ca58598a9
Boomers do not like to solve social problems.
nihil obstet
Boomers do not like to lose quality of life without solving the problems. The current style of development leads to problems beyond the ability to solve them. The first response to “fixing” housing is gentrification, which the affluent don’t object to. I’m fairly judgmental on people objecting to facilities that provide a citywide benefit, but when housing is one’s primary asset, the thing that supports them in potential medical emergencies, or is expected to be a mainstay of their retirement, or will go to their children to pay off college debt, you can understand their concern about property values.
Then there’s the increase in density, which means in my neighborhood, building fourteen floor buildings filled with one bedroom apartments, all wrapped around a parking garage. The demographics of the area change with all that brings with it in terms of schools and public infrastructure. Do the transit promises every materialize? And meanwhile, the people keep coming and the housing problems keep growing.
I would propose that we should focus on developing the small and middle-sized cities rather than accepting that the very large cities should continue to grow. That means working out how to put jobs in those cities and making intercity transportation convenient. That is a job for states and the federal government. In the meantime, it doesn’t relieve us of our responsibility to take care of all members of our society.
bruce wilder
Boomers do not like to lose quality of life without solving the problems.
If someone they do not know loses the quality of their life — becomes homeless, say — that is OK, though.
Willy called it, “a loosely structured culture where ‘more for our kind’ trumps all. ”
It is a political form of narcissism or radical subjectivism, where people argue not from self-interest, but from Self as feeling. Reason need not apply.
450.org
Wow, is there a working definition for what exactly constitutes a “Boomer?” Or is it anyone for whom you whimsically and arbitrarily have disdain? In a strategized campaign of violence, should these “Boomers” be the target? Maybe what the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs can also be the fate of these so-called “Boomers.”
I have to laugh. I watched a video recently where Marxist economist Richard Wolff was extolling the virtues of the Chinese economy. He truly believes China is an example of a successful socialist state and he’s getting tremendous publicity and shrift. Google loves Wolff, in fact.
Are Muslim Uyghurs Being Brainwashed By The Chinese State?
nihil obstet
“without solving the problem” is part of the sentence. That is, if you do all the things the planners want and the person still becomes homeless, what’s the point? Proving your virtue? The planners wanted highways busting through residential neighborhoods in the sixties, high rises replacing human-scale housing, and urban renewal. How did that work out? At the time protest was labeled as selfish just as it is today. The article acknowledges that, but, you know, this time it’s different. This time it’s always different. While the article uses examples of affluent families protesting low-income facilities in their neighborhoods, what I’ve seen is more often protest against developers of high end properties building fortress-style housing in areas that have become desirable.
One of the great government housing crimes of the last 15 years was the HUD Hope program to “redevelop” public housing. The public housing built during the New Deal was old, and was economically segregated. It would be better to redevelop it into mixed income housing and move many of the residents out of poor ghettos, said the planners. In other words, that housing was on land that had become too valuable for poor people to live on! So the Hope grants were given to local governments to redevelop the housing by demolishing it and building more upscale housing on the now valuable site. This is in cities where there is a homeless and affordable housing crisis!
I don’t like arguing that selfishness and greed are acceptable, and I’ve been in enough local planning meetings to know how strong the “I want everything that makes my property more valuable and nothing else” movement is in a capitalist economy where property is a fetish. But I also find the “solutions” proposed are frequently a cover for something else and prevent us from figuring out what kind of society we want and how to get there.
bruce wilder
@ nihel obstat: That is, if you do all the things the planners want and the person still becomes homeless, what’s the point?
There is an old joke in business consulting: “your expertise has been hired by the problem.”
If the impetus to “solve” the “problem” comes from the same spirit as the “problem” itself, what can be expected?
I am idealistic enough to believe in the wisdom of enlightened selfishness, but enough of a recovering Catholic to be skeptical of self-sacrificing altruism. I do not object to selfishness, per se. You have to fight your own corner. You are a specific, concrete person in a particular situation; you abstract from your self at peril of losing your self and your real, organic relation to others.
What i fear is the subtle loss of enlightenment in current manifestations of liberal, virtue-signalling, identity politics. Enlightenment carries with it the healthy albeit abstract realization that society is a system and social choices, collective choices to constrain the individual can promote a general welfare and public good. Enlightenment carries with it the realization that our interests as individuals are opposed and that politics is a negotiation of conflict. Enlightenment holds out the possibility that reasoning abstractly about the social system can improve the outcomes of political conflict.
I linked to the HuffPost article about the “radicalized” opposition to proposals to respond to the problems of increasing homelessness because it seemed to me illustrative of an unenlightened politics arising from the soi disant centre-left, the products of Adam Curtis’s politics of the century of the self, of self-regarding posing and personal outrage as political opinion.