Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 08, 2024

By Tony Wikrent

How to give a good speech

Tim Harford [via The Big Picture 12-02-2024]

The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage. It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say?

[TW: The ability to speak well in public is a skill that will probably become more and more important as we try to resist the Trump’s regime’s policies and actions. I have often regretted I have not learned public speaking while in high school and college.]

Strategic Political Economy

The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert.  

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]

…The structure of the grocery industry has been a matter of national concern since the rise of large retail chains in the early 20th century. The largest was A&P, which, by the 1930s, was rapidly supplanting local grocery stores and edging toward market dominance. Congressional hearings and a federal investigation found that A&P possessed an advantage that had nothing to do with greater efficiency, better service, or other legitimate ways of competing. Instead, A&P used its sheer size to pressure suppliers into giving it preferential treatment over smaller retailers. Fearful of losing their biggest customer, food manufacturers had no choice but to sell to A&P at substantially lower prices than they charged independent grocers—allowing A&P to further entrench its dominance.

Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them….

For the next four decades, Robinson-Patman was a staple of the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement agenda. From 1952 to 1964, for example, the agency issued 81 formal complaints to block grocery suppliers from giving large supermarket chains better prices on milk, oatmeal, pasta, cookies, and other items than they offered to smaller grocers. Most of these complaints were resolved when suppliers agreed to eliminate the price discrimination. Occasionally a case went to court.

During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway….

Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it….

Why did Silicon Valley turn right? The “pounded progressive ally” thesis has limits

Henry Farrell, December 04, 2024 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]

…The shifting relationship between the two involves- as far as I can see – ideas, interests and political coalitions. The best broad framework I know for talking about how these relate to each other is laid out in Mark Blyth’s book, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century.

Mark wants to know how big institutional transformations come about. How, for example, did we move from a world in which markets were fundamentally limited by institutional frameworks created by national governments, to one in which markets dominated and remade those frameworks?….

As Mark puts it in more academic language:

“Economic ideas therefore serve as the basis of political coalitions. They enable agents to overcome free-rider problems by specifying the ends of collective action. In moments of uncertainty and crisis, such coalitions attempt to establish specific configurations of distributionary institutions in a given state, in line with the economic ideas agents use to organize and give meaning to their collective endeavors. If successful, these institutions, once established, maintain and reconstitute the coalition over time by making possible and legitimating those distributive arrangements that enshrine and support its members. Seen in this way, economic ideas enable us to understand both the creation and maintenance of a stable institutionalized political coalition and the institutions that support it.”

Thus, in Mark’s story, economists like Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Art Laffer played a crucial role in the transition from old style liberalism to neoliberalism. At the moment when the old institutional system was in crisis, and no-one knew quite what to do, they provided a diagnosis of what was wrong. Whether that diagnosis was correct in some universal sense is a question for God rather than ordinary mortals. The more immediate question is whether that diagnosis was influential: politically efficacious in justifying alternative policies, breaking up old political coalitions and conjuring new ones into being. As it turned out, it was.

[TW: “The Great Grocery Squeeze” that resulted from Reagan’s decision to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, proves the accuracy of Farrell’s and Blyth’s work. So also Stoller’s discussion of federal judge Carl Nicholsm below. This is all a reflection of civic republicanism being supplanted by liberalism as capitalism developed, allowing “sanctity of private property” to become a more powerful “economic idea” than “promote the General Welfare.”]

Global power shift

Trump Threatens BRICS Countries With 100% Tariffs if They Ditch the Dollar

Yves Smith, December 3, 2024 [Naked Capitalism]

The Long War to reaffirm Western and Israeli primacy undergoes a shape-shift 

Alastair Crooke, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2024]

…American strategy ultimately rests on the conviction that the U.S. could engage in a nuclear war with Russia – and prevail; that Russia understands that were it to go nuclear, it would ‘lose the world’. Or, pressured by NATO, the anger amongst Russians likely would sweep Putin from office were he to make significant concessions to Ukraine. It was a ‘win-win’ outcome – from the U.S. perspective.

Unexpectedly however, a new weapon appeared on the scene which precisely unshackles President Putin from the ‘all-or-nothing’ choice of having to concede a bargaining ‘hand’ to Ukraine, or resort to nuclear deterrence. Instead, the war can be settled by facts on the ground. Effectively, the George Kennan ‘trap’ imploded.

The Oreshnik missile (that was used to attack the Yuzhmash complex at Dnietropetrovsk) provides Russia with a weapon, such as never before witnessed: An intermediate range missile system that effectively checkmates the western nuclear threat.

Russia can now manage western escalation with a credible threat of retaliation that is both hugely destructive – yet conventional. It inverts the paradigm. It is now the West’s escalation that either has to go nuclear, or be limited to providing Ukraine with weapons such as ATACMS or Storm Shadow that will not alter the course of the war. Were NATO to escalate further, it risks an Oreshnik strike in retaliation, either in Ukraine or on some target in Europe, leaving the West with the dilemma of what to do next….

China bans exports to US of gallium, germanium, antimony in response to chip sanctions

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2024]

U.S. Trade Vulnerabilities in Critical Minerals: Pressure Points Amid Rising Tensions. 

[TD Economics, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2024]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

The End of Pluralism in the Middle East 

[Craig Murray, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2024]

A truly seismic change in the Middle East appears to be happening very fast. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.

This also spells the end for Lebanon and Syria’s Christian communities, as witness the tearing down of all Christmas decorations, the smashing of all alcohol and the forced imposition of the veil on women in Aleppo now….

It is very difficult to see the tide turning in Syria. The Russians now have either to massively reinforce their Syrian bases with ground troops or to evacuate them. Faced with the exigencies of Ukraine, they may do the latter, and it is reported that the Russian navy has already set sail from Tartus.

RAY McGOVERN: Neocons Try Again in Syria 

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2024]

I was lucky enough to observe, up-close and personal, the angry reaction of some of Israel’s top American supporters on Sept. 9, 2013, when the Russian-brokered deal for Syria to destroy its chemical weapons was announced.

After doing an interview in Washington on CNN International, I opened the studio door and almost knocked over a small fellow named Paul Wolfowitz, President George W. Bush’s former under-secretary of defense who in 2002-2003 had helped craft the fraudulent case for invading Iraq.

And there standing next to him was former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut neocon who was a leading advocate for the Iraq War and pretty much every other potential war in the Middle East.

On the tube earlier, Anderson Cooper sought counsel from Ari Fleischer, former spokesman for Bush, and David Gergen, long-time White House PR guru.

Fleischer and Gergen were alternately downright furious over the Russian initiative to give peace a chance and disconsolate at seeing the prospect for U.S. military involvement in Syria disappear when we were oh so close.

Russia / Ukraine

Zelensky Says He’s Willing To Cede Territory in Exchange for NATO Protection 

[Antiwar, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2024]

Oligarchy

People Shouldn’t Have Private Jets— Neither Should Corporations

Howie Klein, December 14, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

A few days ago Tina Brown wrote that you can understand the motives of our mercenary elite by flying on a private jet— There’s Nothing More Corrupting Than Flying Private. She’s wondered, as have I, what is “the pivotal moment when money changes people forever.” I’ve thought about it terms of precaution and prevention….

“A leading M&A lawyer once told me that corporate merger negotiations often run aground on a vague-sounding contractual term known as “the social issues.” The social issues are, primarily, the private plane. Can the exiting big shot still have use of it? How often? With how many co-passengers? No plane, no deal.”

Big Tech’s Class War Politics: Why Silicon Valley Bolted Right 

John Ganz, December 05, 2024

I believe what this avant-garde is doing is attempting to usher in a post-managerial capitalism: it is first and foremost an attack on the ideology, employment structures, and political organizations of the professional-managerial class., those you might shoehorn into an orthodox framework as “the progressive petit bourgeoisie” or, when they lack property, “knowledge workers.” The tech-capitalist avant-garde are taking back control over the means of production and the systems of communication and knowledge dissemination. They don’t share their more pragmatic-minded tech colleagues’ worries that immigration restrictions will lower their ability to staff complex organizations, because they want a post-labor future or, at least, want labor not cossetted but more subordinated. They take their inspiration from openly authoritarian models of capitalist development, like Singapore and apartheid South Africa. One obvious model is turning Twitter into X: lay off the managerial layer, replace things with AI wherever you can, and ensure management domination of content. “DOGE’s imagined attack on the civil service and bureaucracy in government is a similar offensive on the “PMC.” This is clear-eyed class war on the part of the capitalists. There were signs of radicalization in the steadily proletarianized section of the “cognitive elite:” increased pace of white-collar workplace unionization, a growing interest among college-educated young people in socialism and the labor movement, “wokeness” causing workplace problems, the multi-racial uprising during the George Floyd protests, the Bernie Sanders movement, etc. In this class war, the Silicon Valley capitalist class has forged an alliance with the reactionary mob also facing the prospect of (relative) pauperization under current conditions: lumpen elements unable or unwilling to form any class consciousness and who instead turn to crypto schemes and ideologies like racism, nostalgia for unalloyed male chauvinism, and religious obscurantism. On an ideological level, the reactionary tech avant-garde shares these anti-solidaristic visions of social domination. (Notice how this mob shrieks with delight when it sees glimpses AI destroying both the employment and standards of taste of the educated middle class.) The tech capitalists also have a natural set of allies in the family-owned capitalist class that has always struggled against both organized labor and the onus of federal regulations.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

An Assassin Showed Just How Angry America Really Is 

Matt Stoller, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2024]

…But almost everywhere outside of such official channels, pouring out through every seam of the internet, was a different message, a message of raw unadulterated hatred, of “this guy deserved it.” This picture, for instance, came from a Reddit channel dedicated to nursing. Yes, these are the people who heal for a living, and they are mocking this guy’s death. “My patients died while those bitches enjoyed 26 million dollars,” said one. There are endless angry comments about Thompson from people who try to stop people from dying….

….And that gets back to the question of legitimacy. While normal people who have to deal with health insurance understand at a visceral level the absolute terror UnitedHealth inspires in all of us, our leadership class does not. Take one of the first antitrust suits brought by the Biden Justice Department, which was actually against UnitedHealth Group, because that company was trying to buy Change Health, the dominant payment network for hospitals and pharmacies, kind of like Visa/Mastercard in health care. The argument was that UHG would misuse the data that flowed over its wires, to surveil its customers and rivals.

The judge, a conservative Republican corporate type named Carl Nichols, wrote a stinging rebuke of the Department of Justice in 2022, ruling in favor of UnitedHealth Group. After Nichols cleared the merger, of course, disaster ensued. Change Health’s network got hacked and stopped working for more than a month, leading to cash crunches at hospitals, doctor’s practices, and pharmacists. Ninety-four percent of hospitals, for instance, were affected, and roughly 40% had more than half of their revenue affected by the hack. What did UnitedHealth Care do? Well, they went shopping, engaging in mergers with provider practices hurt by their own malfeasance. That’s how these guys operate, and why they are so hated.

Bitter Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Murder: ‘My Empathy Is Out of Network’ 

[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 12-06-2024]

A Rogue Reporter vs. The American Empire (w/ Matt Kennard)

Chris Hedges, December 04, 2024

The American material life is taken for granted. Things just appear. There is no consideration for what country the Empire destroyed to fuel their cars, which people are earning pennies inside sweatshops for their clothes or how many children’s hands touched the lithium in their phone batteries fresh out of the mine. The U.S. Empire makes sure these realities are out of the public consciousness and only the shiny, finished products end up in the public view, no questions asked. Matt Kennard, founder of the independent investigative outlet Declassified UK, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire.”

Monopsony Power and Poverty: The Consequences of Walmart Supercenter Openings 

[Institute of Labor Economics, via Naked Capitalism 12-01-2024]

Prior research suggests that Walmart Supercenters exert substantial power over the low-wage labor market, though the consequences of Supercenter openings on household incomes and public finances are less clear. This study uses restricted-access Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1970 to 2019 to study how Walmart Supercenter openings affect poverty, tax liabilities, and receipt of income transfers. Using a stacked difference-in-differences approach, we find that the opening of a Supercenter leads to a 2 percentage point (16%) increase in poverty. This increase is channeled through declining annual earnings and persists for 10 years following the Supercenter’s entry. Increases in poverty are particularly strong for younger and less-educated adults, and for adults with pre-treatment incomes below the national median. Moreover, Walmart Supercenter openings lead to a $200 (or 16%) per household per year increase in government income transfers received, and a $920 (or 5%) per household per year decrease in tax revenues.

Monopoly Round-Up: Trump’s FDA Pick Knows How to Fix Medical Shortages 

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 12-02-2024]

Predatory finance

The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 3, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Feds: Tether Has Become a Massive Money Laundering Tool for Mexican Drug Traffickers

[404, via The Big Picture 12-01-2024]

Tether is being used on a massive scale by large scale drug traffickers, to the point where Tether is sold cheaper in Mexico due to its links to drugs, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media.

Restoring balance to the economy

Americans agree politics is broken − here are 5 ideas for fixing key problems 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2024]

Health care crisis

Big Insurer Sets Time Limits On Anesthesia Coverage During Surgeries

Helen Santoro, December 04, 2024 [The Lever]

One of the country’s largest health insurance companies says it will no longer automatically pay for patients’ anesthesia if a medical procedure takes longer than a predetermined time limit, regardless of complications or other factors that impact operation time.

The new policy published last month by Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield means patients will not know whether they’re going to be stuck with the massive bill until they wake up from surgery.

Putting Harmful Anesthesia Policy To Bed

[The Lever, December 07, 2024]

A day after The Lever broke the news that major health insurance company Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield planned to adopt a policy that would set arbitrary time limits on anesthesia procedures in order for them to qualify for coverage, a company representative wrote to The Lever that the company was retracting the policy change.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

The Facebook Apostate: She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She’s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook

[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 12-05-2024]

Apple patents system for identifying people when facial scans aren’t enough 

[The Record, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2024]

The AI We Deserve: Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?  

[Boston Review, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]

Why is printer ink so expensive? 

[Digital Rights Bytes, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-06-2024]

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Building blocks: How China plans to make bricks on the moon for lunar habitats 

[Space.com, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2024]

Democrats’ political malpractice

The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost

[Elad Nehorai’s Newsletter, via The Big Picture 12-07-2024]

1. The most significant shift was people who had voted against Donald Trump as opposed to for Biden in 2020. This group of voters simply didn’t show up to vote. This deserves the most examination because it explains a lack of turnout that is even deeper than lack of turnout for Democrats.

In other words, the story is less a rightward shift than an anti-Trump collapse. And, more importantly, that many people have generally exited the political process all together….

This all was particularly true among young people. On TikTok, excited videos and video edits by young people were impossible to miss for the first few days. The fact that an old white man was replaced by a less old Black and Asian woman alone felt like a massive change, and became a symbolic sign of change. The same change promised under Obama. The same change hoped for for decades.

It didn’t take long for Harris to make it clear that nothing, in fact, would change. She went out of her way to say she would continue Biden’s policies. She courted the rich. And she refused to back down from Biden’s Gaza policies.

A lot of pollsters and pundits considered this to be minor, largely because polls showed that people didn’t consider the Gaza war to be high on most voter’s agendas, including among younger Americans.

What they missed was something larger. They went off one poll: one that focused on vote prioritization. Not one that examined how much young people cared about the Gaza war. In reality, they cared and care deeply: they are the most likely to say they won’t talk to someone because of what they said about the war. They sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. Half of them are paying close attention to the news. Almost half believe a genocide is occurring (30 to 44 year olds aren’t far behind).

The issue wasn’t that they didn’t care. It wasn’t that it didn’t affect their votes. It was that it was just one more issue in which it was clear that in America, it is the powerful who have a say, and all the rest can suffer. They weren’t and aren’t single issue voters: they are evaluating these issues from an intersectional perspective in which the fact that Donald Trump isn’t held accountable is not much different than Joe Biden not being held accountable to aiding in war crimes.

Thomas Frank: “Why Democrats FEAR Populism (And Keep Losing)” (video)

Nathan J. Robinson [Current Affairs, via YouTube].

Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic left-wing populism in the face of neoliberal failures.

0:00–14:09 The Prescience of Listen Liberal

14:09–17:37 Why Harris Abandoned Progressive Policies

17:37–22:44 The Refusal to Have an Open Primary

22:44–25:45 The Tragedy of Joe Biden

25:45–28:36 The Tragedy of Bernie Sanders

28:36–32:39 The “Citizen Kane Theory” of Donald Trump

32:39–45:26 Left-Wing Populism vs. Right-Wing “Populism”

45:26–58:18 The Path Forward

There Is A Path To Democratic Party Redemption— But Not Through The Neoliberalism That Wrecked It

Howie Klein, November 30, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]

Almost As Bad As Rahm As DNC Chair Would Be Ritchie Torres As DCCC Chair….

“[T]he liberal consensus has for decades,” wrote Moscrop, “been utterly corporate, elitist, and narrow-minded to the exclusion of structural, nation-building policies that benefit working people, like Medicare for All or the return of American manufacturing from abroad… Liberal disdain has long manifested in skepticism of student loan forgiveness, hostility toward Medicare for All, and contempt for warnings that offshoring and dismantling manufacturing would create problems that no pair of $3 boxer shorts from Walmart could offset. It’s hard not to look askance at those whose moral principles and studied certainty bend only in the face of electoral vagaries— particularly when democratic socialists, among them Bernie Sanders, have been saying the same thing for decades. Liberals backing away from their preelection and election-time commitments have a touch of the wrong Marx— Groucho, not Karl. A quotation attributed to the comedian goes something like this: ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.’ And that’s the problem.”

RAHM IS OUTRAGED ABOUT WHAT RAHM DID

David Sirota, December 06, 2024 [The Lever]

You may recall that potential DNC chair candidate Rahm Emanuel was the chief of staff of the Obama White House that opted to avoid holding Iraq War proponents responsible for their lies, and opted to avoid holding Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis. So it was a genuinely jaw-dropping moment when on CNN this week, Emanuel indignantly declared that such lack of accountability helped destroy Democrats’ antiestablishment credibility in voters’ minds. Watch the clip here — it might be the ultimate hot-dog-guy moment of this era.

Changing of the Guard: Democrats are starting to deal with their gerontocracy problem. But there are still battles to come.

Luke Goldstein December 6, 2024 [The American Prospect]

How Democrats Can Regain the Working Class

by Harold Meyerson December 2, 2024 [The American Prospect]

It’s time to go after the nation’s real elite—not the Republicans’ largely fictitious one….

In recent decades, with the decline in the share of unionized workers, the steadily growing power of major investors who’ve demanded and received share buybacks and the like, the growth in price-setting corporate concentration, the reclassification of full-time workers as independent contractors rather than employees, and more, the share of national income going to wages has declined, just as the share of working-class anger has soared. Public polling shows low approval ratings for corporations and high approval ratings for unions.

You wouldn’t know this from the tone and substance of Harris’s campaign and most of her fellow Democrats’….

Democrats need to go after financial and corporate elites at least as much as Republicans go after cultural elites. Democrats don’t have to say that Carl Icahn and Paul Singer are Satanists, which is a term the right applies to any number of stray liberals; but they do need to call them out in public and make that message heard….

Billionaire Gifts and Cuts for Everyone Else

Robert Kuttner, December 5, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Democrats, if they do their job, [should be] pointing out how valued government benefits are being sacrificed to finance tax cuts for billionaires.

Trump’s transactional regime

What is net worth of Trump’s Cabinet? The staggering wealth of his nominees revealed 

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 12-01-2024]

Guess Who Profits From Trump’s Deportation Plan? Private Equity Firms.

Matt Sledge, December 4, 2024 [The Intercept]

Trump’s Oil and Gas Donors Don’t Really Want to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture 12-01-2024]

Fossil-fuel tycoons helped return the president-elect to Washington. Now, they are seeking to lock in use of their products for years to come….

Many of the tycoons who backed the Republican’s victorious campaign say what they need help with is shoring up demand for their products—not pumping more fossil fuels, which they have little incentive to do.

They are pushing for policies that would lock in fossil-fuel use, such as easier permitting for pipelines and terminals to shuttle fossil fuels to new markets. They also favor eliminating Biden administration policies meant to put more electric vehicles on the road.

Under President Biden, shale companies produced record amounts of oil and natural gas as crude prices rebounded from the pandemic’s depths and then soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the industry is also confronting the early stages of a long-term shift away from fossil fuels, as well as concerns that gasoline consumption has peaked in the U.S….

But some donors grimace when they hear Trump promise that under his watch, crude-oil producers would open the floodgates. He has also promised to cut Americans’ energy costs by 50% or more.

Oil backers’ skepticism stems from the fact that Wall Street has successfully pressured chronically indebted frackers to stop burning through cash, and return it to shareholders via buybacks and dividends instead of reinvesting it to frack more wells.

“Our stocks will be absolutely crushed if we start growing our production the way Trump is talking about it,” said Bryan Sheffield, a Texas oilman who contributed more than $1 million

Wall Street Is Banking On Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

Katya Schwenk, December 04, 2024 [The Lever]

New research shows just how deeply private equity firms have infiltrated our immigration detention system.

Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s Pick to Head the NIH, Is a Eugenicist Charlatan

Lambert Strether, December 1, 2024 [Naked Capitalism]

Trump Labor pick surprises unions, rattles business 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 12-02-2024]

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

‘Nothing Is Sacrosanct’: GOP Floats Social Security Cuts After Musk Capitol Hill Visit

Jake Johnson, December 06, 2024 [CommonDreams]

Watchdogs Say World’s Richest Man Elon Musk Has ‘Declared War on Social Security’

Jake Johnson, December 03, 2024 [CommonDreams]

Will Congress surrender to the DOGE?

[Punchbowl News, via [Talking Points Memo 12-.6-2024]

Here’s the bear case, as described by a senior Republican aide:

“Two people who know nothing about how the government works pretending they can cut a trillion dollars, both with decent pulpits to preach from, and the ear of an unpredictable president? Disaster. The only good thing is that at some point they’ll overpromise and get bounced by Trump. But until then … disaster.”

Democrats and Republicans express support for unelected billionaires’ plans to slash government and social spending 

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2024]

The Who’s Who on Kash Patel’s Crazy Enemies List

Timothy Noah, December 3, 2024 [The New Republic]

The Bell Finally Tolls for the FBI

Matt Taibbi, December 02, 2024 [Racket News]

Note on the FBI 

Matt Taibbi, December 02, 2024 [Racket News]

“The transformation of the FBI back into a J. Edgar Hoover-style domestic spy service with sweeping political ambition has been a long-developing story, obscured by a political anomaly. In the first phase of this nightmare, between 2001 and 2016, the post-9/11 Bureau used the pretext of an enhanced counterintelligence mandate to throw off some mild restraints that had been placed on it the last time it had to be slapped down, i.e. after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. The second phase of its transformation took place after the election of Donald Trump, when the Bureau remade itself on the fly as a kind of government-in-exile, empowered by an outpouring of public and media support to view itself as a counterweight to the Trump government. This dichotomy has probably helped prevent a full portrait of the FBI’s makeover from appearing. The more troubling aspects to phase one were mostly found in reports by a then-adversarial ACLU or in testimonials of agents and investigators who spoke out in places like Democracy Now! or the Southern Poverty Law Center, with examples being people like Colleen Rowley and Mike German. The post-Trump exposes of FBI excess meanwhile often appeared in places like Mollie Hemingway’s The Federalist or broadcasts by the likes of Tucker Carlson or even sites like The Conservative Treehouse, and the signature FBI whistleblowers of this period were agents like Steve Friend, Garrett O’Boyle and Marcus Allen, testifying in front of Republican elected officials like Jim Jordan. They were all really talking about the same subject, but their complaints were broadcast to different audiences at different stages of the Bureau’s evolution.”

Three Steps to Fixing the FBI: Interview with Whistleblower Colleen Rowley

Matt Taibbi, December 05, 2024 [Racket News]

Depoliticization, decentralization, and transparency are all achievable goals….

While the Bureau blamed 9/11 on a lack of investigatory authority, the actions of the Minnesota office showed otherwise. Rowley’s decision to confront Mueller with a laundry list of unnecessary bureaucratic failures made her perhaps the FBI’s most famous whistleblower. Her letter excoriated the Bureau’s Washington officeholders for failing to appreciate agents in the field, and for implicitly immunizing themselves against culpability.

ALEC Maps Out Right-Wing Legislative Agenda for 2025 in DC

David Armiak, December 4, 2024 [Center for Media and Democracy]

Top Leonard Leo Lieutenant Leads ALEC Bootcamp Against “Woke” Capitalism

David Armiak, December 7, 2024 [Center for Media and Democracy]

CBO Provides ‘Stark Preview of Healthcare Under Donald Trump’

Jessica Corbett, December 06, 2024 [CommonDreams]

Millions of Americans could lose coverage if the GOP allows the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits to expire.

Initial recount affirms Riggs’ lead in NC Supreme Court race. Griffin ramps up efforts to toss ballots

[WRAL News, December 03, 2024]

…Griffin plans to keep fighting, however and not only by calling for a second recount. His main strategy to win the race is a separate challenge — which Griffin’s campaign and state Republican Party officials began mounting soon after the election ended — to have election officials agree to throw out more than 60,000 people’s ballots.

Many of those challenges are based on a legal theory that claims elections officials don’t have enough information to confirm some voters’ identities. Republicans tried making the same claim prior to election and failed. Their arguments were rejected by the State Board of Elections and by federal courts. But GOP officials continue to press their efforts post-election, and on Tuesday the NCGOP filed a legal motion asking for the process of considering those complaints to be sped up….

Political campaigns in North Carolina have more leeway to aggressively launch allegations of voter fraud, even if all or many of those claims end up being false, due to a new court ruling earlier this year from the state Supreme Court.

That ruling stemmed from a defamation case following the 2016 elections, when the campaign of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory falsely accused people of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the election results that led to Democrat Roy Cooper unseating McCrory.

The GOP operatives in that case admitted to falsely accusing people of committing voter fraud but argued they should be immune from defamation lawsuits regardless.

The voters who sued them won at trial and at the North Carolina Court of Appeals, but the Supreme Court reversed those rulings earlier this year in a ruling that had ramifications for this year and future elections, too.

The court’s Republican justices wrote in the opinion that while individuals do risk damage to their reputations if falsely accused of committing voter fraud, it’s more important not to scare people away from reporting cases of suspected voter fraud in case those allegations turn out to be real.

Disdain for democracy and voters

Thomas Mills, December 06, 2024 [PoliticsNC]

Everybody should be watching North Carolina right now. The GOP in North Carolina is openly displaying their disdain for democracy and voters. They are trying to steal one election outright by disenfranchising voters and they are trying to change what voters chose when they elected Democrats to helm Council of State seats. It’s a disgraceful consequences of extreme gerrymandering by a party that’s become cynical and autocratic.

Republicans are actively trying to cancel the votes of people who cast ballots to give them a win in the Supreme Court race that sitting Justice Allison Riggs won. They’ve challenged 60,000 votes, questioning the legitimacy of voters. Voters whose registration is being questioned are pissed, as they should be. Unfortunately, they can’t do much about it because Republicans value power more than people or democracy.

Republicans in North Carolina have been assaulting the democratic process since they took control of the legislature in 2010. They’ve gerrymandered themselves into control of the legislature, often with veto-proof majorities, eliminating the checks on power that the Founding Fathers envisioned. Ever since they ensconced themselves in safe districts, they’ve been trying to shape the electorate to give Republican candidates the advantage in statewide races, too.

We need to remember that Republicans used the prospect of voter fraud as a pretext for making voting more difficult. We also need to remember that they suddenly saw voter fraud when the state voted for a Black man for President of the United States….

Revealed: the Operators Behind Four Major Neo-Nazi X Accounts 

[Texas Observer, via Naked Capitalism 12-05-2024]

Hoover Withdraws Discredited Article 

Barry Ritholtz, December 3, 2024 [The Big Picture]

You may have missed this little brouhaha over the Thanksgiving weekend. We posted an analysis of a deeply flawed (dare I say fabricated?) data analysis from the Hoover Institution…. [TW: Hoover claimed that the recently increase in the minimum wage in California had resulted in less employment and much high prices at restaurants.]

Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times did a very thorough follow-up. Hoover has retracted the published article. Its author, Lee Ohanian, deleted his Twitter account. This is the second such time a basic ECON101 error appeared from this author and this source. (We may have to dive deeper into the archive to see what else was wrong).

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

“The Meese Revolution” by Calabresi & Lawson 

[Legal Theory Blog, via Naked Capitalism 12-02-2024]

“The Meese Revolution is more than just a biography of an influential figure. It is required reading for anyone from any political persuasion who wants to understand the recent history of the Supreme Court. Told by two insiders, the book explains how a once little-known idea championed by Reagan’s attorney general ended up shaping the law of the land. This is the untold and crucial story of how originalism, the now dominant approach to constitutional interpretation, entered the mainstream.”—Corey Brettschneider, author of The Presidents and the People

Resistance

Five Steps To Resist The Coming Tyranny: Adopt These Urgent Immediate Actions to Safeguard Yourself, Your Family & America

Malcolm Nance, December 03, 2024

Step 1 – Adopt a Resistance Posture (RP)

Your Resistance Posture (RP) is an active decision you will make about what the face of your compliance or opposition to the Trump regime will look like. It is also about how far you will go to make your displeasure known. Most people should adopt a secret resistance posture….

Make sure your RP is as bland as possible unless you choose, like me, to be publicly and openly defiant. Before you do that, note that these agencies may soon become enemies or surveillance arms of the Trump regime.

• TAXES: Make sure your taxes are paid, and your relationship with the IRS has no basis for attacking you.
• TRAVEL: This week, coming from Canada, the Customs & Border Patrol adopted a much heavier and more aggressive interrogation of everyone crossing from Montreal, particularly me. Without orders, the CBP officers have already assumed Trump’s attitude toward borders. They even gave my dogs a hassle.
• LAW ENFORCEMENT: While State and federal law enforcement may be more challenging to turn, one must assume that local police & sheriffs have a highly political mind. If they feel the President of the United States may protect them, they may not see abusing their office as unlawful. Be mindful of how you drive and interact with law enforcement officers. It’s terrible to say this, but if you’re a liberal in America and have a high-profile RP, you should expect to be treated like a black man….

Step 2 – Stop Debating Maga & Use Simpler Speech…

…MAGA has always loved the fact that progressives, Democrats, and others seek to engage in a civilized, rational discussion in which logic, truthful arguments, and reality will win the debate. Watch their pundits on CNN or Fox; they will listen carefully and launch into a firehose of simple-to-consume lies. They’re not debating you; they’re using your goodwill as a weapon to show you are weak and “wordy.”….

Step 3 – Establish A Safe & Secure Communications…

Reestablish Face-to-face interaction with friends. Once a day or a few times per week, I meet with my friends at a café in my village. There, we discuss the news of the day, but we do it face-to-face rather than via text message, DM, or video chat. That way, the communications that occur there belong to us and are not documented. It also goes back to restoring your humanity. Try it with your family and immediate friends, especially as the situation grows more dire….

Step 4 – Do Not Engage In Violent Protests Or Armed Action

… active resistance in the form of violent protests, brandishing of arms, or personal violence is precisely what the Trump regime wants. They will wish for a massive, violent protest so that they can beat down the liberals and establish extra-legal emergency powers.

Let’s not give it to them. The regime will use an attack on one person to strip tens of millions of their rights. Do. Not. Be. That. Guy….

Step 5 – Secure Your Home, Family & Friends

We have to take the things the Trump regime says at face value. That means being prepared for the economic hardship that could come in the face of tariffs and price hikes….

Civic republicanism

How America Got Mean

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 12-01-2024]

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.

What Happened to Integrity and Honor?

Charles Hugh Smith. December 06, 2024

The hope here is that facing the reality of moral collapse frees us of the delusion that fiddling with technocratic financial abstractions and policy tweaks can reverse moral collapse.

Ours is a technocratic culture with a short attention span, and so problems and solutions are understood to be 1) technocratic and 2) instant. The problem is something that can be distilled down to a spreadsheet, formula, algorithm or legalistic policy, and the solution is some modification of spreadsheet, formula, algorithm or legalistic policy: all our problems will go away if we just end the Fed, switch to cryptocurrency, tweak some laws, get rid of the bankers, eliminate an agency, and so on….

Neoliberalism’s Plague: The Erosion of Conscience in Education

Henry A. Giroux, December 6, 2024 [laprogressive.com]

For decades, neoliberalism—a predatory form of capitalism—has waged a relentless war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and eroded the common good. Disguised in the rhetoric of freedom, it elevates market logic to the status of a governing ideology, insisting that every aspect of society must conform to the demands of economic activity.[1] In practice, neoliberalism concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite while celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, deregulation, and privatization. It reduces citizenship to consumerism and strips public life of its collective purpose, creating a society where everything is commodified, yet nothing of real value is safeguarded. Within this framework, the devastating social costs of its policies—ranging from systemic racism and militarism to staggering inequality—are not merely tolerated but normalized. Neoliberalism is a systemic force of political, economic, and cultural violence, fostering despair while obliterating any vision of justice, solidarity, or care.