Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 12, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

… the playing fields of Eton:

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The Pandemic That Capitalism Made

Umair Haque, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-2021]

It Would Cost Less to Vaccinate the World Than Big Pharma Earns in Vaccine Profits. If That Doesn’t Make Sense…That’s Because It Doesn’t

Do you ever wonder about those pharma TV commercials, and why any company would pay millions to have a speed-talker drone on about bad side-effects for 30 seconds? The intended result is what Haque writes about former CDC Director Tom Frieden’s comments in Europe that “Big Pharma is war profiteering” off COVID: 

Why does he say that? Well, first note that he had to head to the UK, to say it on Dispatches, which is one of the nation’s finest and most hardest-hitting news programs. In other words, nobody in America would even run the story.

 

Normalizing Corruption: The Biden White House purports to be worried about corruption — just not the kind now dominating American politics.

Andrew Perez, December 9, 2021 [Daily Poster].

“Corruption robs citizens of equal access to vital services, denying the right to quality health care, public safety, and education,” the Biden administration wrote Monday [report], adding that corruption ‘has been shown to significantly curtail the ability of states to respond effectively to public health crises.’ The Biden administration, as it turns out, is a perfect example of this: Every policy solution they propose involves some sort of corporate giveaway. This is the kind of institutionalized and legalized bribery that’s almost never discussed — the corruption that’s responsible for high health care costs and poor health care outcomes in the U.S., and that has made it effectively impossible for lawmakers to rationally respond to the COVID-19 pandemic here and around the globe. As if to drive the problem home, within hours of releasing their corruption report, the Biden White House was flailing on TV trying to defend an overly complex COVID testing plan that will keep Americans paying inflated retail prices for at-home tests with the hope that their health insurer will agree to reimburse them at some later point. This plan is wildly impractical, but it would be a boon for the same testing manufacturer that just so happened to start paying Biden’s former top aide shortly after Biden was elected president.”

 

Insulin’s deadly cost: Ultrahigh prices in the U.S. mean many diabetics can’t afford the medication they need to survive

[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-2021]

 

“Billionaire Koch-Backed Group Sues FTC Over Antitrust Enforcement” 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-9-2021]

“A nonprofit backed by billionaire Charles Koch sued the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to obtain documents related to a series of policy changes that have been criticized by the country’s biggest business lobbying group as an attack on American companies. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation filed a complaint on Wednesday in federal court in Washington seeking an order requiring the FTC to produce records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request the group filed with the agency. ‘The FTC’s aggressive agenda on antitrust enforcement is out of step with mainstream legal thinking and is best regarded as anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and harmful to economic growth and prosperity,’ it said.”

 

WHITE-COLLAR DEFENSE LAWYERS FIGHT CORPORATE CRACKDOWN

[DailyPoster, December 9, 2021]

The Department of Justice’s plans to ramp up enforcement against white-collar criminals recently faced pushback from defense lawyers arguing that the agency is “holding companies to too high of a standard,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The white-collar defense lawyers’ opposition is linked to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco’s October announcement that the DOJ’s efforts will include prosecutors scrutinizing repeat offenders. “These are big organizations and try as you might to get it right, there’s gonna be misconduct. That’s what’s troubling us,” said Joseph Warin, chair of the litigation department at the D.C. law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. “One of our clients has three million employees… that’s bigger than every city but eight or nine in the United States.” As Rick Claypool with Public Citizen tweeted, the admission that these companies are too big to manage is a sound argument for dismantling them.

 

Groups Never Admit Failure

[Naval, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-2021]

You get a schism instead.

Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in the mythology of “we were repressed” than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don’t like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to.

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Usually what happens in that case is a schism, where you go from the Catholic Church to Protestant and so on. There’s a divergence and usually a lot of infighting

 

The U.S. is at a dangerous ‘level of polarization,’ political scientists warn — Nicole Karlis

[Alternet, via Mike Norman Economics 12-8-2021]

Wakeup call falling on dear ears. Is the US past the point of no return, where even exogenous shock and existential threats fail to overcome polarization?

 

‘Tipping point’ makes partisan polarization irreversible

[ScienceBlog, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2021]

The model simulates the behavior of 100 members of a legislature, with varying positions on 10 divisive issues (such as gun control or abortion). Over time, the legislators adjust their positions on the issues as they respond to pushes and pulls from like-minded allies and partisan opponents. The researchers manipulate a set of “control parameters” to test how intolerance, party identity and the strength of an outside threat might impact the system dynamics.

At each time step, the model records two measures of polarization: partisan division and ideological extremism. Partisan division is measured as the expected difference of opinion between members of each party, and a statistical model is used to calculate extremism based on the distribution of positions on the issues.

Below the critical point in the level of polarization, the researchers found that the upward trend in polarization would reverse when the researchers dialed down the control parameters. But once the level of polarization reached a critical point, the control parameters no longer had any effect and the dynamics could not be reversed, even in response to a common threat.

“The process resembles a meltdown in a nuclear reactor,” said Macy. “Up to a point, technicians can bring the core temperature back down by increasing the flow of water used to cool the reactor. But if the temperature goes critical, there is a runaway reaction that cannot be stopped. Our study shows that something very similar can happen in a ‘political reactor.’ The voters are like the nuclear technicians. It’s up to us to bring the political temperature back down before it is too late.”

Not going to happen, because the conservative movement and the (anti)Republican Party are built in fueling the “culture wars.” And who funds the conservative movement and the (anti)Republican Party? We have to build the cultural capacity to limit free speech by rich reactionaries. (See below, Who Just Gave Trump $1 Billion? Let’s Find Out.)  For example, media consolidation must simply be forbidden, period. Allowing one person, or one company, such as Rupert Murdoch, or Disney, to own so many media outlets should never be allowed. Another idea: de-privatize every media company — stock holders could be compensated, or not — and give at least 60 percent ownership to employees, who may only sell stock to an employee trust (a good model for industrial / economic democracy, also, imho). And implement Alexander Hamilton’s idea of NOT allowing anyone more than 30 votes in a company, no matter how many shares they own. 

 

Democracy Dies In Dark Money Ties

[DailyPoster, December 8, 2021]

The Washington Post left a key detail out of their reporting on a conservative group fighting school mask mandates….

In October, The Washington Post published a story about how the dark money group Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) had circulated a template letter that parents could use to push back against school mask mandates. While the Post’s piece called out a number of high-profile organizations and “GOP megadonors” bankrolling IWF’s operations, it failed to mention contributions from several major donors — including Amazon, which was founded by the current owner of The Washington Post….

Other noteworthy donors to IWF who went unnamed in The Washington Post’s story include Google, the drug lobby Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America.

 

Fred Hiatt & the Terrible Quandry Of Elite Journalism

Ian Welsh, December 7, 2021

But, really, this isn’t about Fred Hiatt. He wasn’t unusual at all, he was straight up normal for men and women in his position; in his profession. The New York Times pushed the war hard, so did all the networks, and so on. It was elite consensus, and nobody who doesn’t bow down to elite consensus gets the good jobs at important newspaper or TV. If they somehow slip thru and finally draw a line, they are dealt with.

This means they have, virtually to a person, all sold their souls. They’re almost all evil, well over 90%. They’ve made the devil’s bargain of “I will help great evil succeed in exchange for prestige and wealth in this life.”

We’ve set the system up this way, yes, but understand that isn’t just that the system makes people do this, it is that the people who are willing to do this are those the system selects and promotes. In this regard they very much are like gangs where to join, you have to murder someone. In journalism you just have to lie about something that will get people killed or hurt.

 

The Center-Right and Our Future: Should liberals and progressives take the hand that some anti-Trump conservatives are extending? Let’s talk.

Paul Starr, December 9, 2021 [The American Prospect]

…But the center-right elites who use nationalism, religion, and race to broaden their support risk losing control to far-right factions and parties that make more forthright and extreme appeals on that basis. So long as the center-right elites control cohesive party organizations and media, they may be able to contain and marginalize the radical right. This was what they were able to do following World War II, in the aftermath of fascism’s defeat, when they embraced a more conciliatory and reformist politics….

That tradition gave us a working democratic politics and the shared prosperity of postwar societies. It is the tradition to which the center-right could return in the recognition that the politics of austerity and reverence for markets in recent decades has turned out to be just as politically destabilizing as laissez-faire was in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Industrial capitalism then required institutions such as social insurance; postindustrial capitalism now requires a new wave of adjustments reflecting changes in the economy, work, and the family, and the new understanding of global climate. The historic choice facing the center-right is whether to join Trump in playing up nativist and racist impulses or to enter into a coalition with Democrats in trying to alleviate the stresses now faced by working- and middle-class people and addressing the threats posed by climate change to our way of life.

The Third Force: On stupidity and transcendence

[Harper’s Magazine, via The Big Picture 12-5-2021]

“Stupid” doesn’t mean unintelligent or even uninformed. Stupidity is a denial of reality to the degree that one’s own survival, to say nothing of the survival of others, is imperiled. Stupidity is oblivious to negative consequences; it falls into a pit. Gross stupidity invites negative consequences; it looks for a pit. There’s an element of willfulness to it: let the oceans rise, let the virus rage, you can’t scare me.

 

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-7-2021]

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Geo-Strategic Political Economy

PORTENTS OF THE END: RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP 9 DECEMBER 2021, Russia Observer

Just watch this and weep. This guy is on the US Senate Armed Services Committee and is supposed to know something. Any US warship entering the Black Sea to “rain destruction” would have three or four minutes to detect and deal with a swarm of hypersonic missiles coming at it. As to nukes, Russia has them too. Crazy dangerous empty ignorant threats. [Wicker is a Republican Senator from Mississippi who retired a Lt. Colonel from  the Air Force Reserve.]

Under What Circumstances Is Russia Likely To Invade the Ukraine?

Ian Welsh, December 9, 2021

Russia was promised, when the USSR broke up, that NATO would not expand past Germany. They feel betrayed; they feel this is a core interest, and they think that nations in their sphere of influence shouldn’t belong to an alliance whose purpose is to fight them (that’s what NATO was created for.)

I am, as I must tediously point out, not a fan of Putin, who has done great evil, and who has lead to Russia into a resource economy trap. But Russia is a great power, Ukraine was part of Russia for centuries, and it is in their sphere of influence. As for Putin, it must be understood that Russians are far better off under his leadership than they were before, and that US lead shock therapy cause catastrophic contraction (aka. the population dropped because of all the deaths) when applied.

If the US and Europe had seriously wanted Russia as an ally, they would have not treated it not just as a conquered enemy, but as looting target and ideological straw man. If democracy and capitalism had been made to work for Russia as they were for Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan, then Russia today would be a sold Western ally, which is what Russians in the 90s mostly saw as the ideal outcome. They wanted to be Europeans.

Instead Russia is a de-facto Chinese ally. From a geopolitical viewpoint, this is malpractice on a vast scale.

 

How China’s belt and road is connecting Southeast Asia, political wariness aside

[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

 

Now comes the final countdown to either peace or war

[The Saker, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

Here is the problem as I see it: “Biden” has allowed all sorts of russophobic nutcases to paint the Biden Administration into the exact same corner where the same russophobic nutcases stuck Trump: a place where no meaningful negotiations (i.e. negotiations which imply the willingness to make mutual concessions) are possible.  All that Kabuki theater about “talking to Russia from a position of strength/force” kind of implies that the Russians will get scared and cave in to the Empire.  The problem is that in the real world (as opposed the political Hollywood of the western propaganda machine), it is Russia which is in a very strong position while the US/NATO/EU are all in a position of extreme vulnerability.  In other words, it is extremely unlikely that the Russians will make major concessions on anything (if only because Russia’s “great retreat” of endless concession to win time for preparations has now left Russia pretty much with her own back also against the wall).  Of course, Russia does not want/need a war anywhere, so she is probably willing to make relatively minor concessions, but only political ones.  In military terms, Russia is now “ready to go” and she will not stand down unless the Empire gives legally binding and verifiable concessions to guarantee Russia’s security on her western border (Putin has specifically said so).

 

The pandemic

How well masks protect

[Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

Three metres are not enough to ensure protection. Even at that distance, it takes less than five minutes for an unvaccinated person standing in the breath of a person with Covid-19 to become infected with almost 100 percent certainty. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if both are wearing well-fitting medical or, even better, FFP2 masks, the risk drops dramatically.

Supporting evidence:

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

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Where Is Biden In The Global War On Omicron?

[The Daily Poster, December 7, 2021]

The administration has ways it could share vaccine information with the world — but it refuses to do so….

Guarding The COVID Cash Cow…

Today, Moderna denies the government’s involvement in the development of its vaccine. Months of negotiations between the NIH and the company to reach an agreement over the intellectual property have yielded no results, and in a July filing with the U.S. Patent Office, Moderna left off the names of the NIH scientists who participated in the vaccine research: John Mascola, director of the NIAID, as well as Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett.

The discovery of Moderna’s power play was made by Public Citizen, which alerted the NIH to the matter in a letter, urging the agency to clarify its role in vaccine development. If there is no resolution by the time a patent is issued, the end result could be a lawsuit by the government — although that outcome is not guaranteed.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

A Massive Oil Spill Helped One Billionaire Avoid Paying Income Tax for 14 Years

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2021]

 

These Real Estate and Oil Tycoons Avoided Paying Taxes for Years

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 12-8-2021]

 

Years of Delays, Billions in Overruns: The Dismal History of Big Infrastructure 

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 12-5-2021]

The nation’s most ambitious engineering projects are mired in postponements and skyrocketing costs. Delivering $1.2 trillion in new infrastructure will be tough.

 

Why US infrastructure costs so much

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-2021]

 

The Supply-Chain Mess

Daron Acemoglu [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 12-6-2021]

In February 2021, Biden issued an executive order directing several federal agencies to secure and strengthen the American supply chain; and in June, the White House published a 100-day review on “Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth.”

….the review’s most important contribution is its observation that global supply chains have imposed various social costs… The review then asks whether hyper-globalized supply chains are so great for economic efficiency after all.

The default position among economists is “yes, they are.” When two firms enter into a transaction in which each will gain something, that is good for both firms and also probably for the rest of the economy, owing to the resulting efficiency improvements and cost reductions. Whether this involves a US manufacturer offshoring the production of some inputs to a Chinese firm is beside the point.

Yet supply chains can pose a danger to an economy in two important ways (beyond the defense-related concerns mentioned above). The more complex a supply chain becomes, the greater the economic risks. A break in any link can affect the whole chain and send prices surging if it creates sudden shortages of a necessary input….

A second way that companies may overextend their supply chain is subtler but no less important. The problem, the White House review notes, is that “the United States has taken certain features of global markets – especially the fear that companies and capital will flee to wherever wages, taxes and regulation are lowest – as inevitable.” This statement echoes economist Dani Rodrik’s prescient observation that globalization is not just about trade in goods and services; it is also about the sharing of rents. As such, the globalization of supply chains is an integral part of the shifting balance between capital and labor.

The most straightforward mechanism for this process is the offshoring of inputs, the mere threat of which can be used by managers to keep wages low.

Acemoglu does not mention the political instability that has resulted, including resentment, loss of legitimacy by almost all institutions, and the growth of authoritarianism. But then, no other mainstream economist does, either. And what would be the proper political economy for a republic? As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1783, just before leaving France in “Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, Which Will Be  Occasioned in Europe by the American Revolution:” 

To desire to keep down the rate of wages, with the view of favoring the exportation of merchandise, is to seek to render the citizens of a state miserable, in order that foreigners may purchase its productions at a cheaper rate; it is, at most, attempting to enrich a few merchants by impoverishing the body of the nation; it is taking the part of the stronger in that contest, already so unequal, between the man who can pay wages, and him who is under the necessity of receiving them; it is, in one word, to forget, that the object of every political society ought to be the happiness of the largest number.

[HAWB 1783 – Benjamin Franklin on the Augmentation of Wages Occasioned by the American Revolution – How America Was Built]

 

Inflation: Tone-deaf liberal Democrat NGOs:

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-10-2021]

Lambert Strether: “No. The average working class person pays for gas at the pump, food, and rent now. A tax break to install solar panels with capital you don’t have anyhow won’t help with that.”

Bank of England finds QE did not increase bank lending: who would have thought

Bill Mitchell [billy blog, via Mike Norman Economics 12-6-2021]

I read an August 2020 Bank of England Staff Working Paper (No.883) — Does quantitative easing boost bank lending to the real economy or cause other bank asset reallocation? The case of the UK — recently, which investigates whether the large bond-buying program of the Bank stimulates bank lending. They find that there was no stimulus to lending. Which would only be a surprise if one thought that mainstream monetary economics had anything useful to say. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists were not at all surprised by this finding.The reality is that the lack of bank lending during the GFC had nothing to do with a liquidity shortfall within the banking sector. It had all to do with a lack of credit-worthy borrowers – which should tell you that bank reserves do not constrain bank lending. The fact that mainstream institutions such as the Bank of England are now publishing this sort of research, which undermines the mainstream theory is the interesting fact.

 

“Six Things They’re Not Telling You About Inflation”

Julia Rock and David Sirota, December 6, 2021 [Daily Poster]

Have you noticed that all the media fearmongering about wage inflation hasn’t mentioned the soaring salaries of corporate executives? Have you noticed how most of the headlines about price increases haven’t mentioned medicine, health insurance, and housing prices that have been skyrocketing for years? Have you noticed that stories about expensive essential goods don’t mention the record profits of the companies selling them?

That’s not an accident. The discourse is being rigged and manipulated by media and political voices so that the conversation serves the business interests and donors benefiting from the status quo.

Make no mistake, higher prices are annoying, and for 70 percent of households with an annual income below $40,000, they are causing financial hardship. For some people, the rate of inflation has outpaced wage increases. But the bottom 60 percent of earners have more money in their pockets than they did pre-pandemic, even after accounting for inflation, when wage increases and government programs like COVID relief checks and the Child Tax Credit are included. That spending successfully cut poverty nearly in half….

In this Great Inflation Scare of 2021, we’re not talking about the following six issues at play in the economy.

1. Inflation At The Very Top

Perhaps the most important point being overlooked by the corporate media is that inflation is being driven by the greed and power of wealthy people and corporations….

2. Corporate Consolidation

Relatedly, unchecked corporate consolidation is making it easier for corporations to cite the inflation crisis to unilaterally jack up prices, even as their huge profit margins show they don’t actually need to….

4. Addressing Health Care and Housing Costs

The government has other tools at its disposal to manage rising cost of living and exorbitant corporate profits. Biden, for example, has claimed that the investments in health care, housing, and other sectors in the Democrats’ Build Back Better social spending and climate bill will help address inflation in the longer term. His claim is partially true….

 

‘This has been happening for a long time’: Modern-day slavery uncovered in South Georgia

[Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Naked Capitalism 12-7-2021]

A yearslong human trafficking operation trapped migrant workers in “modern-day slavery” on South Georgia farms, according to a federal indictment unsealed last week.

Victims include over one hundred laborers smuggled from Mexico and Central America into “brutal” and “inhumane” working conditions. Under the threat of gun violence, some were allegedly forced to dig for onions with their bare hands, earning only 20 cents for each bucket harvested. At least two people died on the job. Another was allegedly repeatedly raped.

When not out in the fields, workers were detained in work camps surrounded by electric fencing, or held in cramped living quarters, including dirty trailers with raw sewage leaks. There was little to no access to food or safe drinking water.

 

“The Quiet Scandal of College Teaching”

Jonathan Zimmerman [Liberties, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-10-2021]

“A majority of college teachers are now adjunct or contract faculty. This is the third way we fail our students. If we really cared about their education, we would not slough it off on itinerant laborers. When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, we were told that the old guard would retire and that we would get their jobs. That was right on the first count and wrong on the second one. Many professors did retire, but institutions replaced them by hiring adjuncts — at several thousand dollars per course — instead of new full-time faculty members. A fortunate few of us actually got hired onto the tenure track, which now feels like winning the lottery. Everyone else had to drive from campus to campus, picking up courses here and there and waiting for the real job (with a living wage, health insurance, and even a desk) that would never come. A quarter of part-time faculty rely on public assistance; some of them live in cars, and others have turned to sex work to make ends meet. In 2013, Pittsburgh newspapers reported the death of an adjunct professor who taught French for twenty years at Duquesne University. She never earned more than $20,000 in a year, so when her classes were cut she was rendered almost homeless. She died at 83, with no health insurance or retirement benefits. You would think that an institution so exquisitely attuned to “social justice” would bridle at this radically unjust situation. But a professor quoting the n-word out loud from a James Baldwin book generates vastly more indignation than the systematic exploitation of adjuncts, which barely registers on the campus outrage meter. We have made our undergraduates into accessories to this crime, and it is not clear how many of them know or care about it.”

 

Restoring balance to the economy

The Teamster Election

[Tempest, via Naked Capitalism 12-7-2021]

The landslide victory of the O’Brien-Zuckerman Teamsters United slate certainly represents a vote for a change. While the focus of discontent is centered at United Parcel Service (UPS), a broad swath of Teamsters across industry lines voted to move the union in a more militant direction. The question will be: will they get it?

….During the last decade, a growing number of UPS Teamsters have grown increasingly bewildered and angered by the long list of concessions from health care to a new tier of lower-wage full-time drivers agreed to by the union. This came on top of four decades of concessions at the national level including multiple wage tiers and long progressions to top pay scale stuffed into the national contract. UPS, twenty-four years after the 1997 strike, is still a company where two-thirds of the workforce is part-time….

In many ways, the growing Teamster rebellion at UPS during the past decade foreshadowed 2021’s industrial strike wave across the country where two-tier wage structure, exhausting overtime, and undemocratic union structures have propelled forward and simultaneously muffled the discontent among industrial workers….

Greg Kerwood, a UPS Teamster and newly elected member of the International Steering Committee of Teamsters for A Democratic Union (TDU), the long standing rank and file reform group, wrote in the Teamster Rebel website this past summer:

“No one ever wants a strike. But given the corporate arrogance that exists after four decades of unfettered pursuit of profit, the frustration of UPS Teamsters after two decades of stalled progress, the signs of a broader labor push back, and the changing views of the public, a strike seems not only unavoidable, but necessary for the good of the country.

“So the time is now, brothers and sisters, to prepare for what may be inevitable. Start saving your money, start engaging yourself and your fellow members in your local union, and start talking to your friends and neighbors about what life is like at UPS. Because the odds are good that we will have to take this fight to the streets — for ourselves, for our families, for the labor movement, for the whole working class, and indeed for our nation.”

 

“Kellogg to permanently replace striking employees as workers reject new contract”

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-8-2021]

“Kellogg Co (K.N) said on Tuesday a majority of its U.S. cereal plant workers have voted against a new five-year contract, forcing it to hire permanent replacements as employees extend a strike that started more than two months ago. Temporary replacements have already been working at the company’s cereal plants in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Tennessee where 1,400 union members went on strike on Oct. 5 as their contracts expired and talks over payment and benefits stalled. ‘Interest in the (permanent replacement) roles has been strong at all four plants, as expected. We expect some of the new hires to start with the company very soon,’ Kellogg spokesperson Kris Bahner said. Kellogg also said there was no further bargaining scheduled and it had no plans to meet with the union.”

 

Reddit and TikTok users clog job postings after Kellogg readies to replace striking union workers

[DailyKos 12-10-2021]

As covered by The Daily Dot, a post in the Reddit community r/antiwork has made some serious traction in encouraging folks to submit fake applications for new hires to come in and replace those who are on strike. Because applications are accepted online, it’s apparently pretty easy to fill them out and clog the system. Tens of thousands of users have upvoted the post, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that the community has more than one million members….

Members of the antiwork community also compiled lists of products made by Kellogg and encouraged people to avoid buying them if at all possible during the strike. And it’s not only Redditors who are engaged. In fact, the sentiment has already spread to TikTok.

One example? As reported by Insider, user Sean Black posted a video explaining a code to TikTok that is intended to essentially spam Kellogg with fake applications. The idea is that the code would autofill application questions and include a filler resume to submit the application.

 

Climate and environmental crises

USA TODAY investigation reveals a stunning shift in the way rain falls in America

[USA Today, via The Big Picture 12-6-2021]

USA TODAY reporters used 126 years of monthly data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to analyze average annual precipitation at 344 climate divisions. They used daily precipitation data from weather stations to measure the change in frequency of extreme rain events across the U.S. from 1951-2020….

We found more than half of the nation’s 344 climate divisions had their wettest periods on record since 2018. We calculated the same rolling averages for states.

“East of the Rockies, more rain is falling, and it’s coming in more intense bursts,” our report finds. “In the West, people are waiting longer to see any rain at all….

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, told our reporters the greenhouse effect is important to keep Earth from freezing, but excess heat greatly reduces the temperature difference between the warmer tropics and cooler polar regions in the summer.

Mann said that reduction in the temperature difference slows down the jet stream, which makes it weaker and wavier in the summer. That means weather systems moving across the country can slow or stall more often.

 

Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth

[Visual Capitalist, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

 

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Core Concept: Green ammonia could produce climate-friendly ways to store energy and fertilize farms

[PNAS, via Naked Capitalism 12-5-2021]

 

Information age dystopia

‘The internet’s on fire’ as techs race to fix software flaw

[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2021]

Amit Yoran, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Tenable, called it “the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade” — and possibly the biggest in the history of modern computing.

The vulnerability, dubbed ‘Log4Shell,’ was rated 10 on a scale of one to 10 the Apache Software Foundation, which oversees development of the software. Anyone with the exploit can obtain full access to an unpatched computer that uses the software,

Experts said the extreme ease with which the vulnerability lets an attacker access a web server — no password required — is what makes it so dangerous.

New Zealand’s computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw was being “actively exploited in the wild” just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.

The vulnerability, located in open-source Apache software used to run websites and other web services, was reported to the foundation on Nov. 24 by the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, it said. It took two weeks to develop and release a fix.

 

Recently uncovered software flaw ‘most critical vulnerability of the last decade’

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2021]

 

“Explainer: What caused Amazon’s outage? Will there be more?”

[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-9-2021]

“Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to dominate key internet operations. ‘The latest AWS outage is a prime example of the danger of centralized network infrastructure,’ said Sean O’Brien, a visiting lecturer in cybersecurity at Yale Law School. ‘Though most people browsing the internet or using an app don’t know it, Amazon is baked into most of the apps and websites they use each day.’ O’Brien said it’s important to build a new network model that resembles the peer-to-peer roots of the early internet.”

Commentary:

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“Amazon Fined $1.3 Billion in Italian Antitrust Case”

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-10-2021]

“Italy’s antitrust regulator fined Amazon.com Inc. $1.3 billion, saying it harmed competitors by favoring third-party sellers that use the company’s logistics services, a decision that reflects increased scrutiny of tech giants by antitrust regulators globally. The regulator said Thursday that Amazon favored sellers in Italy that paid it to use its warehouse and delivery services, including by making them more likely to appear as the default option, or ‘Buy Box,’ when consumers click to buy a product. The fine of 1.13 billion euros is part of a wave of antitrust enforcement in Europe and elsewhere against Amazon and other big tech companies for allegedly abusing their dominance to squash smaller competitors.”

 

‘Warehouses in their backyards’: when Amazon expands, these communities pay the price

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2021]

 

U.S. Military Has Acted Against Ransomware Groups, General Acknowledges

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-6-2021]

 

Disrupting mainstream politics

“Hispanic Voters Now Evenly Split Between Parties, WSJ Poll Finds”

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-8-2021]

“One year after giving Democratic House candidates more than 60% of their vote, according to polls at the time, the Journal survey found that Hispanic voters are evenly split in their choice for Congress. Asked which party they would back if the election were today, 37% of Hispanic voters said they would support the Republican congressional candidate and 37% said they would favor the Democrat, with 22% undecided. Hispanic voters were also evenly divided when asked about a hypothetical rematch in 2024 of the last presidential contenders, with 44% saying they would back President Biden and 43% supporting former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 63% support among Hispanic voters, nearly 30 points more than Mr. Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a large survey of the presidential electorate.” • Well, so much for the coalition of the ascendant, eh? What a debacle that was. After working hard to persuade voters who identify as white that the Democrat Party was not for them — unless they were professionals — the Democrats then proceed to lose the “Latinx” vote anyhow. Or at least men: “Hispanic voters in the survey ranked economic issues as the priority for Mr. Biden and Congress to address. Hispanic men said Republicans had the better economic policy, by a margin of 17 points. Hispanic women, by contrast, said Democrats had better economic plans, by a 10-point margin. A majority of Hispanic men said they would like to return to the policies that Mr. Trump pursued as president, while a majority of Hispanic women said they would rather stick with Mr. Biden’s policies.”

 

“Seattle’s Capitalists Couldn’t Defeat Kshama Sawant”

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-10-2021]

“in a razor-tight race, Seattle’s socialist city council member Kshama Sawant beat off a recall attempt bankrolled by the city’s business interests. She won by just over two hundred votes in a race that went down to the wire. The outcome wasn’t determined until two days after the election, as mail-in ballots streamed in after election day. Six hundred ballots have been challenged and could still be counted, but they are not expected to change the recall’s outcome. Sawant won largely based on a concerted effort to get out the youth vote. Among all demographics, the eighteen to twenty-five cohort was the only one which increased its turnout from the most recent election, held only one month earlier. Three hundred more voters in that age group voted in this election compared to last month, and those three hundred were largely the margin of victory. To indicate the level of interest in the race: last month’s general election turnout was 43 percent. Turnout for the Sawant recall — a single-candidate special election — was 53 percent. Seattle’s capitalists have tried repeatedly to stamp out Sawant and her socialist politics from City Hall since her election in 2014. Repeatedly, they have failed.”

 

The dark side

Who Just Gave Trump $1 Billion? Let’s Find Out.

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-7-2021]

 

Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun

Barton Gellman, December 6, 2021 [The Atlantic]

January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election….

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already. Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

 

What the GOP Does to Its Own Dissenters

Tim Alberta, December 6, 2021 [The Atlantic]

After January 6, Peter Meijer thought he could help lead the Republican Party away from an abyss. Now he laughs at his own naïveté….

That entire day—the vote, as much as the attack—had caught Meijer unprepared. His party’s leadership had provided no guidance to its members, leaving everyone to navigate a squall of rumor and disinformation in one-man lifeboats.

The next week, when Democrats introduced an article of impeachment and promptly scheduled a vote, seeking to hold President Donald Trump accountable for inciting the mob’s siege of the Capitol, Meijer steeled himself for some tough conversations within his party. But those conversations never happened: Most of Trump’s staunchest defenders were too shell-shocked to defend him, even behind closed doors, and the Republican leadership in the House was once again AWOL. There were no whipping efforts, no strategy sessions, no lectures on procedure or policy. Barreling toward one of the most consequential votes in modern history, everyone was on their own….

Whatever his final decision, Meijer didn’t want to blindside the people back in his district. So he began making calls. The conversations did not go well. Meijer remembers one man, “a prominent business leader in Grand Rapids,” arguing that the election had been stolen, that Trump was entitled to a second term, that Meijer was a pawn of the “deep state.” The man went “full QAnon,” spouting conspiracy theories and threatening him with vague but menacing consequences if he voted to impeach. Meijer was well acquainted with that kind of talk; one of his own siblings was fully in the grip of right-wing conspiracies. Even so, the conversation “shook me to my core,” Meijer says, “because the facade had been stripped away. It showed me just how bad this had gotten.”

….Meijer remembers straining to hear Nancy Pelosi giving a speech through a thick mask. He remembers raiding a refrigerator in the office of Kevin Brady, the ranking Republican on the committee, and drinking a beer to pass the time. And he remembers walking into a small side room and encountering two House Republican colleagues. “They were discussing the Twenty-Fifth Amendment—talking about phone calls they made to the White House, encouraging officials to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” Meijer says. “Neither of them voted for impeachment a week later.”

 

Jared Kushner’s Saudi Ass-Kissing and Murder-Excusing Is About to Pay Off.

[Vanity Fair, via The Big Picture 12-5-2021]

The former first son-in-law is poised to receive a very large check from his Saudi pals, and all he had to do was let them get away with murder.

 

Sunshine Soldiers: Ron DeSantis has a plan to fight extreme weather.

[The Bulwark, via The Big Picture 12-5-2021]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control. But sure, it’s about “hurricane response,” because what you really need to deal with hurricanes is 200 dudes with guns who answer only to the governor.

 

Mark Meadows sent the Select Committee a power point along with his lawsuit

annieli December 09, 2021 [DailyKos]

 

Saving Democracy Will Require Institutional and Civil Resistance at All Levels

David Atkins [Washington Monthly, via Naked Capitalism 12-6-2021]

 

The (Anti)Federalist Society Infestation of the Courts

John Roberts warns his fellow justices against Texas nullification: ‘Our constitutional system is at stake’

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