By Tony Wikrent
Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine
[The Register, via The Big Picture 01-01-2025]
Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many.
Stand Out: How to Prevent Obeying in Advance
[3 Quarks Daily, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Wikileaks has just put all its files online. It’s all there!
DefendDemocracy.Press, January 1, 2025
Wikileaks has just put all its files online.
It’s all there: Hillary Clinton’s emails, McCain’s guilt, the Vegas shooting perpetrated by an FBI sniper, Steve Jobs’ letter on HIV, Pedo Podesta, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Israel, the military-financial complex, the mafia/mafias, CIA agents arrested for rape, conspiracies, CIA false-flag attacks, the WHO pandemic, etc…..
Strategic Political Economy
Chris Hedges, December 29, 2024
For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.
“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”
President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease….
The End of New Deal Liberalism, by William Greider, exactly 14 years ago
Tony Wikrent, January 04, 2025 [RealEconomics]
Bill Greider was the former national affairs editor at Rolling Stone, who left us in December 2019. The man was a prophet — from exactly 14 years ago:(reposted by Physicians for a National Health Program)We have reached a pivotal moment in government and politics, and it feels like the last, groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government’s extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must be the end of the line for the governing ideology inherited from Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson.
Political events of the past two years have delivered a more profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled or captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of most major media.
What the capitalist system wants is more—more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of government interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections….
Sanders Lays Out Plan to Fight Oligarchy as Wealth of Top Billionaires Passes $10 Trillion
Jake Johnson, December 31, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Enshittification Comes to Washington
Jason Linkins, January 1, 2025 [The New Republic]
Our tech overlords have ruined the online platforms that Americans depend on. Now, as Donald Trump returns to the White House with Elon Musk in tow, expect the same to happen to our government….
The federal government typically gets a bad rap from the media, who often depict it as a faceless, bloated, and lethargic bureaucracy. But as Michael Lewis documented in his book The Fifth Risk, as well as a series of stories along similar lines he curated last year at The Washington Post, the civil service is a hive of innovation driven by brilliant, hardworking Americans. Our army of loyal public servants does a lot of important, quiet work—from key medical and scientific research to pollution mitigation to chasing down tax cheats and protecting consumers to keeping our food and medicine safe.
As Trump and his cronies see it, though, these workers are actually left-wing “deep state” soldiers whose sole purpose is to thwart his authoritarian designs. That’s why he waged total war on the administrative state during his first term and plans to pick up where he left off with a shock-and-awe purge of the federal workforce. If he succeeds by even a fraction of his goal, we’re all likely to learn just how important the government is in our lives—by experiencing what happens when it becomes the equivalent of Google’s AI search results or Amazon’s endless stream of junk. All that invisible work done every day on our behalf becomes all too evident when it’s not being done by competent professionals.
You also shouldn’t discount the maladroit impact of Trump’s own army of weirdos. The empowerment of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. creates an environment where crackpots are suddenly allowed to subject the known world to their flawed interrogations. What will it be like to live in a country where things like the polio vaccine are suddenly the subject of a reopened debate? As Dan Drezner recently explained, there is a lot of tail risk that arises when settled matters suddenly become unsettled:
”Agreeing to a debate on this topic is like agreeing to a debate about whether the Earth is flat. Even if there is no scientific evidence to support such an outdated worldview, the idea that a debate should be had can be enough to sow doubts about the current consensus. The entire upside to the debate strategy rests with the conspiracy theorists.
“The second problem with agreeing to a debate is that it is not cost-free. Energy and time spent on defending concepts like, “vaccines are good” cannot be devoted to other questions of public policy. Instead, advocates pushing crackpot ideas get to extend the Overton Window.” ….
The unholy grail for the crypto industry may be to get their casino more deeply entangled with the real economy and, as Ford writes, “to get the federal government—and, by extension, all Americans—to be the ultimate bag-holder by directly buying cryptocurrencies with taxpayer dollars.” We’re probably now at the threshold of the first big crash of the cryptogrift industry and the first big government bailout of these crooks. If you remember how well the last round of government bailouts helped restore everyone’s faith in the system, well, hold on to your butts….
Global power shift
In Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, China is proving it is master of the sea
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-2024]
Putin 25 years in office – has he been a boon or a bane for Russia?
Ben Aris, Jan 02, 2025 [Radio Moskva, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Again, it is hard to overemphasise how dramatic the economic changes of the first two decades of Putin’s rule have been:
GDP Size:
2000: Russia’s nominal GDP was approximately $278.3bn.
2024: The nominal GDP is projected to be around $1.862 trillion.
Debt Levels:
2000: Central government debt stood at 55.9% of GDP.
2024: This ratio decreased to 14.6% of GDP and it can cover every penny of this debt with its cash reserves.
International Hard Currency Reserves:
2000: Russia’s foreign exchange reserves at the start of 2000 were an astonishingly low $12.5bn.
2024: By the start of sanctions in 2022 they had reached $600bn.
GDP per Capita:
2000: GDP per capita (nominal) was about $1,902.
2024: Now it is approximately $13,005 in nominal terms and $47,299 in PPP (purchase power parity) adjusted terms, on a par with many EU countries.
Average Incomes:
2000: The average monthly income was a mere $79 per month in nominal terms.
2023: Since then, incomes have decupled to $948 per month in nominal terms, by far the highest of any Former Soviet Union (FSU) country. In PPP adjusted terms that is equivalent to around $2,100 a month – again on a par with most EU countries.
This transformation was brought about by Putin’s decision to raise public sector wages by about 10% every year for a decade starting in 2000. Putin realised that the gap between private and public sector wages – half the country is budgetniki – was getting so big that it would inevitably lead to social unrest so he shared Russia’s petrodollar riches with the hoi polloi….
This economic transformation is the foundation of Putin’s popularity. It is not that the Russians love Putin, but they are grateful to him for normalising their lives. They may not like the way he runs the country, but they don’t rebel as they are more scared of losing what they have gained than demanding change in the hope they could live better under a more liberal system.
Sahra Wagenknecht, Condition of Germany, NLR 146, March–April 2024
[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 01-02-2025]
It’s the Mittelstand firms that are really suffering in the current crisis. With continuing high energy prices, there is a real danger that manufacturing jobs will be destroyed on a large scale. And when industry goes, everything goes—decently paid jobs, purchasing power, community cohesion. You only need to look at the North of England—or the deindustrialization of the eastern Länder. The fact that we have this solid industrial base means that we still have a relatively high number of well-paid jobs. But Mittelstand firms have been under pressure for a long time. Mainstream politicians like to sing their praises, because they are very popular in Germany—it’s quite an achievement to have retained these small, high-skilled family companies against the pressures of corporate buyouts and globalization. Helped in part by the cheap euro and low-price Russian gas, some of them became so-called hidden champions and world-market leaders. But German governments, prodded by global capital, have been tightening the conditions under which they operate. This was part of the neoliberal turn under Gerhard Schröder’s red–green coalition at the turn of the millennium. Schröder abolished the old model of local banks holding large blocks of shares in local companies; that had at least had the advantage that most of the shares weren’t freely traded, so there was no shareholder-value pressure from financial groups or hedge funds to maximize returns. Schröder also granted a profit-tax exemption, to tempt the banks to sell their industrial shares—if he hadn’t done that, the model probably wouldn’t have broken.
I don’t want to idealize the Mittelstand. There are family-run companies that exploit their employees quite harshly. But it’s still a different culture to that of the listed companies with international, predominantly institutional, investors, who are only interested in chasing double-digit returns.
[TW: 15 years ago, Jon Larson recounted his experience at a model engineering show in Detroit:
Like a lot of 75-year-old guys with too many interesting stories and not enough people to tell them to, Frenchy didn’t need a lot of encouragement. And because I was barely of any use to the actual operation of Tony’s book stand, I decided to listen to over an hour of stories. He told about some of the great characters at Ford like “Bunkie” Knudsen. He’s one of my favorites because he once asked, “How hard can it be to sell a device that takes people where they want to go sitting down?” Apparently, Knudsen who was as a son of a former GM President, Detroit royalty, made it a habit of starting his day at the Research Center where he loved to drive the prototypes. A good prince, he made it a point to know everyone’s name.
Frenchy’s theme–one that would be repeated over the weekend–was the pain over the loss of potential. These guys knew how it was done–and make no mistake, the affordable mass-produced automobile is still the most difficult thing humans make. At least four guys told me that 85% of the independent machine shops in the Detroit area had closed due the current Great Recession. You could have started a pretty nice country with the skills walking around at the show–these are guys who have old Bridgeport mills in their garages and know how to use them. This is a crowd that knows what has been lost.
[“At least four guys told me that 85% of the independent machine shops in the Detroit area had closed due the current Great Recession.” USA’s Mittelstand was destroyed by NAFTA, free trade, and financialization, two decades and more ago. This is the basic reason USA “can’t make anything anymore” — including the death throes of Boeing and Intel, which were the crown jewels of USA industrial capacity.]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
EU Officials Will Claim Ignorance of Israel’s War Crimes. This Leaked Document Shows What They Knew.
[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 01-02-2025]
Oligarchy
Brianna Boston, mother of three, accused of terrorism against a health insurance company
jaimehlers, January 02, 2025 [DailyKos]
On December 10th, Brianna Boston was on the phone with Blue Cross Blue Shield about medical claims that had been denied. After being given the runaround, she reportedly said “Delay, deny, depose. You people are next”. She was arrested that same day, despite having no criminal record or even owning a gun, by a detective who determined that she was personally threatening BCBS and arrested her with a bail of $100,000. If convicted of the felony of making a “written threat to kill or injure—conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism” she was charged with, she faces upwards of 15 years in prison. She is a mother of three.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Modern Retail, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-30-2024]
”Starting March 10, 2025, Amazon will only pay back sellers for the product manufacturing cost, not the full retail cost, which is how the e-tailer currently reimburses sellers for lost or damaged items. … What’s more, in order to calculate the payouts, sellers have one of two options. They can let Amazon determine the manufacturing cost. In the announcement, Amazon said such estimates would be ‘based on a comprehensive evaluation of comparable products sold by Amazon, by other sellers and through wholesale channel.’ Still, sellers who spoke to Modern Retail said they’re worried that this could lead to inaccurate or low-ball estimates. Alternatively, sellers can provide their manufacturing costs, such as proof of cost of sourcing, directly to Amazon. For sellers, this raises serious privacy concerns over how exactly their private manufacturing cost data will be used.” Indeed! More: “A Wall Street Journal investigation from 2020 found that Amazon has allegedly used data from third-party sellers to help develop its private-label goods. Brands have claimed that Amazon copies their products and undercuts them with prices that make it difficult to compete. Amazon has since pulled back on its private-label business to alleviate regulatory scrutiny. … To AmpliSell’s [Joshua] Rawe, Amazon sellers have two ‘closely guarded secrets’: one, their manufacturing cost data. And two, who their manufacturer is. ‘With Amazon saying, ‘Hey, give us your cost,’ that’s like giving up your competitive advantage to these sellers,’ Rawe said. ‘They’re like, ‘Well if I give you my cost, you’re going to go out and figure out how to source it cheaper and create an Amazon brand of my product.’ That’s every seller’s worst fear.’”
Cutting Government Is Easy… If You Go After McKinsey
Matt Stoller, December 20, 2024 [BIG]
There are plenty of studies showing massive government waste, but it’s not in the Federal workforce. It’s in procurement, the place where the government buys from the private sector, everything from pencils to software to nuclear submarines. The government spends about $750 billion a year on contracts. How much of this money is wasted?
It turns out, the answer is a lot.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) points out that about a fifth of it is stolen by contractors through bid rigging, the so-called “Collusion tax.” Collusion is when contractors get together in groups and conspire on their bids so that the government overpays for goods and services. According to the OECD, “The elimination of bid rigging could help reduce procurement prices by 20% or more.”
If you take $750 billion, just in Federal procurement spending, that’s $150 billion a year of pure overpayment, due to this one form of crime. There are other boring reports saying something similar. Earlier this year, for instance the Government Accountability Office published a report on fraud, showing the government loses between $233 billion to $521 billion on fraud….
Why take on management consultants? Well, for starters, the government spends far too much on people giving it advice. In it’s 2024 budget, the Biden administration requested $70 billion for management consulting, aka “professional services,” which is 5% of all discretionary spending. The Defense Department alone asked for $32.9 billion. So just cutting all management consulting would be a big chunk of savings.
But it goes beyond just the raw spend on consultants, to how consultants misdirect other monies. An important study in 2023 on what it costs to resurface roads at a state level – a very simply and standard need everywhere – showed why procurement waste in America is so persistent. A key reason is consultant bloat. It turns out, when you hire government employees for long-term planning, costs go down, but when you use third party consultants, they go up.
“A one standard deviation increase in DOT employment per capita is correlated with 16% lower costs,” said the study, while “a one standard deviation increase in reported consultant costs is associated with an almost 20% increase ($70,000) in cost per lane-mile.” Consulting firms replace government with flabbiness, driving up procurement spending.
200 Years of Market Concentration
[Global Financial Data, via The Big Picture 01-04-2025]
Is this trend an anomaly or part of an ongoing pattern in the stock market? To answer this question, we have collected data on the concentration of the US stock market over the past 235 years, from 1790 until the present. Figure 1 shows the market capitalization of the largest company, the five largest companies and the ten largest companies in the United States between 1790 and the present as a share of the entire stock market. Based upon Figure 1 and Figure 3, we have broken down the market concentration of the United States during the past 235 years into seven periods. (Global Financial Data)
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Thomas Neuburger, December 31, 2024
It’s wage theft, pure and simple….
Restoring Balance to the Economy
Why America Needs to Break Wall Street’s Kneecaps
Matthew Ehret, December 29, 2024
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Eugenics Isn’t Dead—It’s Thriving in Tech
Julia Métraux, January 2, 2025 [Mother Jones]
A new book takes on the throughline from the rise of 20th-century eugenics to Silicon Valley….
The eugenicists of the early 20th century used medical violence like forced hysterectomies in a pseudoscientific campaign to prevent “inferior” immigrants from entering the US, and push certain groups —especially disabled, non-white, and otherwise marginalized people—out of the gene pool.
Big Tech successors like Musk and PayPal billionaire-turned-arms dealer Peter Thiel have overtly promoted fraudulent race science, with Musk amplifying users on X who argue that people of European descent are biologically superior. In response to another user’s deleted post suggesting that students at historically Black institutions have lower IQs, Musk posted, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE”—diversity, equity, and inclusion, misspelled. In 2016, Thiel buddied up to a prominent white nationalist, and, the same year, was said by a Stanford dorm-mate to have complimented South Africa’s “economically sound” system of racial apartheid.
Starter video that will become extremely important from Mike Benz on X deplatforming and censorship
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-03-2024]
AI Needs So Much Power, It’s Making Yours Worse
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 01-01-2025]
AI data centers are multiplying across the US and sucking up huge amounts of power. New evidence shows they may also be distorting the normal flow of electricity for millions of Americans, threatening billions in damage to home appliances and power equipment. 75% of highly-distorted power readings across the country are within 50 miles of significant data center activity.
Traffic lights will have a fourth color in 2025 — Here’s what it means
[EcoNews, via Naked Capitalism 01-02-2025]
[TW: human behavior is now expected to change to meet the demands of technology.]
Collapse of independent news media
Onward ho! End of year wrap-up and a look ahead to 2025
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 01-02-2025]
Given the bizarre coordinated nature of every Western nation’s mirrored crack downs on fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, the total delegitimization of democracy and elections, the absolute spiteful disgust that our ruling elites have shown to the common man, the farmer, the blue collared laborer, the wage slave—given all these things, and how remarkably coordinated they have been across the governments of the West, 2025 has taught us that the entire Western order must necessarily be taking direction from a centralized node of governance somewhere. That somewhere may be in the backrooms of the WEF or Bilderberg or what have you, but the rule by fiat from above is now clearer than ever.
Quoting Mearsheimer, B writes: “Most horrifying though is the breakdown of humanitarian concepts the ‘west’ once claimed to hold high. Mearsheimer says it best when he decries the the moral bankruptcy of the West”….
Climate and environmental crises
The Time Jimmy Carter Probably Saved The World And Almost Nobody Noticed
[IFL Science, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Race for Arctic resources in a climate change era
[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-31-2024]
…Over the last 50 years, the polar region has been warming up four times faster than other parts of the globe, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Temperatures have risen considerably; in 2023, the region experienced its warmest summer.
“A melting Arctic presents new challenges and exacerbates existing ones for Arctic states and communities,” said Samuel Jardine, head of research at London Politica. “Degrading permafrost has already seen infrastructure damage as foundations collapse and pipelines deform.”
“It is estimated that 34% of the population in the Arctic’s permafrost regions will be at risk by the end of 2100, with it costing between US$205-$572 billion depending on who you ask to just maintain the operation of engineering and service infrastructure in the 2080s,” Jardine said.
The Japanese ‘micro-forest’ method is transforming cities
[EuroNews, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-2024]
The Miyawaki Forest Technique, invented by Japanese botanist and plant ecology expert Professor Akira Miyawaki in the 1970s, is the inspiration for micro-forests worldwide.
These diverse, organic small forests can be created on sites as small as nine square metres, and only use native species that would otherwise grow naturally in the planting area. They grow up to 10 times faster than monoculture forests, in just two to three decades.
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
[TCD, via Naked Capitalism 12-31-2024]
What if it’s possible to produce plastics without making them from petrochemicals and without the plastic breaking into microparticles that take forever to degrade?
Well, researchers from Origin Materials are on the right track. The company just announced it’s discovered a novel way to produce plastics using bio-based feedstocks, like sawdust, old cardboard, and wood chips.
Oh, and that’s not all. While learning how to produce these kinds of bio-based plastics, the researchers also “stumbled on” a way to make traditional, petrochemical-based, single-use plastics much easier to recycle, according to a report by Forbes.
Democrats’ political malpractice
Are You Still Wondering Why Workers Voted for Trump?
Les Leopold, January 01, 2025
Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-03-2024]
The Democrats paid the price for letting brain genius Obama, The Wizard of Kalorama™, heave Sanders over the side, and replace him with a cognitively challenged thousand-year-old man. “Those who made Bernie impossible made Trump inevitable.”
Trump’s transactional regime
Trump Voters Are in for a Rude Awakening
Robert McCoy, January 1, 2025 [The New Republic]
Already, there are two major contradictions emerging in the nascent Trump administration, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued in November. “The first centers on economic policy—or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself,” he wrote, noting that some Trump picks are proponents of unfettered capitalism while others are economic nationalists who want to “transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations.” The second contradiction, meanwhile, “centers on foreign policy—or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world.” The advocates of hard power versus the isolationists, essentially.
These diverse allies found common cause on the campaign trail in opposition to the left, but “when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos.” In other words, Trump will have to pick sides. In some ways, he’s already doing so based on the balance of his nominees: His Cabinet is shaping up to be rather interventionist and plutocratic.
… jury nullification occurs when a jury returns a not guilty verdict even if they believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did commit a crime. Since colonial times, nullification has been a way for ordinary people on juries to send messages about unjust laws, malicious prosecutions, and other miscarriages of justice.…On the eve of the second Trump administration, the president-elect has already signaled his intention to pursue prosecutions of some of his political enemies, such as President Joe Biden, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and others. In addition to these specific threats, Trump has discussed prosecuting the “enemy from within,” referring to Democrats more broadly—both politicians and regular people. Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is widely seen as eager to turn Trump’s vindictive fantasies into reality.Republican governors and legislatures are also criminalizing behavior counter to their policy preferences. Multiple women have been prosecuted for abortions and miscarriages under wrongful death laws, and some states are debating whether to legally classify abortion as murder. In some red states, librarians face the prospect of criminal charges for circulating banned books. In several states, doctors can face criminal charges for providing gender-affirming care.
With the very real prospect of malicious and unjust prosecutions on the horizon, it is important for jurors to understand the power they have in preventing these and other injustices through nullification. However, judges have made it extremely difficult for juries to gain the knowledge they need to use that power. Even though the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, affirmed the legality of jury nullification, successive courts have erected significant barriers to prevent its use. Defense attorneys are generally not allowed to mention the option of nullification, potential jurors can be stricken for mentioning nullification during voir dire, and judges can give jury instructions suggesting that nullification is not allowed….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Unelected Billionaires Musk And Ramaswamy Think They’re Going To Fundamentally Change America
Howie Klein, December 29, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Kansas once required voters to prove citizenship. That didn’t work out so well
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-30-2024]
“Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory. The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018. Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rare risks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator and now says states and the federal government shouldn’t touch it. ‘Kansas did that 10 years ago,’ said Schwab, a Republican. ‘It didn’t work out so well.’”
GOP’s top priority for 2025: Repeal the laws of arithmetic
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 01-01-2025]
Republicans are reinventing math to justify extending pricey Trump tax policies.
This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 12-29-2024]
NewsGuard, which prizes its nonpartisan criteria, has become a prime target of the GOP’s battle against disinformation watchdogs.
What an Unregulated School Voucher Program Looks Like
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 01-02-2025]
U.S. Military Service Is the Strongest Predictor of Carrying Out Extremist Violence
Nick Turse, January 2 2025, [The Intercept]
From 1990 to 2010, about seven persons per year with U.S. military backgrounds committed extremist crimes. Since 2011, that number has jumped to almost 45 per year, according to data from a new, unreleased report shared with The Intercept by Michael Jensen, the research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland. Military service is also the single strongest individual predictor of becoming a ‘mass casualty offender,’ far outpacing mental health issues, according to a separate study of extremist mass casualty violence by the researchers.
Is Trump God’s Wrath? Is It The Punishment America Deserves For All The Fucked Up Crap We’ve Done? Can Things Get Even Worse?
Howie Klein, January 03, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Joyce Vance, December 30, 2024 [Civil Discourse]
…In its recitation of the facts of the case, the court seems to grasp something that Donald Trump never did and that society at large often misses. Trump claimed Carroll made the whole thing up, that she wouldn’t have waited so long to tell the story if it was true. Of course, Carroll did tell two of her closest friends at the time, but she never went to the police. One of her friends had cautioned her: Trump was too powerful; it would end her career. It’s an all too familiar story for women.
Here is the court’s take: “While conducting interviews for a book that she was writing in 2017, the accounts of assaults perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein came to light and received nationwide attention. As a consequence of the many women who came forward to report their experiences of sexual assault, Ms. Carroll finally decided to share more broadly what Mr. Trump had done to her in 1996.” Me too was a watershed moment for so many women. It was for E. Jean Carroll too. In an era where women have faced taunts of “your body, my choice” in the wake of the election, we might want to stay focused on what women have gained—and lost—in recent American history.
In discussing the trial judge’s decision to permit Carroll’s lawyer to put on evidence of other alleged sexual assaults committed by Trump, the Court of Appeals writes, “Rules 413 and 415 permit a jury to consider evidence of a different sexual assault ‘precisely to show that a defendant has a pattern or propensity for committing sexual assault.’” They continue, “Congress ‘considered knowledge that the defendant has committed [sexual assault] on other occasions to be critical in assessing the relative plausibility of sexual assault claims and accurately deciding cases that would otherwise become unresolvable swearing matches.’ … ‘[T]he practical effect of Rule 413 [and Rules 414 and 415] is to create a presumption that evidence of prior sexual assaults is relevant and probative’ in cases based on sexual assault.”….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Congressional Terms Limits— A Cure Even Worse Than The Ailment?
Howie Klein, December 29, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
State Legislatures With Term Limits Have All Gotten Worse…. while the proposal may sound like a straightforward solution to entrenched political power, the experiences of states that have already enacted legislative term limits suggest a troubling side effect: increased dominance by lobbyists and special interest groups, making matters much worse, not better.
How Big Companies and the Courts Killed Net Neutrality
Craig Aaron, January 03, 2025 [Common Dreams]
The powerful telecom industry did what they always do when the FCC does anything good or important on behalf of consumer: They sued to overturn the rules….
On Thursday, this federal court in Cincinnati threw out the Federal Communication Commission’s Net Neutrality rules, rejecting the agency’s authority to protect broadband consumers and handing phone and cable companies a major victory just weeks before the Trump administration returns to power.
The ruling against the FCC by three Republican judges isn’t shocking, but their reasoning is shoddy, a mish-mash of tired industry claims paired with a willful misrepresentation of how the internet actually works.
As Matt Wood, an experienced telecommunications attorney and my colleague at Free Press, explains: “Beyond being a disappointing outcome, the 6th Circuit’s opinion is just plainly wrong at every level of analysis. The decision missed the point on everything from its granular textual analysis and understanding of the broader statutory context, to the court’s view of the legislative and agency history, all the way to its conception of Congress’s overarching policy concerns.”
Civic republicanism
[TW: I begin this section with links to the Mises Institute, to contrast the thinking of these conservatives and libertarians with the political philosophy of civic republicanism. Conservative and libertarian ideology is a major driver of the collapse of USA and the west. ]
Charles Amos, 12/20/2024 [Mises Institute]
…The Spirit of Ayn Rand should have visited Scrooge on the night of Christmas Day and returned him to his rugged individualism, and gotten him to appreciate how to properly lead a good life. Such a haunting should have made Scrooge stand up and utter Rand’s immortal words: “My happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.” The individual properly pursues his own happiness in life—through the development of friendships, the nurturing of a kind disposition, and the balancing of financial security with living in the moment, of course, but these should still ultimately serve his happiness, not other people….
The Three Spirits of Christmas led him astray into a morality which implicitly denied his existence was for his own enjoyment; rather, they alluded it must be lived for others (which they falsely made out will be in his interest too so as to sugar the pill). No. As Rand declared with a full vigor for life: “Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others, nor sacrificing others to himself.” Scrooge embraced this rugged individualism before his haunting and he was right to do so.
The Confederate Constitution
Randall G. Holcombe, June 1, 1992 [Mises Institute]
[TW: Holcombe was a top economic adviser to former Florida governor Jeb Bush during the 2016 Presidential primary contest.]
But the differences in the documents, small as they are, are extremely important. The people who wrote the Southern Constitution had lived under the federal one. They knew its strengths, which they tried to copy, and its weaknesses, which they tried to eliminate.
One grave weakness in the U.S. Constitution is the “general welfare” clause, which the Confederate Constitution eliminated.
Henry Clay: National Socialist
Thomas J. DiLorenzo, March 1, 1998
…Clay was a corrupt statist who spent his political career promoting mercantilism, protectionism, inflationary finance through central banking, and military adventurism in the quest for empire. Upon entering Congress in 1811 he helped persuade the government to attempt to conquer Canada, which it tried to do three times. He waged a thirty-year battle with James Madison, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and other defenders of the Constitution over federally funded corporate welfare.
Presidents Madison and Monroe both vetoed so-called “internal improvements” bills sponsored by Clay that would have been the very first federally funded pork-barrel programs. Clay was the fiercest congressional proponent of protectionism from the War of 1812 until his death forty years later. He used his power as Speaker of the House in the early 1820s to push through the first protectionist trade bill in U.S. history….
Henry Clay was a lifelong promoter of central banking and participated in a pitched political battle with President Andrew Jackson over the rechartering of the Bank of the United States in 1831—a battle that Jackson won.
[TW: Jackson’s “war on the Bank” resulted in an American financial system of wild cat state banks wracked by repeated financial panics; a financial system so disorganized and weak that that the federal government nearly lost in the first year of the Civil War. Lincoln, Carey, Stevens and the [real] Republicans dragged the USA back from the abyss only after they reimposed a Hamiltonian national banking system. And a quick review of the timelines of technological developments seems to indicate that Jackson’s financial [non]system had a depressing effect on the application of new science and technology.
[These conservative and libertarian ideologues wage a non-stop war of misinformation and outright lies to promote their antirepublican ideas:]
The Minimum Wage Claims You Keep Hearing Are Totally Fake. We Can Prove It.
Ka (Jessica) Burbank, December 31, 2024
In September 2023, California passed a law to bring fast food workers’ minimum wage up from $16 to $20 an hour. A flurry of reports predictably followed from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Employment Policies Institute, and the Hoover Institution claiming that restaurants and other businesses were already laying off workers based on the new law.
The Hoover Institution, a think tank with $879.8 million in total assets, continued to dig in against AB 1228, publishing multiple articles over the past year attempting to pin “lost jobs” on rising wages. At the heart of the research are three major claims made by Lee Ohanian, an economist at UCLA and senior fellow at The Hoover Institution: ….
All three claims are false, and the Hoover Institution has now had to retract six articles based on faulty research by Ohanian. The claims were first debunked by Invictus, an anonymous poster—using the same publicly available data that Ohanian used as source for his analysis….
Why is the Hoover Institution so committed to publishing articles they end up needing to retract? The think tank, which is part of Stanford University and is headed by former Secretary of State under George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, describes its economic research as, “aimed at developing solutions that foster economic freedom”—a euphemism for unbridled capitalism that leaves workers underpaid and overworked. Being part of the university shields the Hoover Institution from needing to reveal the amounts given by individual donors, but its board of overseers includes some of the biggest names in corporate America, including Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Mercer, and Harlan Crow—known for his relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas….
[Now, let us turn to consider the ideas of civic republicanism. A key component of the political economy of civic republicanism is a social requirement to do good. Benjamin Franklin wrote that “Serving God is doing good to man,” and his record of long public service, and the positive impact of the many institutions he helped create, such as the public library and first hospital in Philadelphia, and what would become the University of Pennsylvania, show that Franklin lived his life fully in line with his belief in doing good. ]
“The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution”
Edmund S. Morgan, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1967), pp. 3-43
“The Ethic conveyed the idea of each man’s and woman’s “calling” in life. “The emphasis of [work or labor] was on productivity for the benefit of society….
“The calling of a ruler, as the colonists and their Puritan forebearers saw it, was like any other calling: it must serve the common good; it must be useful, productive; and it must be assiduously pursued.”
Modern economics is famous for believing in the rational economic actor, almost entirely concerned with his or her own utility. (In normal parlance, a selfish bastard). This is a model of how people behave, but it’s an oversimplification of human nature so severe as to be wrong. Most people don’t behave like that most of the time: they cooperate, and they share and most of them don’t free ride….Who else behaves that way? Senior executives in large corporations and rich people. The people who control the economy, act as economic theory says they should.
Be clear, all elites in all places and times have not acted this way… It is not even the case that executives in the 50s and 60s acted this way. When John Kenneth Galbraith investigated why executives back then didn’t pay themselves more, he came to the conclusion that they didn’t because they believed, as a group, that doing so would be wrong, and they took out anyone who tried to pay themselves more than they considered appropriate.
So why do executives act that way now?
Ideas lead culture and policy produces the outcomes one would expect. Thatcher and Reagan and intellectuals like Dawkins made being greedy and taking whatever you could get, screw the hindmost, acceptable… We were told this is how humans are; and this is how humans should be; and that doing this would produce better outcomes for everyone. This was legislated into law: the removal of protections from financial abuse put in place in the 30s, the lowering of top tax rates; the emphasis on consumption taxes over wealth taxes, the dropping of corporate tax rates; the “free trade” movement which allowed elites to avoid taxes and make goods in sweatshop nations.
The previous generation, those who experienced the Great Depression as adults, and who remembered the 20s and what the last great unregulated economy had wrought, were old, and out of power. Those who believed; who knew; that economic success had nothing to do with any sort of virtue, were gone. The new generations accepted a premise they desperately wanted to believe: that they could be selfish assholes, acting in their own interest and not caring about other people, and that it would all work out for the best.
Central to Welsh’s argument is his observation of the duality of human nature. Yes, there are some people who are fully the cold, calculating, self-serving bastards that are the worst embodiment of economists’ model of the rational economic actor. But this is a caricature of general humanity. Thankfully, humanity is richly ornamented with glittering examples of selflessness, charity, and even sacrifice. As Welsh noted, people have died trying to save their pets. Not to mention relatives, friends, and even complete strangers. Isn’t that what so impressed us and the rest of the world, when we witnessed the heroism of New York City police and fire fighters struggling to rescue and assist complete strangers at the World Trade Center on 9-11, entering a burning skyscraper from which they never came out alive?
The genius of the USA Constitution, in my considered opinion, was that it began with an understanding of this duality of human nature: mankind is deeply flawed, and all through history a privileged few have abused the powers of state entrusted to them to oppress, loot, and even murder, their subjects. But despite this wretched history – actually, because of it – the Founders of the United States deployed the full power of their reason to create a framework of national government in which the political manifestations of those human flaws are supposed to be checked and balanced, and in which the promotion, protection, and furtherance of the general welfare was one of three preeminent goals of the new national government. And to make sure the point was not missed, “general welfare” is mentioned twice: in the Preamble, and in Article 1, Section 8, the great and famous “General Welfare Clause.” ….Only by conceiving of society and its economy as an interdependent system – as political economy – can you begin to identify and attack economic problems of greedy misbehavior, and, begin to understand the depth of the hostility and enmity of conservative thinking to the USA form of government. Because conservatives and libertarians openly argue that the very idea of the general welfare is the slippery slope to statist totalitarianism….The conservative insistence that the markets must have priority over the state is a direct frontal attack on the American system of government, and its constitutional enthronement of the general welfare….
Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches. [in Adams’ first draft]
capelin
Thanks as always TW, lots to chew on.
The overview of Russian economic stats is good.
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“Jason Linkins, January 1, 2025 [The New Republic]
“You also shouldn’t discount the maladroit impact of Trump’s own army of weirdos. The empowerment of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. creates an environment where crackpots are suddenly allowed to subject the known world to their flawed interrogations. What will it be like to live in a country where things like the polio vaccine are suddenly the subject of a reopened debate? As Dan Drezner recently explained, there is a lot of tail risk that arises when settled matters suddenly become unsettled:
”Agreeing to a debate on this topic is like agreeing to a debate about whether the Earth is flat. Even if there is no scientific evidence to support such an outdated worldview, the idea that a debate should be had can be enough to sow doubts about the current consensus. The entire upside to the debate strategy rests with the conspiracy theorists.”
Drive-by to-much-protesteth. Paraphrased; “weird whacky we-all-know nothing to see here it’s dangerous to even discuss this”
Which means it needs discussing, obviously.
bruce wilder
Can Democrats be so jealous of “our democracy’s” “norms” that they do not recognize that lawfare against Trump was bound to make similar prosecutions against Democrats at least thinkable?
Political narcissism seems to be an epidemic disease. And contagious.
KT Chong
I think most of us are old enough to remember what happened to Russia for a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. The West was looting, pillaging and plundering Russia with impunity while Russians starved and froze to death. The US and EU were “strip-mining” Russia. It was a good time for the US and the West.
Then, Putin came into power and gradually but quickly put an end to all that. That is why the US and Europe hate him so much. They want their good time back.
Putin saved Russia.
different clue
The current American consensus is that race-based chattel-slavery was a bad thing.
” “weird whacky we-all-know nothing to see here it’s dangerous to even discuss this
Which means it needs discussing, obviously.
capelin
Hot on the heels of posting the above comment, I was listening to CBC, Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point”.
Lively interesting conversation; then he goes off about all that “crazy Covid misinformation”, on the internet, which, he says, turns out “all originated from 3 accounts! That’s what we’re dealing with!”
The host didn’t flag it, the producers didn’t flag it, everyone just nodded smugly. I turned the radio “off”.
I find it astounding, really, these blatant assertions of non-fact, these blatant personal attacks in lieu of honest discussion.
capelin
@dc
“race-based chattel-slavery was a bad thing”
Yes, agreed.
Drag it into the open, debate it in good faith, and slay the bad ideas. Should be easy if it’s so cut’n dried.
“It’s settled we can’t talk about it” is never the flex of truth. Duh.
And, like, who gets to decide? Exactly.
Anyway, race-based chattel-slavery is so last decade. Non-race-based chattel-slavery is the future.
bruce wilder
What will it be like to live in a country where things like the polio vaccine are suddenly the subject of a reopened debate?
I am not personally a big fan of RFK,Jr but I watched the blowup of aghastitude over “the polio vaccine” and recognized it as cynical psyop. It was sophisticated enough that NC’s Lambert Strether fell for it (and was corrected by NC commenters).
There is more than one Polio vaccine and some Polio vaccines have long been known to have questionable risk profiles. Some may not be as easy to handle and distribute / administer in the field, requiring special handling or refrigeration or the use of hypodermics to administer. Whether a particular vaccine formulation is likely to remain efficacious in distribution or poses the hazard of infecting recipients with communicable polio — these are potentially open questions and require active management and risk assessment.
Rightly or wrongly, RFK,Jr has questioned one particular polio vaccine, and not without good reason.
Confounding RFK,Jr’s specific concerns about one particular vaccine with the general concept of a Polio vaccine was a propaganda move and not initiated in good faith. It should not have been so easy to get that malicious bandwagon rolling, either. There were serious problems early on in the campaigns for polio inoculation, which really ought to be within the memory of informed opinion-haters writing on the subject of vaccines and polio. Polio, like smallpox before it, was a candidate for complete eradication within the last 20 years and that possibility has receded faster than the horizon rather being achieved, in large part because public health experts muffed it. And the particular vaccine that RFK,Jr has targeted for criticism, questioning the risk assessment, may have been a factor in the failure of global eradication efforts.
In short, there are serious issues here, both about vaccines and how they are developed and used, but also about how political journalism and commentary are done. The instinct of a self-satisfied “elite” class of “leftish” journalists and pundits to amplify any propaganda given form as snark makes them tools of establishment interests without ethical commitments.
capelin
Open debate is a cornersone of a healthy society. There was a time when, never mind the chatel part, race-based slavery was considered a-ok and a settled issue.
Anyway, equating slavery with what I am pointing out is a bit of strawman argument.
RFK jr is an articulate and acomplished lawyer and health advocate and the author of multiple books, which lay out serious and systemic issues and corruption, and names names. Extensively footnoted and referenced. Not being sued for libel. It’s the US. Do the math.
The public is gunna be shocked as this stuff is dragged out into the daylight.
Likewise, the claim of “3 sources” for the “misinformation” is absurd on the face of it. An absolutely kindergarten-level lie.
Thousands of health professionals and scientists signed open letters challenging the official hogwash. I personally accessed an order of magnitude more independent sources than that, daily. Etc etc.
It’s work but ideas should be able to withstand being debated and challenged, and when an idea or action is defended from that scrutiny there is a problem.
Curt Kastens
The very essence of a republic is that any issue can be reopened at any time. If that were not the case it would not be possible to correct the mistakes of the past.
Of course the ability to reopen the debate on past issues is a double edged sword. Humanity is confronted with many double edged swords. Jury nullification being a very important one.
I was once a libertarian fanatic. Now I am not even a democrat let alone a libertarian. Whether I have gotten smarter or dumber is in the eye of the beholder.
Politics can be complicated at times.