by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
John Kiriakou: The Slide Into Authoritarianism
John Kiriakou [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2024]
The Social Recession Is Accelerating
Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]
A reader asked about the term social recession which he’d noted in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Here is the paragraph:
“Stagnation in opportunities to work and earn (i.e. a financial recession) leads to social recession, a loss of opportunities for adulthood: a rewarding career, family, and a home of one’s own. In a social recession, unemployed young people may be mired in adolescent narcissism, eschewing ambitions not just in work but in romance and marriage.”….In the purely financial / economic terms of growth of GDP, household income, corporate profits and the value of assets, the US has only been in an economic recession for a few months in 2008-09 and at the start of the pandemic lockdown. But when measured by the ability of just about anyone willing to work hard and practice basic frugality to buy a house and start a family, the US has been in a social recession since 2009. Demographics / economics analyst Chris H., who tweets as
CH @economica, recently posted charts which reflect this social recession, most strikingly in the collapse of the US birthrate that started in 2009. He asked: “The largest childbearing population in US history has gone on strike…maybe we should know why?”….
The social recession began as a direct result of policy responses to the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09, policies that favored capital and those who already owned assets, at the expense of everyone who did not inherit wealth/assets or was too young to buy assets such as houses when they were still affordable to average workers….
As I often note, average wages have stagnated for the past 45 years. This stagnation was tolerable as long as the cost of a house, childcare and healthcare insurance remained somewhat affordable to average workers, but once the engines of financialization transformed the US economy into a Bubble Economy of soaring real estate / stock valuations that then inevitably crash, triggering an even larger bailout / stimulus response that inflates an even greater bubble, the costs of home ownership, childcare and healthcare soared out of reach of all but the top 20%….
Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No. That is social recession in a nutshell. When this fact is raised in conversation, those in the top 10% protest, but their protest rings hollow, for what they’re really saying is: since I’m doing great and all my friends are doing great, everyone’s doing great. There’s a word for this: denial. Denial cannot solve problems, it can only make them worse.
Heather Cox Richardson, August 28, 2024 [Letters from an American]
…on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property… he said …: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”
Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”
….What Republicans mean by “socialism” in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity.
Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina” and should be kept from the polls.
This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories….
Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man’s liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers’ government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists….
The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”
Global power shift
Patrick Lawrence: “The End of Days”
[Scheerpost , via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]
…Three-quarters of the French stood with Chirac, whose refusal to enlist France in Operation Iraqi Freedom strained Franco–American relations for several years. Remember “freedom fries” and the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” This was the level to which Bush II brought American discourse as he manipulated public opinion prior to the invasion. Good guys, bad guys. Black hats, white hats.
There is one detail of the U.S.–French confrontation over Iraq that remains very little known. Just before the 20 March 2003 invasion, Bush II called Chirac in a late-hour attempt to persuade him to change his mind. The exchange was very heated. Bush II made a vigorous argument that with the events of 11 September the prophesied war of Gog and Magog had at last begun. I can only imagine what went through the worldly Chirac’s mind, or indeed the look on his face, as Bush II discoursed in this manner.
I know of only one account of this conversation. It is in The Irony of American Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Walker & Co., 2010), a book William Pfaff published late in his life. The book sits at the end of Pfaff’s long and principled career as a sort of summation. It is rightly read as his causes-and-consequences critique of American exceptionalism. And it includes, inter alia, a description of the Bush–Chirac exchange. He got it, if I recall correctly what he told me later, from a high source in the French Foreign Ministry.
Ryan Grim and Jose Olivares [Drop Site News, via Thomas Neuburger 8-320-2024]
Russia / Ukraine
How the Russian Establishment Really Sees the War Ending
[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2024]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel Starts Ethnic Cleansing In West Bank
Moon of Alabama [via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2024]
Western media can be held legally accountable for its role in the Gaza genocide
[Mondoweiss, via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]
Gaza breakdown: 20 times Israel used US arms in likely war crimes
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2024]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2024]
David Sheen
@davidsheen
After State TV interviewed families where one partner’s Jewish and the other one isn’t, Israeli Minister of Communications
@shlomo_karhi
says the station’s board will be replaced with one that’s “zionist” and which won’t feature the voices of miscegenators
The Beijing Declaration is a key step to resolve the Palestinian question
Cao Xiaolin, China’s ambassador to Qatar [Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2024]
Palestinian unity is key to the realisation of Palestinian statehood and China is committed to facilitating it.
Oligarchy
How Global Capital Killed Climate Science
George Tsakraklides [via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2024]
Meet the megadonors pumping millions into the 2024 election
Clara Ence Morse, Luis Melgar and Maeve Reston, August 26, 2024 [Washington Post, via downwithtyranny.com]
The 50 biggest donors this cycle have collectively pumped $1.5 billion into political committees and other groups competing in the election, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission data.
The vast majority of money from top donors has gone to super PACs, which can accept unlimited sums from individuals and often work closely with campaigns despite rules against coordinating their advertising….
Trump and Harris Hear From the Megadonors. What the Big Money Wants in Return.
[Barrons, via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]
At the DNC, Kamala Harris has a billionaire problem on her hands
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]
NYT Gives ‘Whining’ Megadonors a Platform to Push Harris Against Taxing the Rich
Jake Johnson, August 30, 2024 [CommonDreams]
…”I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you that Wall Street billionaires and Silicon Valley tech bros are trying to convince a presidential candidate to abandon her commitment to tax them, and using their own alleged brilliance to justify it,” said Morris Pearl, the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires. “I admire their chutzpah in claiming that taxing unrealized capital gains will stifle innovation!”
“Claiming that making a billionaire pay taxes on their second billion will reduce innovation is as absurd as the rooster claiming the sun won’t rise without his crowing,” Pearl added. “The billionaires I know were all highly motivated to earn their first billion. The only thing at stake here is the remarkably fragile egos of billionaires who are on the verge of realizing they might not be saving civilization for anyone, including themselves.”….
As Much Power As the President: How Billionaires Became More Influential than World Leaders
[Literary Hub, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2024]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
We’re ‘witnessing nothing less than a coup by Macron’
Arnaud Bertrand [Twitter thread, via Thomas Neuburger 8-30-2024]
What’s happening in France is a little complicated, but not that much. A coalition of leftist parties (NPF in English, NFP in French) won a plurality of seats in the new Assembly, but the split between the left, center-right, and far-right parties is even enough that if Macron and the far-right wanted to, they could block the left.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]
Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
Update: it’s now official, in a just-released communiqué Macron has rejected a government led by the New Popular Front (NPF).It’s an unprecedented situation in the history of the 5th French Republic: the loser in the election effectively rejects yielding power to the winner.
How many dynamic companies broke their streaks of engineer-CEOs for the first time in the 2000s?
[Thread Reader App, via The Big Picture 08-25-2024]
Installing their first MBA/finance CEOs, who then promptly made fundamental strategic errors that nixed the company’s future, that are now becoming obvious…
The irony is that many of these MBA/finance CEOs in fact succeeded at greatly increasing revenues, profits, and shareholder value—even while making fundamental strategic errors that would effectively kill the company in the future. And they were lauded for it at the time!
You would think having an MBA/finance CEO for a few years wouldn’t be that bad, surely inertia and some basic competence goes a long way… but no, the MBA/finance CEO immediately begins making catastrophic mistakes and vengefully purging any remnants of engineer-executives….You would think that a company in the process of being murdered by its own CEO would see worse financial performance and lower stock valuations by investors, but in fact murdering a company seems to greatly increase profits and excite investor enthusiasm to unheard-of heights….…The apparent conclusion—uncomfortable if not unthinkable for free marketeers—is that MBA/finance thinking and decision-making is not just not helpful but actively hostile and destructive to running a successful, functional company.
…The problem of companies being enthusiastically managed into irrelevance is often simplified to blaming MBAs, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. Although Intel’s Otellini and Boeing’s McNerney were MBAs, Sony’s Idei was just a career manager who went to college in Japan. Jeff Immelt, an MBA, presided over the precipitous decline of General Electric from 2001 to 2017. Yet his notorious predecessor for twenty years, Jack Welch, is often held equally responsible—and he had a PhD in chemical engineering. Westinghouse, once an American industrial conglomerate with a major line of business in building nuclear reactors, undertook a seemingly absurd and ultimately fatal pivot into becoming a media company in the 1990s. The man who led that change, Michael H. Jordan, was a chemical engineer by training too—though also a former McKinsey partner.
Rather, the problem seems to stem from a particular way of thinking about what a company even is, what its goals are, and what measures are or are not appropriate to achieve those goals. In simplified terms, we can think of companies as organized to create value and sustain themselves by capturing a portion of the created value as financial profit.….
John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, NY: Grossman Publishers)
The questions of the introduction of domestic manufactures and the role that labor-saving machines might play in American life were considered not as isolated economic issues but as matters affecting the entire character of society. No doubt profit motives existed, but would-be manufacturers had to make cogent arguments which addressed broader ideological concerns. “In addition to asking “How much will it pay?” they had to consider as well, ”How will it advance the cause of republicanism?”
The Great Recession and the Great Depression
Peter Temin [National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2010]
[TW: Temin argues that public policy today is again crippled by a “gold-standard mentality” among elites, who are unwilling to confront head on the forces of financialization and neo-liberalism that have impoverished the working class and wrecked aggregate demand generation for the second time in less than a century.]
10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing: Or How Silicon Valley Started Breaking Bad
[The Honest Broker, via The Big Picture 08-25-2024]
Top Low-Wage Corporations Have Dumped $522 Billion Into Stock Buybacks Since 2019
Jake Johnson, August 29, 2024 [CommonDreams]
An analysis published Thursday shows that the 100 leading U.S. corporations with the lowest median worker pay poured more than half a trillion dollars into stock buybacks over the past five years, further enriching wealthy executives and shareholders while ordinary employees struggled to make ends meet.
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank that has been tracking executive compensation and stock buyback trends for decades, found in its 30th annual “Executive Excess” report that the 100 S&P 500 companies that pay their median workers the least spent $522 billion on share repurchases between 2019 and 2023.
That list of corporations, which IPS dubs the Low-Wage 100, includes Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Walmart. Lowe’s “led the Low-Wage 100 share buyback charge,” IPS found, spending $42.6 billion—an amount “large enough to have given each of the firm’s 285,000 global employees an annual $29,865 bonus for five years.”
CEO Greed Feasts on the Sweat of Low-Paid Workers—And Here’s the Proof
Sarah Anderson, August 29, 2024 [Inequality.org, via CommonDreams]
One-hundred S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” blew $522 billion over the past five years on stock buybacks….
The Lowe’s home improvement store spent $43 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years. With that sum, the big box chain could’ve given each of its 285,000 employees a $30,000 bonus every year between 2019 and 2023.
‘Corporate Greed at Its Absolute Worst’: FTC Challenges Kroger Merger
Julia Conley, August 26, 2024 [CommonDreams]
…With 115 of 159 Albertsons stores located within two miles of a Kroger in Los Angeles County and Orange County, California, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) has warned that hundreds of unionized workers could see their stores close if the merger is finalized.
As the trial began Monday, The New York Times published an interview with an employee of an Albertsons subsidiary in Woodland Hills, California. Leonard De Monte was represented by the UFCW in 2015 when the grocery store he was working at was sold as part of Albertsons’ merger with the store’s parent company—a deal that was called “an unmitigated disaster” for workers by AELP senior legal counsel Lee Hepner….
According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the merger would reduce the total annual earnings of grocery store workers in affected metropolitan areas by $334 million.
In court on Monday, the FTC displayed text messages showing that Kroger executives have complained that Albertsons has forced it “to accept more worker compensation.”….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, August 26, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
‘Obscenely greedy’ oil executives handed Swiss jail terms for role in 1MDB fraud
[FT, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2024]
[The Bureau.news, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2024]
Restoring balance to the economy
Judges Rule Big Tech’s Free Ride on Section 230 Is Over
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 08-29-2024]
“Algorithms are no longer a Get out of Jail free card. The Third Circuit ruled that TikTok must stand trial for manipulating children into harming themselves. The business model of big tech is over.” ….
It’s not that big tech platforms took advantage of this law, though they do take advantage of it today. This law created the business model of big tech platforms. There is no way to run a targeted ad social media company with 40% margins if you have to make sure children aren’t harmed by your product. This legal reading not only made a world where Mark Zuckerberg didn’t have to care whether he was hurting kids, it made a world where he would lose out to rivals if he did.
As one judge wrote, “Today, § 230 rides in to rescue corporations from virtually any claim loosely related to content posted by a third party, no matter the cause of action and whatever the provider’s actions.” There’s a shape-shifting element here as well. When corporations want to avoid being regulated, they call what they do speech and claim First Amendment rights. But when someone tries to hold them liable for defamation or unlawful speech, they claim they are mere vessels for others, and thus immune under Section 230. This dynamic creates what one court called “a lawless no-man’s-land.”
What are some of the specific harms? Well such bad acts include Grindr knowingly facilitating sexual violence, credit reporting agencies trying to avoid being regulated for mistakes in credit reports, or Facebook fostering ethnic violence. Identity thieves use social media sites to steal money, with the IRS flagging more than 1 million tax returns for identity fraud in 2023, with information largely captured on LinkedIn or Meta’s sites. Today, “scammers use Facebook to impersonate soldiers so as to start fake long-distance relationships with lonely people, eventually tricking their victims into sending their ‘boyfriends’ money.” And social media firms use algorithms to target gambling addicts with ‘social casino’ apps. These platforms aren’t liable for any of it, because of the weird and creepy reading of Section 230 combined with a corporatized First Amendment….
Because TikTok’s “algorithm curates and recommends a tailored compilation of videos for a user’s FYP based on a variety of factors, including the user’s age and other demographics, online interactions, and other metadata,” it becomes TikTok’s own speech. And now TikTok has to answer for it in court. Basically, the court ruled that when a company is choosing what to show kids and elderly parents, and seeks to keep them addicted to sell more ads, they can’t pretend it’s everyone else’s fault when the inevitable horrible thing happens.
And that’s a huge rollback of Section 230.
The business model of significant corporate actors today, from Google to Meta to TikTok, relies on them being immune from liability for what their users say even as they serve targeted advertising. That business model, of “keep ‘em swiping,” is now in jeopardy. With the Third Circuit splitting with how most other judges have interpreted Section 230, and using the recent NetChoice opinion to do so, policymakers will now have no choice but to start working through problems in Section 230. This case will get appealed, and it’ll likely go to the Supreme Court….
Instead of arguing that TikTok was the publisher of the challenge videos, Matey made the point that TikTok was its distributor. Drawing on common carriage traditions, he pointed to an older pre-internet legal distinction between “publisher” liability for speech, which is to say that author or publisher’s responsibility, and “distributor” liability for speech, which is to say the bookstore, library, or newsstand’s role.
The sale of indecent material has traditionally conferred different liability on the publisher of that material versus the distributor of it. The early Section 230 case law wrote that publisher/distributor distinction out of existence, and Matey says that case law was in error. With its algorithmic boosting, he said, TikTok is best understood as a distributor. That’s consistent with how Chopra and several Supreme Court Justices see the problem.
In other words, the fundamental issue here is not really whether big tech platforms should be regulated as speakers, as that’s a misconception of what they do. They don’t speak, they are middlemen. And hopefully, we will follow the logic of Matey’s opinion, and start to see the policy problem as what to do about that.
This case is going to be catalytic. If/when this goes to the Supreme Court, there are going to be a gazillion amicus briefs, and endless stories on how This Is the Case That Could Destroy/Save the Internet. And now plaintiff lawyers will think about the litigation they can bring. Without Section 230 as a shield, at least in the Third Circuit, is Facebook now liable for facilitating military scams? Are the big tech platforms going to have to face claims for helping violate state gambling laws or being a party to mass identity theft or sexual assault or child abuse? What about garden variety defamation claims they have been able to ignore until now? These are billion dollar questions….
TikTok must face lawsuit over 10-year-old girl’s death, US court rules
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2024]
Striking Back: A Landmark Federal Ruling Against Union-Busting Has Boosted Organizing
[Capital & Main, via North Carolina AFL-CIO 8-30-2024]
…In June, though, the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, offered Gomez and her co-workers a win. After a protracted legal fight, the NLRB’s five-person board, which issues final agency decisions on judicial rulings that have been appealed, concurred with an administrative judge’s earlier decision that Red Rock management had engaged in “pervasive and egregious misconduct.” The board also employed, for the first time, a new protection against union-busting that it had issued in a decision last year called Cemex. Citing Cemex, the board forced Red Rock to immediately recognize and bargain with the union.
Breaking labor laws to keep a union out had, instead, ushered it in.
It’s been about a year since the Cemex decision overturned nearly five decades of precedent and limited an employer’s ability to illegally undermine union support without facing meaningful consequences. Since 1979, there has been little downside for an employer who breaks labor law during an election, and unfair labor practices — as such violations are known — are common. (As of late June, for example, Starbucks’ efforts to oppose unionization have generated 435 unfair labor practice charges from National Labor Relations Board regional offices.)
Except in the rarest of cases, violations simply triggered another election — until August 2023, when the NLRB created a new consequence for law-breaking employers in its ruling on a dispute between the Teamsters and Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, a cement-mixing company. Post-Cemex, if a majority of workers sign cards to join a union, an employer can either recognize the union or file a petition within two weeks for a union election.
If the employer misses the deadline, and the cards are found to be valid, the National Labor Relations Board can order the employer to recognize the union. And if, during the election, the employer commits violations that require setting the election aside, the agency will order the employer to recognize the union and begin to bargain a first contract….
The Must-Carry Solution for the Media’s Google Problem
Courtney C. Radsch, August 22, 2024 [Washington Monthly]
Earlier this month, a federal district court judge confirmed what we’ve known for years—Google is a monopoly, and its anti-competitive search and advertising practices violate antitrust laws. In one of the most critical lawsuits of this century, the Department of Justice won its case against the tech giant by proving that the company used exclusive deals to secure its position as the default search engine on browsers and mobile devices….
The ruling from Judge Ahmet P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is a big deal, not only for the tech industry and consumers who have had limited options for online search but also for those who depend on search engines to reach audiences. Google’s search engine, which claims 90 percent of the search market, has become the hub of a digital advertising empire that generates more than $200 billion annually for the tech giant.
This monopolistic stranglehold is why we need laws that require Google to pay for the content that makes search so valuable not only for its ad business but also to build its artificial intelligence products. We also need legislators to prevent tech giants from retaliating against those who depend on them….
To forestall any efforts to be compensated for its use of news content to fuel its AI development, Google, whose parent company Alphabet has a market capitalization of over $2 trillion (equivalent to the GDP of Italy), is threatening to prevent news publishers from appearing in its search results in California because Golden State Lawmakers have been working on legislation to support journalism that would correct some market imbalances between Big Tech and news publishers. The remedies imposed by the court could also help with this. This week, Google apparently convinced California lawmakers to accept a $125 million payout to a new nonprofit journalism fund over five years rather than address the structural issues that its monopoly poses to sustainable journalism business models.
Earlier this year, Google removed hyperlinks to news websites based in California, following in the footsteps of Meta, which has censored news on Facebook and its Instagram platform in Canada following Ottawa’s passage of similar legislation.
Legislators should not settle for this settlement. They could take a different approach to help ensure news organizations get the compensation they deserve and prevent retaliatory measures from Big Tech. A “must-carry” provision written into law would require covered platforms to carry news, ensuring that people continue accessing important information while prohibiting discrimination and retaliation against news publishers.
The United States and many countries worldwide already have must-carry provisions for other communication platforms, such as local broadcast requirements on cable or local language requirements for media in Canada and many European countries.
In the U.S., local commercial and noncommercial broadcast television stations alike can demand that cable operators offer their channels on their platforms.
Cable operators are not permitted to jettison news or retaliate against those exerting their rights. Broadcast stations can request the same channel on cable as they have on over-the-air, making it easier for people to find them and contributing to brand awareness. (If your local NBC affiliate is Channel 4 on broadcast, it should also be Channel 4 on your cable menu. Similarly, online platforms would not be able to retaliate against news outlets by putting their results on the last search page or making their social media handles unavailable
Despite tech companies asserting that must-carry laws are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court has ruled that such regulations are entirely permissible under the First Amendment. Almost 30 years ago, the Supreme Court in Turner vs. FCC upheld must-carry laws, rejecting industry arguments that the strictures undercut editorial independence, amounted to government-compelled speech, or violated property rights in a decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy. We should impose the same obligations for search and social media platforms that enjoy market dominance as we do for cable and broadcast providers….
Monopoly Round-Up: Kroger-Albertsons Trial Starts Tomorrow
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 08-26-2024]
During Antitrust Trial, Exec Admits Kroger Jacked Up Milk and Egg Prices Above Inflation
Jake Johnson, August 28, 2024 [CommonDreams]
“The grocery industry, as represented by four of its largest players, became more profitable in the pandemic, and it has stayed that way for a couple of years at least,” The Financial Times noted Monday. “It is a good guess that price increases in excess of cost increases have played a role in this.”
Heather Cox Richardson, April 24, 2024 [Letters from an American]
…the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has finalized two rules that will work to stop corruption and money laundering in U.S. residential real estate and in private investment.
This is a big deal. As scholar of kleptocracies Casey Michel put it: “This is a massive, massive deal in the world of counter-kleptocracy—the U.S. is finally ending the gargantuan anti–money laundering loopholes for real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and more. Can’t overstate how important this is. What a feat.”
Defeating the “food-industrial” and “medical-industrial” complexes that are destroying well-being
[Funding the Future, via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]
Monopoly Round-Up: Price Gouging vs Price Fixing vs Price Controls
[BIG, via The Big Picture 08-25-2024]
Kamala Harris proposed a slew of proposals arguing that pricing in America has gone haywire. Economists got mad. Trump called her a Communist. What does it all mean?
A Distinctly Biden Doctrine: Corporate Concentration Violates Worker Rights
Harold Meyerson, August 29, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…Yesterday, Labor Secretary Julie Su, FTC Chair Lina Khan, DOJ Antitrust Division chief Jonathan Kanter, and NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo signed a memo of understanding “to strengthen worker protections and fair competition by collaborating on labor issues in antitrust merger investigations.” It comes in the midst of a federal trial in Oregon on the proposed merger of two huge supermarket chains, Albertsons and Kroger, which have been sued by the FTC for violating antitrust laws. As is standard in such cases, the FTC is arguing that the merger will lead to higher prices. As is not standard in such cases, the FTC is breaking new ground by arguing that the merger will also lead to a less competitive job market for supermarket employees, damaging their pocketbooks not only as a result of higher prices but also as a result of lower wages.
Disrupting mainstream economics
“Proving them wrong”: After raising minimum wage, California has more fast-food jobs than ever
[Salon, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2024]
‘Don’t Trust Google for Customer Service Numbers. It Might Be a Scam.’
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]
X caught blocking links to NPR, claiming the news site may be “unsafe”
[Tech Crunch, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 08-29-2024]
“X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter, is marking some links to news organization NPR’s website as ‘unsafe’ when users click through to read the latest story about an altercation between a Trump campaign staffer and an Arlington National Cemetery employee. The warning being displayed is typically applied to malicious links, like those containing malware, and other types of misleading content or spam. However, in this case, the web page being blocked is an NPR news report, raising questions about whether or not Musk’s X is actively trying to stop the news story from spreading.”
How to Avoid Online Scams and What to Do if You Become a Victim
[New York Times, via The Big Picture 08-25-2024]
Here are tips on how to dodge some of the most devastating schemes and what to do if you or someone you care about becomes ensnared.
Pavel Durov and the Abuse of Law
[Craig Murray, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2024]
Collapse of independent news media
Why the Media Won’t Report the Truth About Trump
James Risen, August 28 2024 [The Intercept]
The political press has doubled down on horse-race coverage of the election, overlooking the threat Trump poses to democracy.
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean
[Phys.org, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 08-26-2024]
“An international team of researchers led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs has found matching sets of Early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints on what are now two different continents. More than 260 footprints were discovered in Brazil and in Cameroon, showing where land-dwelling dinosaurs were last able to freely cross between South America and Africa millions of years ago before the two continents split apart. ‘We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar,’ Jacobs said. ‘In their geological and plate tectonic contexts, they were also similar. In terms of their shapes, they are almost identical.’”
Electric planes: The future of aviation? (video)
[CBS News Sunday Morning, August 25, 2024 [via YouTube]
Correspondent David Pogue checks out advances being made in aviation technology that allow a plane to be powered by batteries, promising a more environmentally-friendly, quieter and cheaper ride that may not even require a runway.
Ships of the Future: The Coming Revolution in the Shipping Industry (video)
[FD Engineering, via YouTube, August 2024]
Harris v. Trump
Thomas Neuburger, God’s Spies, April 26, 2024
Another mistake that could cost her is not articulating a clear domestic policy. There are already questions around her ties to billionaires, especially those in California, and questions around her brother-in-law, Tony West.
Her acceptance speech was ambiguous about economics: “That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy. An opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”“Opportunity economy” sounds very neoliberal. Social Security is not an “opportunity” plan; it’s a “give people money” plan. Giving people money is not what rich people do; they hoard it for themselves. And in case you’ve forgotten, neoliberals handed us Trump by refusing to let us have Sanders.
Who Is Kamala Harris? Her Context, Ascent, and Economic and Social Commitments
Joseph Gerson, August 31, 2024 [Common Dreams]
Will Kamala Harris and the Democrats Listen to Shawn Fain?
Les Leopold, August 30, 2024 [Common Dreams]
Corporate greed in the form of stock buybacks piled on top of mass layoffs should be a laser focus of the Democratic Party if it wants to win back the nation’s working class….
The Democratic Party platform mildly addresses stock buybacks by proposing to raise the tax on them from one percent to four percent. It also comes very close to adopting a proposal I have been hawking over the past year: that tax-payer money awarded through federal contracts (about $700 billion per year) should not be used to lay off taxpayers and finance stock buybacks. The language in the platform states, “Taxpayer money should not be used to pay out dividends, fund stock buybacks, or give raises to executives,” (p 12). Unfortunately, the reference covers only past Covid-19 relief funds and not all federal contracts.
More importantly, the platform does not make the all-important connection between stock buybacks and mass layoffs. In fact, the 91-page platform avoids any mention at all of mass layoffs. Instead, it features “Building a Stronger, Fairer Economy,” which includes “Investing in the Engines of Job Creation.” That’s because it’s easier to talk about providing corporate incentives to create jobs in the future, rather than stopping corporations from slashing jobs to finance stock buybacks right now.
Fintan O’Toole [The New York Review, September 19, 2024 issue]
…conventional wisdom is itself out of sync with a nation in which white men make up just 30 percent of the population. This is the minority that benefits from a spectacular application of positive discrimination in the political sphere: it accounts for close to two thirds of officeholders. By contrast, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Carol Moseley Braun in 2004, and Harris in 2020—have previously even sought a major party’s presidential nomination, and only three (including Harris) have served in the Senate. No Black woman has been elected as a governor, and only twenty-five have held other senior statewide offices, such as lieutenant governor, attorney general, or secretary of state.
Time shapes contemporary American politics in two additional ways—anachronism and gerontocracy. Biden, because of who he is, seemed to embody both the superannuated nature of America’s political class and its overrepresentation of white men of the baby boomer generation. Harris, because of who she is, is uniquely placed to call time on both these realities—which means, first of all, calling time on Donald Trump. If she frames her campaign effectively, Harris can make Trump a throwback and herself the embodiment of a future that has already taken shape in American demography.
That campaign can and must be about the things that affect people’s daily lives—jobs, health care, education, the climate crisis. But ticking away underneath it is another kind of question: Who is a normal American now? Harris’s choice of running mate suggests she is aware of this: the avuncular Minnesota governor Tim Walz has a gift for making progressive ideals seem familiar, ordinary, and rooted in down-home common sense. Meanwhile, Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, implicitly appeal to a more symbolic notion of representation: however complex and diverse American society might seem to be, its essential form is male, white, and at least culturally Christian….
…the torch of American democracy must be envisaged as a flickering flame. In her rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention on August 19, Hillary Clinton spoke of how “every generation has carried the torch forward.” It is not a secure and fixed inheritance that can be handed down as a bequest from one generation to the next. It is a dangerous and endangered idea that must always draw fuel from new sources. American democracy cannot be saved if it is not reimagined, deepened, expanded, and brought into line with contemporary American realities. It is open to Harris to embody the energy of that urgent updating….
Harris does, of course, have children through her marriage to Doug Emhoff, but because she did not give birth to them, Vance cited her first among the ranks of “people without children.” This, crucially, excludes her from the norm and indeed makes her the prime example of those who “hate normal Americans for choosing family.”
But it’s not just that Harris has failed to give birth; it is also that she has failed to be properly born. John Eastman, a coconspirator in Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, sought the Republican nomination for California attorney general in 2010, the year Harris won that office. In August 2020 Newsweek published an op-ed by Eastman protesting that “before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris’ eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth.”
…On August 19, as the Democratic convention was opening, Trump returned to this theme, asking of the Democrats: “I wonder if they knew where she comes from.” In this upending of the idea of birthright, Harris has no right to be American because she was born wrong. If there’s a genre underpinning the Republican disdain for Harris, it’s a nativity play that has become a horror movie. In Eastman’s narrative, she was already, at the very moment of her birth, a traitor to America, loyal to two foreign powers. According to Vance’s rhetoric, this misbegotten woman has grown up to be the potential begetter of a sterile American future….
…Of all the “firsts” that Harris represents—first female vice-president, first Black woman and first Indian American to contest the presidency—the one that goes unspoken is that if she wins in November, she will be the first openly acknowledged descendant of slaves to lead America. In this identification there is a complex interplay between freedom and necessity….
…Harris told Ball in 2019 that “the reality is that when you are the so-called minority you learn many languages, necessarily.” She did not mean literal languages but rather the languages of power. Harris entered the very arenas her mother’s friends and political allies had despaired of: the law, party politics, elective public office. She chose to believe what the previous generation could not—that justice can be achieved by working from inside the existing institutional structures. It is an act of faith that critics of her work as a prosecutor and attorney general in California do not believe to be justified in practice by the way she used her power. She sought to uphold some wrongful convictions, threatened to prosecute parents of habitually truant children (a policy that disproportionately affected people of color), and even appealed a federal court ruling that California’s death penalty is unconstitutional (in spite of her own complete repudiation of the death penalty). But her caution is not mere moderation or bland centrism. It comes from a complex personal and political navigation between the desire for freedom on the one side and the tight constraints of reality on the other.
That weighing of what is right against what is possible is the business of democracy, and Harris represents the way the left has accepted that difficult responsibility. American politics has ended up in a place where it is those on the right who want to burn everything down. They will do that, if they can, in the name of a phony American normality that excludes Harris and everyone who shares with her a complex identity. It is striking, therefore, that Harris’s candidacy has given Democrats permission to point out how “weird” the Republicans’ version of America really is.
[TW: I linked to video below a month ago as a rebuttal of Trump’s and (anti)Republican’s misrepresentations about citizenship. It directly addresses the points raised by O’Toole, above.]
What was the American Civil War Really About? with Allen Guelzo (video)
[School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, Arizona State University, April 23, 2024]
Question at 55:31: … would you not say that this battle for … liberal democracy is not generational, and we have to … meet and fight in every generation.
Guelzo: Let me tell you why, and in the most fundamental way. Lincoln said, at Gettysburg, that this was a nation dedicated to a proposition, that all men are created equal. I want you to reflect for a moment on how utterly novel that idea was, even in Lincoln’s day: the idea that you could create a nation dedicated to “tracks of ink on paper.” That was how one European reactionary scoffed at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. European reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre sneered at the American experiment. The idea that you could build a nation around propositions, sentences, reason! No! said de Maistre, nations are built historically; they are built upon race and tribe and clan and ethnicity and language and religion and soil. That’s what makes a nation.
They thought it was ridiculous, that Americans thought they could confect a nation out of assent to
propositions. “You mean any Tom, Dick and Harry that gets off the boat and reads the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and says, “yes,” can be part of the American experiment?”To which the American experiment replies, “Yeah. Yeah.”
It takes 1500 years to make a Frenchman — you got a lot of wine that has to be consumed, you know — it takes 1500 years to make a Frenchman. But you can become an American in 20 minutes. You read those propositions, and you say, “Yeah, I sign on to that.” …
Democrats’ political malpractice
[CovertAction, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]
(anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia.
[ProPublica, via The Big Picture 08-25-2024]
Militias After Jan. 6: Internal messages reveal how AP3, one of the largest U.S. militias, rose even as prosecutors pursued other paramilitary groups after the assault on the Capitol. Organized Vigilantism: AP3 has already sought to shape American life through armed vigilante operations — at the Texas border, outside ballot boxes and during Black Lives Matter protests. Close Ties With Police: AP3 leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement around the U.S. Internal files reveal their strategies for building these ties and where they’ve claimed success.
Forgotten Right-Wing Founding Father Has A Super Villain Origin Story (video)
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder, August 12, 2024 [via Youtube]
David Austin Walsh, postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and college fellow at the University of Virginia, discusses his recent book Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right…. diving right into the major role of one William F. Buckley in shaping American conservatism in the second half of the 20th Century, presenting himself (and all of his bigotry) as the “rational Republican.” Stepping back, Walsh explores how Buckley, the founder of the National Review, came to be the resectable staunch anti-communist and anti-labor aficionado that just happened to have close ties to full-on Neo Nazis, looking at the roles of folks like Merwin Hart, Charles Lindbergh, and Russell Maguire in shaping the more explicitly racist antisemitic strands of Buckley’s war on communism, before Barry Goldwater’s major loss in 1964 (and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement) saw him begin to push away the electoral risk of rhetorical extremism.
‘Elected by no one’: ‘Reaganland’ author on how the Heritage Foundation wields power (video)
[MSNBC, August 6, 2024, via YouTube]
Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s 9th iteration of “The Mandate for Leadership” – a detailed map of policy recommendations first provided to Ronald Reagan in 1981. While this newest edition pushes further to the right than any version that came before it, the evolution also highlights The Heritage Foundation’s long-game strategy. It has been pursuing many of the same goals for decades. Members of the conservative think-tank have openly talked about the long-term plans of their movement – making it clear that they’re still thinking three, four presidential elections down the line. “In a lot of ways, Donald Trump is that strong right arm. You know, he wants to please the conservative movement. And we saw with his judicial appointees, that he was just perfectly willing to kind of pass on what the right-wing activist world, elected by no one, told him to do.”
The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About
Rick Perlstein, August 28, 2024 [The American Prospect]
A Q&A with David Neiwert, America’s foremost writer and thinker on far-right extremism, on what might happen if Trump wins—or loses.
David Neiwert was a 21-year-old newspaper editor in the Idaho Panhandle in 1978 when the Aryan Nation hate group showed up in town. He and his publisher arrived at a fateful decision.
“We decided, ‘Oh, these guys just want publicity and we’re not going to give it to them,’” he said. “Well, within about three years that policy was completely discarded, because what followed was an endless litany of criminality, culminating in ’84 with the rampage of the Order, including bank robberies and assassination.”
It taught him a lesson that has informed his work for almost five decades as America’s most important writer and thinker on far-right violent extremism and its incursions into the conservative “mainstream”: There is no acceptable choice but to shine a light on forces like these….
Trump Has No Problems With Sex Predators— So Why Be Surprised Or Shocked That Lewandowski Is Back
Howie Klein, August 29, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Wisconsin: Politically Schizophrenic— Joe McCarthy & Ron Johnson vs Bob La Follette & Tammy Baldwin
Howie Klein, August 29, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
[McSweeney’s, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 08-26-2024]
“Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. This election year, with the very real possibility of Trump returning to office, we know it’s important to be reminded of these horrors and to head to the polls in November to avoid experiencing new cruelties, collusions, corruption, and crimes.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Jed S. Rakoff [The New York Review, September 19, 2024 issue]
[TW: Rakoff sits on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and has achieved notoriety for his unwillingness to let major Wall Street figures and institutions off the hook.]
In his new book, Reading the Constitution, [retired Supreme Court justice] Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence….
…[Breyer] is simply unwilling to admit that his onetime colleagues and friends on the Supreme Court could be anything less than sincere (albeit misguided) in their theories of statutory and constitutional construction or that their real purposes are political and ideological. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the Supreme Court justices of the early twentieth century who constantly overruled progressive legislation did so as an expression of sincerely held beliefs that any curtailment of rampant capitalism was an infringement of constitutionally protected freedoms and that “courts were better suited to protect those rights than legislatures.”
But I would suggest a more realistic view: for much of its history the Supreme Court has been the most conservative branch of the US government, and its justices have been chiefly motivated by their personal ideologies, which, like all good lawyers, they camouflage as solid reasoning.
The Supreme Court’s Presidential Immunity Decision Says What??? (PDF)
Albert W. Alschuler [U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 861, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2024]
“This Article uses Justice Sotomayor’s “Seal Team 6 hypothetical” to explore the categories Trump v. United States employs in determining whether the acts of a former President are immune from prosecution. It concludes that, contrary to Justice Sotomayor’s assertion, a President who orders a military unit to assassinate a political rival can be prosecuted…. The Article describes the procedural tangle the Court’s decision has created. It concludes that if the American legal system proves incapable of bringing the most corrupt President in American history to justice, the fault will rest primarily with the Supreme Court.”
Oakchair
2 Germen Local state elections happened today. The pro-war establishment parties lost.
In Thuringian the next government will need either the Anti-war Left BSW, or the Anti-war right AfD.
In Saxony the next government will either need to contain 1 of the anti-war parties or every single pro-war party (CDC, Social Democrats, Greens, and The Left).
The Anti-war BSW left party was formed in January of 2024. It was the 3rd most popular party with 16% and 12% of the vote respectively in Thuringian and Saxony.
The Greens and right FDP who are coalition partners at the federals level saw the largest loses, losing all their seats in Thuringian. The Left and the Social democrats saw loses. The AfD and BSW saw large gains.
Raad
So I guess all the dem freaks in the US are now slowly prepping the ramp for memory holing genocide until it’s convenient to drag it out in service of the empire again…
Jorge
80 is not “grandpa”, it’s great-grandpa. Biden is 80, Trump is 78, Pelosi is 90. Americans are tired of being ruled by our great-grandparents.
I believe that this dynamic will be the most important in the election. Trump bugged out of the debates the second that he had to face a 60-year-old woman who looks younger. He’s a fool to think he can look good in the debates, he should not appear on stage with her.
I also believe that this dynamic, the urge to retire the Boomer generation, will not be acknowledged. It will be subconscious, which makes it even more powerful.
Adam Eran
The big trouble with “marketing”–however despicable the deception– is that those proposing it start to believe their own BS. Delusional thinking is a sure way to walk off a cliff.