Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 28, 2022
by Tony Wikrent
The pandemic
”Individual freedoms versus collective duty: immunization decision-making within the face of often competing values”
[Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]
From 2006, nonetheless germane: “There are situations where there can be a real or perceived divergence between individual and community benefits of vaccination. This divergence may occasionally be based upon current scientific evidence and may exemplify the need for overriding individual autonomy. Use of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) in the US in the early 1990s is such an example. The sustained use of OPV led to the elimination of polio in the US, with the last cases of wild polio reported in 1979. While OPV is extremely safe and effective, the vaccine very rarely caused vaccine associated paralytic polio (VAPP) resulting in 5–7 cases of VAPP annually with near universal use of OPV in the US. Once polio had been effectively controlled in the US, preventing the indigenous transmission of polio, the risks of the vaccine (VAPP) may have been greater than the risk of disease. Assuming the individual does not travel to a region where polio is still endemic, a roughly one in a million risk of VAPP is highly unlikely, but still greater than the risk of wild polio. Yet, if a substantial number of individuals were not vaccinated because of this individual risk/benefit analysis, polio would likely have been reintroduced into the US, as the disease is only a plane ride away, leading to a tragedy of the commons [7]. While this divergence in individual versus community benefits was short-lived (the US switched to the inactivated polio vaccine that can not cause VAPP), such a situation can cause a dilemma for parents, health care providers and policy makers.”
“Barriers to Air Purifiers in Schools Rebuttal Matrix”
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-22-2022]
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”How a $100 field is altering the way in which individuals shield themselves towards coronavirus”
[Dallas Morning News, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]
“Enter the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, a do-it-yourself air filtration system with North Texas ties that has taken the internet by storm. Each box typically costs under $100 to make and is more effective than other, pricier options like High Efficiency Particulate Air filters. The simple contraption consists of a box fan, four MERV13 furnace filters that can be purchased online or in store, some cardboard and strips of tape. It’s the brainchild of air quality researcher Richard Corsi, dean of engineering at the University of California, Davis, and Jim Rosenthal, CEO of Texas-based company Tex-Air Filters. …. The White House recognized the need for better ventilation and launched the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge in March to call on building operators, like schools and companies, to up their inside air quality. But interest in such investments has been weak, even with billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 funding for schools that can be used to upgrade ventilation systems. Portable air filters can make up for outdated ventilation systems, although they tend to come with hefty price tags. Standalone devices that use HEPA filters can cost upwards of $300 to $400, and that doesn’t include the price of filter replacements. So when the DIY air filter prototype – designed by Corsi and first constructed by Rosenthal in the summer of 2020 – worked, the two were elated. With MERV13 filters making up each side of the cube, the box fan on top pulls air through the filters and blows clean air out of the top. In a 700-square-foot classroom with nine-foot ceilings, a Corsi-Rosenthal Box on the highest fan setting can add the equivalent of about seven-and-a-half to eight air changes per hour, Corsi said. ‘If we started at two air changes per hour and we added eight air changes per hour, we’re roughly getting about an 80% reduction in inhalation dose with that single Corsi-Rosenthal Box,’ he said. ‘That’s a huge reduction. That’s like everybody wearing pretty decent masks in the classroom.’”
Restoring steadiness to the financial system
“Biden’s Student-Loan Forgiveness Is Good. It Could Have Been Revolutionary”
[New York Magazine, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-26-2022]
“Although Biden’s plan will be life-changing for many, it’s necessary to think about what could have been had he or his administration possessed the necessary imagination or will. Student-loan debt is not a natural disaster: It became a crisis because of political decisions made decades ago. In the debates over plans and proposals, the human toll of student-loan debt can become lost. Student-loan debt ruins lives. It delays or even prevents people from starting families or buying homes. It inhibits even the simplest acts of enjoying life. This is cruel and unnecessary. The repayment pause is proof that society can survive without millions locked into a predatory debt scheme. Given these circumstances, it feels more than a little insulting that Biden waited two years to put forward a student-loan plan that didn’t even fulfill all of his campaign promises. People deserve better solutions from the president, and they deserved them years ago. Further action will be necessary to dismantle the inhumane policy decisions that turned student-loan debt into such a crisis. Biden can’t address that all on his own. Congress will have to act, and one such solution would be to make public college free.”
The Origin of Student Debt: Reagan Adviser Warned Free College Would Create a Dangerous “Educated Proletariat”
Jon Schwarz, August 25, 2022 [The Intercept]
In 1970, Roger Freeman, who additionally labored for Nixon, revealed the precise’s motivation for coming many years of assaults on greater training….
Freeman’s remarks had been reported the subsequent day within the San Francisco Chronicle underneath the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman stated, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman additionally stated — taking a extremely idiosyncratic perspective on the reason for fascism —“that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.” ….
[As governor] Reagan pushed to chop state funding for California’s public faculties however didn’t reveal his ideological motivation. Rather, he stated, the state merely wanted to save cash. To cowl the funding shortfall, Reagan advised that California public faculties may cost residents tuition for the primary time. This, he complained, “resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This is obviously untrue. … We made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.”
The success of Reagan’s assaults on California public faculties impressed conservative politicians throughout the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vp, proclaimed that because of open admissions insurance policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”
Prominent conservative intellectuals additionally took up the cost. Privately one frightened that free training “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by elevating the expectations of working-class college students. Another referred to school college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The reply was “to close off the parasitic option.”
In follow, this meant to the National Review, a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”
[TW: According to Forrest A. Nabors, author of From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, one committee of the Virginia secession convention presented a report that explicitly attacked democratic republicanism and majority rule as “the despotism of numbers” that inevitably led to “misappropriation of others’ property under democratic forms of government,” which in the North “may be seen in the system of free schools, by which children of the poor are educated at the expense of the rich.”
Nabors quotes from a number of Civil War era leaders of the Republican Party, who had to grapple with the tasks of defining who the Confederate enemy was, and then replacing that enemy’s system of government after that enemy had been defeated by force of arms:
“Knowledge,” Thaddeus Stevens said in 1835, “is the only foundation on which republics can stand.” This theory and its opposite, that ignorance is the only foundation on which oligarchy can stand, runs through the Republicans’ criticism of the slave states’ abstention from establishing a healthy common school system. They argued that the slave-state rulers deliberately prevented the development of common schools because popular ignorance was their policy goal. The arrangement of educational institutions in the slave states secured this goal and supported oligarchic rule…. in 1858, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan quoted from the annual message of South Carolina governor Whitemarsh Seabrook: “Education has been provided by the Legislature but for one class of the citizens of the State, which is the wealthy class. For the middle and poorer classes of society it has done nothing, since no organized system has been adopted for that purpose….
In 1861… Waltman Willey [who was elected from the western mountains around Morganton to go to the secession convention, where he stubbornly voted against secession over and over again, then served in the U.S. Senate representing the Restored Government of Virginia, then served as one of the first two Senators from the new state of West Virginia] immediately defined why the oligarchy opposed free colleges: “Sir, great astonishment has been expressed at the hostility of southern statesmen to popular education. But, sir, we ought not to be surprised at it. Knowledge is power; and to keep the masses in ignorance is a necessary precaution to keep them in subjection. To maintain the oligarchy of the few owning the capital, it is necessary to bind down with the slavish chains of ignorance the many who perform the labor. . . . Sir, the true reason of this hostility to popular education is hostility to democratic institutions.
In 1862 Willey’s colleague from western Virginia Representative Kellian Whaley similarly denounced the policy of the slaveholding aristocrats in eastern Virginia and imputed to them the same motive. The eastern Virginian aristocracy jealously guarded their power over the state… “One of the best accidents sustained by our western individuals has been an organized opposition to a system of free colleges and in style training, by which the intense however untutored minds of our mountain ranges and humbler lessons haven’t been developed, whereas faculties and seminaries for the wealthy have been fostered by jap laws. To hold the individuals in ignorance is part of the coverage of their masters, the forty thousand slave-owners of East Virginia.”
(–Forrest A. Nabors, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Columbia, Mo., University of Missouri Press, 2017, pp. 46 ff. )
A revival of civic republicanism — and a give attention to the precise historical past of how USA was developed — would restore clear ethical ideas of political financial system. For instance, the precept {that a} republic requires its residents to be as extremely educated as doable, would set the inspiration of free public training, via to the very best school stage, and change into an ideological barrier to conservative, libertarian, and neoliberal schemes for privatization, reminiscent of constitution colleges. ]
1860s Republicans handed the Land Grant College Act in order that males with out rich fathers might need entry to greater training
Heather Cox Richardson, August 21, 2022 [Letters from an American]
When they had been in charge of the federal authorities within the 1860s, Republicans handed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities in order that males with out rich fathers might need entry to greater training. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans additionally tried to make use of the federal authorities to fund public colleges for poor Black and white Americans, dividing cash up in line with illiteracy charges.
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that invoice on the grounds that the federal authorities had no enterprise defending Black training; that course of, he stated, belonged to the states—which for the subsequent century denied Black and Brown individuals equal entry to colleges, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.
Then, in 1954, after many years of stress from Black and Brown Americans for equal entry to public colleges, the Supreme Court underneath Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate colleges had been inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional. The federal authorities stepped in to verify the states couldn’t deny training to the kids who lived inside their boundaries.
The Real Heroes Behind Biden’s Student Debt Announcement
Astra Taylor, August 26, 2022 [The New Republic]
[TW: A long excerpt here because this is a story of how years of thankless work can lead to hope for millions. It also illustrates Milton Friedman’s principle of the shock doctrine: it is crucial to develop the policy alternatives that can be adopted years later when policymakers are confronted with a crisis. ]
Though not almost sufficient, the president’s transfer is an efficient one—and is the results of a decade-plus of activism by 1000’s of courageous Americans…. Through years of tireless and sometimes thankless organizing, debtors and their allies pushed a reluctant administration to ship broad-based pupil debt cancellation—to bail out common individuals, not huge banks or companies. Approximately 20 million individuals can have their balances utterly worn out, and lots of have been sharing emotional messages of shock and jubilation on-line…
Yet the triumph is bittersweet. For tens of millions of others, together with most members of the Debt Collective—the union for debtors I helped discovered—$10,000 and even $20,000 doesn’t start to chip away on the curiosity that has capitalized on their steadiness sheets, and it received’t cut back their month-to-month funds. Experts warn that many received’t get the aid they’re entitled to as a result of utility course of that attends the revenue cap.…
In the weeks and months forward, we have to make sure that debtors are in a position to entry the aid they’re entitled to. And we have to defend this coverage determination from bad-faith critics….
I consider that that is doable as a result of I’ve seen what it took to get thus far. Over 10 lengthy years, a rising coalition of debtors, legal professionals, coverage wonks, racial justice advocates, labor unions, and progressive public officers have pushed the demand for mortgage cancellation from the political margins to the mainstream. The Debt Collective, particularly, expanded the Overton window via daring ways, together with a number of profitable debt strikes. Despite the overwhelming stigma and judgment related to indebtedness on this nation, debtors from all walks of life went public with their monetary struggles, stated “enough is enough,” and obtained organized….
It’s straightforward to overlook simply how quixotic the demand for pupil debt cancellation appeared when it first rang out throughout Occupy Wall Street a decade in the past, again when Obama was president. On April 8, 2012, members of the short-lived Occupy Student Debt Campaign organized a protest dubbed 1T Day, marking the day pupil debt surpassed $1 trillion. Protesters wearing caps and robes fabricated from black trash luggage and demanded a pupil mortgage jubilee. Media protection was scant and dismissive. “They want all student debt in the country forgiven. All $1 trillion of it. And if the government would be so kind, they’d appreciate it if it would pay for higher education from here on out, as well,” Reuters’s Chadwick Matlin jeered. “What has happened to this proposal? Hardly anybody has cared.” According to NPR’s All Things Considered, “Most experts believe there’s little chance the government would ever forgive student loans.”…
Two years later, the Debt Collective was formally launched once we introduced the nation’s first pupil debt strike. Fifteen college students—Nathan Hornes, Latonya Suggs, Ann Bowers, Jessica Madison, and others—who had been defrauded by the collapsing for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, went public, refusing to pay again their loans and demanding full cancellation from the Education Department…. Their work on predatory pupil lending included highly effective however underappreciated arguments concerning the Department of Education’s varied authorities to cancel federal pupil loans, together with a little-known provision known as Borrower Defense to Repayment, which says loans have to be canceled when establishments mislead college students or violate state regulation—standard-issue fare for for-profit colleges like Corinthian. With their assist, we created a mobile-friendly web site that allowed us to flood the division with Defense to Repayment claims and compelled the Obama administration to start issuing a trickle of aid….
The Corinthian marketing campaign confirmed that debt cancellation was doable (even when it could take seven years for our full calls for to be met: In June this yr, the Biden administration lastly granted the automated mass discharge the Corinthian strikers known as for, amounting to almost $6 billion for over half one million individuals). In early 2020, Senator Elizabeth Warren, impressed by the Corinthian instance, made broad pupil debt aid a central plank of her presidential main run, adopted by Bernie Sanders. Boxed in, Mr. Biden reluctantly embraced pupil mortgage cancellation as nicely.
“…the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches”
Heather Cox Richardson, August 27, 2022 [Letters from an American]
Biden’s calling out of right this moment’s radical Republicans mirrors the second on June 21, 1856, when Representative Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts, a member of the newly fashioned Republican Party, stood up in Congress to announce that northerners had been prepared to take to the battlefield to defend their lifestyle towards the southerners who had been making an attempt to destroy it. Less than a month earlier than, Burlingame’s Massachusetts colleague Senator Charles Sumner had been brutally crushed by a southern consultant for disparaging slavery, and Burlingame was sick and uninterested in shopping for sectional peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he stated, was sufficient. The North was superior to the South in its morality, loyalty to the federal government, constancy to the Constitution, and financial system, and northerners had been prepared to defend their system, if vital, with weapons.
Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the primary time a distinguished northerner had provided to battle to defend the northern lifestyle. Previously, southerners had been those threatening battle and demanding concessions from the North to protect the peace. He was prepared to just accept a battle, Burlingame defined, as a result of what was at stake was the way forward for the nation. His speech invited a problem to a duel.
Southerners championed their area because the one which had appropriately developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South, a number of very rich males managed authorities and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the very best type of human civilization. They opposed any try to limit its unfold. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood financial development. In the pursuits of union, northerners repeatedly ceded floor to enslavers and left their declare to superiority unchallenged.
At lengthy final, the assault on Sumner impressed Burlingame to talk up for the North. The southern system was not superior, he thundered; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery saved employees ignorant and godless whereas the northern system of freedom lifted employees up with colleges and church buildings. Slavery feared innovation; freedom inspired employees to attempt new concepts. Slavery saved the South mired prior to now; freedom welcomed the trendy world and pushed Americans into a brand new, thriving financial system. And lastly, when Sumner had spoken up towards the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him virtually to demise on the ground of the Senate.
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-27-2022]
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Seattle Residents Make Record Use of ‘Democracy Voucher’ Program
David Moore, August 25, 2022 [The American Prospect]
The new report, by Associate Professors Dr. Jen Heerwig of Stony Brook University and Brian J. McCabe of Georgetown University, discovered that democracy voucher customers are more and more consultant of the town, just like Seattle’s basic election voters of their age distribution, revenue ranges, and race.
Adopted by Seattle voters via a 2015 poll initiative, the democracy voucher program goals to extend participation within the marketing campaign finance system and foster political engagement whereas encouraging candidates who don’t have already got networks of rich donors to run for workplace.
Last yr, 48,071 Seattle residents gave a voucher to a candidate working within the metropolis, making up 7.6% of the voting-age inhabitants—or, as a share of residents who acquired vouchers within the mail, a participation price of 9.4%. The 2021 elections, the third cycle with democracy vouchers provided to Seattle voters, included contests for 2 at-large metropolis council seats and metropolis legal professional, along with the crowded area of candidates working for the open mayoral seat.
Under the first-of-its-kind program, the unbiased Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC) mails 4 democracy vouchers value $25 apiece to each registered voter, who can donate them to qualifying candidates for metropolis workplace, both via the mail, digitally, or by signing in-person handy to a candidate. The candidates who select to just accept vouchers, that are redeemable for funding from the town, comply with abide by decrease marketing campaign contribution limits—together with each vouchers and money donations from people—and take part in no less than three public debates, with their funding totals from vouchers displayed on-line. Candidates who take part additionally agree to look at a most quantity they’ll elevate and spend for the workplaces they search—for instance, $800,000 for the mayoral main and basic election mixed, counting voucher donations and financial contributions….
[Another] report discovered that the share of contributors from outdoors Seattle within the 2015 contest for at-large metropolis council seats—earlier than the voucher program was underway—was a hefty 31.6%. In the 2017 and 2021 cycles, nonetheless, that share shrank to only 6.7% and 6.6% of contributors, which means that far fewer donors outdoors Seattle have been giving money to candidates since vouchers got here into play.
The outcomes are much more stark final yr’s mayoral race. In the 2013 and 2017 contests, earlier than vouchers had been in impact within the election for mayor, about 23% of contributors to mayoral hopefuls got here from outdoors Seattle, whereas in 2021 that share fell to only 7.1% of contributors. Instead of donors outdoors Seattle making up one of many largest blocs of marketing campaign contributors, final yr the out-of-city donors made up a smaller share than any of Seattle’s seven districts.
Union Strikes California Hospital Giant Over Violations of Mental Health Laws
David Dayen, August 24, 2022 [The American Prospect]
More than 2,000 psychological well being therapists and clinicians affiliated with the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) are engaged in an uncommon open-ended strike of HMO big Kaiser Permanente services in Northern California. Rather than combating for pay and advantages—the union agreed to the phrases provided by Kaiser on that rating—the battle is over entry to psychological well being companies for sufferers.
One Way Pharma Lobbyists Actually Lost
David Sirota, Julia Rock & Matthew Cunningham-Cook, August 26, 2022 [The Lever]
At concern is the part of the Inflation Reduction Act that permits Medicare to start a really small program of negotiating decrease drug costs. Pharmaceutical firms spent $142 million on lobbying on the matter, and that spending satisfied lawmakers to water down the much-promised initiative in myriad methods. Democrats, for instance, restricted the availability to solely cowl a handful of older medicine, and postpone implementation till 2026….
Whereas the unique House model of the laws may have given a future pharma-friendly Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary discretion to keep away from negotiating decrease drug costs for Medicare recipients, the Senate model of the invoice overseen by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) explicitly shut down this so-called “Rogue Secretary” loophole.
“The proposal would close a loophole in the House-passed bill that would have allowed a bad actor Republican secretary to refuse to negotiate or negotiate fewer than the maximum number of drugs,” Senate Democrats famous in a messaging doc final month. “The bill now requires the Secretary to negotiate the maximum number of drugs each year, to the extent that number of drugs qualify for negotiation.”
….Removing discretion right here is essential, given the historical past: Clinton’s HHS Secretary Donna Shalala killed importation proper earlier than Clinton started his new profession giving paid speeches to company teams, together with drugmakers. Shalala, for her half, shortly joined the board of administrators on the medical insurance big UnitedHealth Group.
That explicit rogue secretary incident wasn’t some remoted prevalence: Unbound by stricter legislative mandates, President Barack Obama’s HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and President Joe Biden’s HHS Secretary Xavier Beccerra have refused to make use of current legal guidelines to scale back the skyrocketing value of lifesaving medicines developed at authorities expense….
The consideration to element embodied by this provision is especially vital proper now, when the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc is making an attempt to hamstring administrative businesses by stopping them from deriving regulatory and enforcement energy from obscure invoice textual content.
Combating that conservative campaign would require lawmakers to keep away from giving industries or courts methods to evade or eviscerate these legal guidelines throughout implementation. Legislators should truly legislate — that’s, they might want to write their payments to explicitly empower and compel the manager department to take motion.
“The Case for a Participation Income” (PDF)
A. B. Atkinson [via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-26-2022]
“First, the means-tested approach necessarily penalises personal effort. Even if the poverty trap no longer involves marginal tax rates in excess of 100per cent, the marginal rates are still higher than those levied on the rest of the population. Perhaps more importantly, it is not just the individual’s efforts that are penalised, but those of that person’s family. Unlike individualised social insurance, social assistance discourages the partners of those out of work from earning income. I find it strange that a government so concerned with incentives should not see that reliance on means-testing has such a counterproductive effect. In the case of pensioners there is the ’savings trap’, which applies to pension income and capital income. For a range of such income, there is little or no net gain from saving on account of the withdrawal of means-tested benefits. People with capital in excess of a specified amount are not eligible for income support, and, if they realise this in advance, they may decide that there is little point in saving. The second major objection to means- tested benefits is that a significant minority of those with incomes below the assistance level do not claim the benefits to which they are entitled. There is a recurrent problem of incomplete take-up. The reasons are doubtless manifold, but the failure of successive take-up advertising campaigns indicates that it is not simply a matter of inadequate information. There are deep-seated objections to claiming means-tested benefits. Unlike non-income-tested benefits, where take-up is thought to be close to 100 per cent, in the case of family credit only some two-thirds of the potential benefit is claimed. Thirdly, the means test can only make sense when applied to the family or the household as a unit. As such, it runs counter to the desire to have a social security system which ensures independence. This is particularly important for women, but it also applies to young people, as has become clear with the problems of young adults and income support. In short, means-testing is economically inefficient, provides an incomplete safety net, and takes social policy backwards rather than forwards.”
Can We Still Afford Social Security and Medicare? Breaking it down with MMT economist Scott Fullwiler.
Stephanie Kelton [The Lens, via Mike Norman Economics 8-21-2022]
Eighty-Seven Years and Counting
Stephanie Kelton [The Lens, via Mike Norman Economics 8-20-2022]
I’ve lengthy argued that Social Security’s Achilles heel is its so-called funding mechanism. I received’t repeat these arguments right here. To perceive my views, you possibly can learn Chapter 6 of my e-book or refer again to the collection of posts I did earlier this summer time (right here, right here, right here).
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Smoke and Mirrors: What is the historical past of neoliberalism?
Steven Hahn [The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-24-2022]
“During the early 1970s—the “silent phase” of neoliberalism’s ascent, as Gerstle phrases it—the Heritage Foundation, the Koch Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Business Roundtable had been all established, demonstrating that rich donors with neoliberal convictions had been able to go on the offensive. These well-funded assume tanks sought not solely to advertise the idea of deregulation but in addition to vary the very method we spoke about politics and economics. Their intellectuals launched into an enormous propaganda marketing campaign to demonize organized labor, authorities energy, and liberal jurisprudence and to influence the general public that the creeping stagflation of the time was the logical end result of a government-regulated financial system.
This ascendant neoliberalism was not only a undertaking of the Republican Party: It was bipartisan and already evident in Jimmy Carter’s administration within the late Nineteen Seventies, earlier than Ronald Reagan’s near-landslide election in 1980 secured its reign. Famously proclaiming that authorities was the issue quite than the answer, Reagan superior the deregulatory initiatives that Carter had already began to deploy. He additionally moved towards organized labor and crushed its strikes (most notably the Professional Air Traffic Controllers strike of 1981); celebrated supply-side economics; pushed for the repeal of the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” (unleashing shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh); and appointed judges who had been constitutional “originalists” and took a dim view of expansive interpretations of the Constitution’s commerce clause….
For Gerstle, nonetheless, it was within the Nineteen Nineties, not the Nineteen Eighties, that neoliberalism went from being a political motion to a political order. Gerstle tells the story of how neoliberalism grew to become as a lot a creed of the Democratic Party as of the GOP, specializing in how the Clinton administration embedded neoliberal views into the logic of policy-making and helped advance laws that prolonged the Reagan-era rollback of the federal regulatory equipment. Clinton oversaw the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (which had saved business and funding banking separate), the deregulation of the telecommunications trade, and the enactment of punitive welfare reform. Even the administration’s failed try and create a nationwide medical insurance system relied on the non-public sector to underwrite this system. “Across his two terms,” Gerstle writes, “Clinton may have done more to free markets from regulation than even Reagan himself had done.”….
Gerstle is actually not the primary to acknowledge the Clinton administration’s hyperlinks to, quite than breaks from, the Reagan administration… But his dialogue of how…. the tip of the Soviet Union and the obvious defeat of communism—“clear[ing] the world of capitalism’s most ardent opponent”—relieved the stress on noncommunist international locations to pursue extra egalitarian and social democratic applications and put the ultimate nail within the coffin of the category compromise between capitalist elites and employees that had been coming aside for the reason that Nineteen Seventies….
The doable demise of the neoliberal order discovered expression within the emergence of political actions on the precise and the left—the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter particularly—all of which pushed again towards the elites that neoliberalism appeared to have sustained. The Tea Party attacked their internationalism and their embrace of a multicultural America; Occupy Wall Streeters and Black Lives Matter protesters attacked them for the large financial and racial inequalities they enabled and continued to thrive upon… Sanders and Trump shared an opposition to the neoliberal order’s hallmarks of free commerce and globalization. Trump stormed his option to the Republican nomination in 2016, whereas Sanders couldn’t surmount the wall that neoliberal Democrats had constructed to safe the nomination of Hillary Clinton. And, as Gerstle suggests, the hostility that saved Clinton from the presidency was rooted in additional than simply misogyny and private distaste; it was additionally rooted in a deep anger on the political and financial system with which she was readily linked….
Unfortunately, what the previous yr has proven is that the promise evaporated shortly and the hazards have grown overwhelming. If something, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has generated an American-led effort to revitalize the transatlantic neoliberal order and to mud off the rhetoric and logic of the Cold War in order to isolate and take down Russian President Vladimir Putin…. What’s extra, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which appeared to be shifting into the driving force’s seat between 2018 and 2020, has largely been stymied by the celebration’s centrists in addition to by the Republicans and, together with Biden, will likely be blamed for the inflation and associated financial issues that their large Covid rescue plan is seen to have stoked.
Investors Bought a Quarter of Homes Sold Last Year, Driving Up Rents
[Pew Charitable Trusts, via Naked Capitalism 8-24-2022]
20 Million American Households Are Behind On Energy Bills
Michael Kern [Oilprice, via Mike Norman Economics 8-24-2022]
Record Number of US Households Behind on Energy Bills
Yves Smith, August 25, 2022 [Naked Capitalism]
The Nice family is certainly one of some 20 million throughout the nation—about 1 in 6 American houses—which have fallen behind on their utility payments. It is, in line with the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada), the worst disaster the group has ever documented. Underpinning these numbers is a blistering surge in electrical energy costs, propelled by the hovering value of pure gasoline.
‘A Place To Die’: Inside A Nightmare For-Profit Hospital In Rural America
Moe Tkacik August 18, 2022 [More Perfect Union, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-2022]
When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home
[The New Yorker, August 25, 2022, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-2022]
Closing Down the Billionaire Factory
Matt Stoller, August 17, 2022 [Big, via Naked Capitalism]
The non-public fairness trade has been working America for 4 many years. This is how the ‘billionaire manufacturing unit’ emerged, and why the general public has had sufficient….
One results of anger from voters is that there’s growing curiosity by politicians in addressing how uncontrolled non-public fairness has change into, from eliminating tax concessions just like the ‘carried interest loophole’ that allow financiers get taxed at a decrease price, to laws just like the Stop Wall Street Looting Act that may drive them to imagine legal responsibility for the debt they placed on firms and shield employee pensions in chapter. But floor zero within the assault on corrupt types of non-public fairness, is now an company that has been sleepy and corrupt for many years, till a severe regulator named Gary Gensler took it over final yr: the Securities and Exchange Commission….
Gensler is aiming at charges on the speculation that transparency may end up in extra competitors for cash from pension funds, decrease charges for personal fairness barons, and higher capital allocation, as traders understand their cash would work higher elsewhere. (You can truly have an effect right here, by providing your ideas to the SEC. If you’d like to supply feedback, e mail rule-comments@sec.gov and point out file S7-03-22 or go to https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed.shtml and click on via the hyperlink on S7-03-22. Or comply with directions right here.)
How Deadly Bacteria Spread in a Similac Factory—and Caused the US Formula Shortage
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-2022]
‘I’ve Seen a Lease Calling for Daily Lap Dances’
[New York Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-2022]
AL Coal Miners Must Pay $13 Million in Damages for Strike, Biden’s NLRB Rules
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism Water Power 8-22-2022]
“On August 3, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the Associated Press reported that the subunit of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for Region 10 (much of the South) has ordered the union to pay $13.3 million to Warrior Met Coal. About 1,000 workers from two mines and two aboveground facilities southwest of Birmingham, Alabama, have been on strike against Warrior Met since April 2021, resisting brutal working conditions. Now the Biden NLRB is demanding the UMWA pay what amounts to $13,000 per striker into the company’s pocket. The government says this is reimbursement for security guards, security cameras, repairs, and production lost because of the strike, plus buses for carrying scabs across picket lines.”
Criminal depredations of the administration and higher lessons
How the US Toppled the World’s Most Powerful Gold Trader
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 8-22-2022]
JPMorgan’s former gold boss was convicted final week.
Real economics
“Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I”
[Construction Physics, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-22-2022]
[T]he very idea of ‘cost per square foot’ suggests a price perform that’s largely unbiased of general constructing measurement. Similarly, we see few obvious economies of scale in manufacturing strategies. Large quantity builders use considerably the identical strategies of building that small quantity builders do, and don’t on the whole produce buildings extra cheaply.
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-23-2022]
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Creating new financial potential – science and know-how
Chinese scientists create first mammal with totally reprogrammed genes
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 8-27-2022]
Jupiter’s auroras look radiant in new James Webb Space Telescope pictures
Stefanie Waldek [space.com, 8-22-2022]
When Webb “takes an image,” it is not truly snapping a photograph and beaming it all the way down to Earth — scientists solely obtain uncooked knowledge that signifies brightness as measured by Webb’s receptors. As such, scientists should course of that knowledge to create the pictures.
Typically that is executed by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is headquartered in Baltimore. But within the case of this pair of Jovian pictures, the info was processed by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt of Modesto, California. (For the wide-field picture, she collaborated with Ricardo Hueso, a co-investigator on the observations from the University of the Basque Country in Spain.)
Schmidt and different citizen scientists typically faucet into publicly out there knowledge from area telescopes to course of pictures — Schmidt processed her first picture, taken by Hubble, greater than 10 years in the past. “I try to get it to look natural, even if it’s not anything close to what your eye can see,” Schmidt stated in an announcement.
Researchers invent self-charging, ultra-thin system that generates electrical energy from air moisture
[ScienceDaily, via Naked Capitalism 8-24-2022]
Climate and environmental crises
Heatwave in China is probably the most extreme ever recorded on this planet
[New Scientist, via Naked Capitalism 8-25-2022]
Its largest lake is so dry, China digs deep to water crops
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 8-27-2022]
1 million sq. toes of L.A. roads are being coated with solar-reflective paint
[Fast Company, via The Big Picture 8-25-2022]
The initiative covers roads, playgrounds, and parking heaps, and it has already cooled the floor by 10 to 12 levels.
California Approves Ban on Gas-Powered Car Sales by 2035
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-2022]
Expansion of Clean Energy Loans Is ‘Sleeping Giant’ of Climate Bill
[New York Times, via The Big Picture 8-25-2022]
The invoice President Biden signed into regulation just lately will enormously develop authorities loans and mortgage ensures for clear vitality and automotive initiatives and companies.
NY Times:, through DailyKos 8-24-2022
Democrats Designed the Climate Law to Be a Game Changer. Here’s How.
Is There Enough Metal to Replace Oil?
[CounterPunch, via Naked Capitalism 8-24-2022]
Information age dystopia
“Shocker! Test Shows Physical Buttons Are Less Time-Consuming in Cars Than Touchscreens”
[Car and Driver, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-22-2022]
“Vi Bilägare tested a dozen vehicles—primarily new but also one 2005 Volvo—to see how long it took to perform a series of four tasks. It took 10 seconds in the old car and up to 45 in one of the new models. By timing the tasks as the vehicles were in motion, we can see how a simple thing like turning on the radio to a specific station can mean a driver’s eyes and focus are on the screen much more than they used to be. Future drivers may look back at the current trend of replacing swaths of simple, physical buttons with touchscreens and wonder why we let this happen.”
How One Spook-Run London College Department Is Training the World’s Social Media Managers
[Mint Press, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-2022]
How a Hacked Tractor Added Fuel to the Right-to-Repair Movement
[Wired, via The Big Picture 8-24-2022]
This week, we talk about the newest John Deere tractor hack and its broader implications for restore rights advocates.
Study: What Americans actually assume
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 8-21-2022]
Collapse of unbiased information media
Altercation: Can CNN Actually Get Worse? Apparently, It Can.
Eric Alterman, August 26, 2022 [The American Prospect]
Now, because of Malone and his group’s takeover of CNN (due partly to his large shareholdings within the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery), we will see that administration plans to push the community in Fox’s route….
An excessive amount of what drives mainstream protection is a perception within the apparently holy grail of “centrism” as a treatment to our political ills, in addition to to the mainstream media’s unpopularity. Thing is, the “center” retains shifting additional and additional away from actuality because the Republicans get crazier, extra dishonest, and conspiratorially minded. For its half, the general public has not shifted, however a place that doesn’t align with the crazies’ turns into labeled “liberal” as an alternative of merely “not insane,” and positions thought-about far-right immediately change into “centrist.” This phenomenon is the product of many components, however probably the most important of them are: (a) right-wing cable TV is much more worthwhile than its counterparts, and (b) the precise is roughly a trillion instances simpler at “working the refs” than the left is.
Only Lone Nuts Need Apply: The Media’s Antipathy to Deeper Digs
Russ Baker [via Naked Capitalism 8-27-2022]
I realized that the intelligence institution had made a cautious calculation: It didn’t want to fret about Republicans or conservatives, however ought to as an alternative give attention to controlling so-called liberal publications and middle-of-the-road media shops….
Ambitious reporters had realized to not problem main myths of the American Pantheon or to query key claims, just like the widespread assertion that no American chief — political, non secular, civil rights, and so on. — was ever assassinated by anybody apart from a lone unstable particular person. No matter that the US itself has been definitively revealed to have had a hand in assassinations and different removals of leaders of international international locations (Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Vietnam, Indonesia: typically violent removals), who most often had been changed by extra brutal regimes….
Still extra just lately, the media has compliantly shifted its gaze away from the extremely suspicious alleged suicide — in a managed anti-suicide setting — of Jeffrey Epstein, who appeared to own damaging materials concerning the world’s strongest individuals. Anyone who dares elevate the very same questions which are on the minds of many nonetheless faces ostracism or worse.
Notes From the Memory Hole: When the Establishment Buries You
Russ Baker [via Naked Capitalism 8-27-2022]
…I had began the Family of Secrets undertaking — meant to reply no extra innocuous a query than “How did such an unaccomplished, unpromising, and already problematic person as George W. Bush become president of the United States?” — with some ambivalence.
Over the years, notably in my days as an investigative reporter for The Village Voice, I had grown conversant in the idea that some subjects had been merely not appropriate for airing within the institution media. Nowhere was that extra true than with something suggesting that the deaths of transformative leaders — JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, et al — may ever contain organized plots or something greater than only a single unfastened nut with a gun….
If what you publish defies, contradicts, or embarrasses the “inside sources,” or their mates, or the institution writ massive, then you definately threat ridicule and ostracization.
In addition, an incredible many individuals subscribe to the fairy story of “American exceptionalism.” They adore the concept America mainly works nicely, aside from the occasional dangerous apple or lone nut, and that the individuals have the last word say.
I recall one e-book occasion at a house within the hills above Los Angeles, the place a well-meaning Hollywood crowd had gathered to listen to me. One man grew more and more indignant as I spoke. He virtually seemed like he would have a coronary heart assault. He started yelling at me that what I used to be saying was deeply disturbing to him and easily unacceptable. And these had been liberals.
A crude substitute for native information
[Heated, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-2022]
“As local newsrooms rapidly shut down across the country, Chevron steps in to fill the gap with propaganda.”
Democrats’ political suicide
House Leadership Delays Social Security Expansion While Crafting Tax Breaks for Rich Retirees
Lee Harris, August 24, 2022 [The American Prospect]
Nancy Pelosi’s workplace is obstructing Social Security enlargement, whereas Congress prepares to move a windfall for wealthy retirees, insurance coverage firms, and enormous asset managers like Vanguard and Fidelity.
Conservative / Libertarian Drive to Civil War
How the IRS Was Gutted
[ProPublica, via The Big Picture 8-21-2022]
An eight-year marketing campaign to slash the company’s price range has left it understaffed, hamstrung and working with archaic tools. The outcome: billions much less to fund the federal government. That’s excellent news for companies and the rich.
A Rare Peek Inside the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
Anne Nelson, August 26, 2022 [New Republic]
The Council for National Policy, a secretive community of highly effective conservatives, goes to nice lengths to hide its actions and even its members. But just lately uncovered paperwork reveal the extent of the group’s affect on American politics. For greater than 4 many years, the Council for National Policy, or CNP, has functioned because the secret hub of the unconventional proper, coordinating the actions of right-wing strategists, donors, media platforms, and activists….
The Center for Media and Democracy has printed the agenda for a latest CNP assembly, held February 22 to 24 on the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California. In addition, Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism undertaking primarily based in Washington, D.C., has obtained the membership roster and most up-to-date 990 tax filings required of nonprofit organizations. Together, the supplies shed new mild on the CNP’s position in disrupting the democratic course of. CNP archives illustrate the intensive planning its members undertook to discredit the 2020 election outcomes, undermine native election officers, and incite the protest on January 6, 2021. The House choose committee on January 6 has subpoenaed CNP election skilled Cleta Mitchell, and the panel can be inspecting 29 texts exchanged between then–White House chief of employees Mark Meadows and Supreme Court partner Ginni Thomas (a board member of the CNP’s lobbying arm) in help of Donald Trump’s makes an attempt to overturn the election. The Conservative Partnership Institute, which has attracted ample consideration for its position in election subversion, is carefully tied to the CNP, although few reporters have made the connection. The CPI’s chairman, president and CEO, senior authorized accomplice, and senior director of coverage are all distinguished members of the CNP (see beneath), and the CPI has served as a public face for CNP ways developed behind closed doorways.
How a Former Transcendental Meditation Devotee Ended Up Funding America’s Wildest Right-Wing Spy Op
[Mother Jones, via The Big Picture 8-21-2022]
The saga of Gore-Tex inheritor Susan Gore is a parable of the darkish flip the Republican Party has taken.
…Maier and LaRocca … had been undercover conservative operatives, the paper found, who had been educated at a ranch belonging to Blackwater founder Erik Prince by a former MI6 officer with ties to the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe. Maier’s mom labored for Prince. His uncle was Glenn Beck. Alongside different moles, Maier and LaRocca had been trying to gather grime on Wyoming’s Democrats—and sure Republicans—for a pair years.
While the information jolted Martin and different activists who’d as soon as welcomed Maier and LaRocca into their houses, the id of the lady who had allegedly financed a lot of the operation was much less shocking.
Susan Walton Gore, an 83-year-old scion of the Gore-Tex waterproof-fabric fortune, was each a ubiquitous and reclusive presence in her adopted house state—a prolific donor whose community of political organizations picked huge fights, however who shirked the highlight herself. For greater than a decade, Gore had embodied a well-known genus of American energy: the massive fish in a small pond who had realized simply how far a greenback can go the farther you get from Washington. An effort to dam Common Core science requirements from being applied in state colleges? Gore, a onetime backer of the Libertarian Party, led the battle. Stopping tax will increase, blocking Medicaid enlargement, and reforming the state’s asset-forfeiture legal guidelines? Gore’s assume tank, the Wyoming Liberty Group, led the way in which. The legislature’s rightward creep? Gore helped bankroll dozens of candidates….
The product that made the Gores certainly one of America’s wealthiest households was invented virtually accidentally. Wilbert L. “Bill” Gore, a chemical engineer and avid outdoorsman, left DuPont in 1958 to experiment on polymers within the Delaware house the place he and his spouse, Vieve, raised their 5 youngsters. It was a “slipshod operation,” Susan later instructed college students at Liberty University, with kitchen home equipment standing in for lab tools. Then one evening in 1969, her older brother, Bob, was tinkering when he yanked a chunk of Teflon. Instead of tearing, the substance reworked into a brand new, breathable, and waterproof materials—Gore-Tex. By 1986, W.L. Gore & Associates was doing $300 million in annual gross sales, with factories on three continents.
But within the eyes of the household, the corporate’s largest breakthrough was ideological. W.L. Gore eschewed the normal organizational pyramid for a “lattice” system. Employees, often known as “associates” regardless of their wage, owned firm inventory and operated with near-total autonomy. Instead of bosses, they’d “sponsors”—senior colleagues who acted as mentors. “We don’t manage people here,” Bill Gore stated in 1982. “People manage themselves.”
The household patriarch wasn’t merely disrupting company paperwork. What Inc.journal known as “un-management” was a complete way of life—a philosophy of deconcentrated energy and particular person duty. In one early manifesto, Bill traced the lattice system to tribal societies. He gave talks about rejecting “authoritarian hierarchy” and doubling the capability of the mind. It was doable to see within the firm’s fashion a vaguely lefty notion of employee energy, however whereas the Gores might be crunchy of their methods, the vibe was extra libertarian. Bill described himself as a “radical progressive conservative.” He was a free-enterprise evangelist and fierce critic of welfare who counted Ayn Rand as a buddy. He believed smaller was higher and that the very best decision-making existed removed from centralized energy. That prolonged to the possession of the corporate itself; in a book-length historical past of W.L. Gore, Bob emphasised his dad and mom’ perception within the significance of utilizing trusts to avoid “death taxes”—permitting the household to remain in management, free from outdoors interference.
“Inside The Right’s Historic Billion-Dollar Dark Money Transfer”
Andrew Perez, Andy Kroll & Justin Elliott, August 22, 2022 [Lever News].
“An aged, ultra-secretive Chicago businessman has given the biggest identified donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. historical past — value $1.6 billion — and the recipient is among the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, together with the Supreme Court. Through a collection of opaque transactions over the previous two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the large sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the conservative authorized group the Federalist Society. The donation was first reported by The New York Times on Monday….
‘In practical terms, there are few limitations on how Leo’s new group, the Marble Freedom Trust, can spend the big donation. The construction of the donation allowed Seid to keep away from as a lot as $400 million in taxes. Thus, he maximized the amount of cash at Leo’s disposal. Now, Leo, 56, is positioned to finance his already sprawling community with one of many largest swimming pools of political capital in American historical past.
How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts
by Andrew Perez, The Lever, and Andy Kroll and Justin Elliott, ProPublica, Aug. 22,2022
In the biggest identified political advocacy donation in U.S. historical past, industrialist Barre Seid funded a brand new group run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, who guided Trump’s Supreme Court picks and helped finish federal abortion rights.
One Man Has Set Up a $1.6 Billion Slush Fund to Fuel the Radical Right’s Takeover of Congress; Get Ready for a Dirty Tricks Campaign
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 26, 2022 [Wall Street on Parade]
So who is that this Barre Seid that the general public has by no means heard of who has the power to drop a cool $1.65 billion into the lap of the unconventional proper? It simply so occurs that our information of Barre Seid dates again to November 16, 2010 when Salon printed an article by Justin Elliott naming Seid because the probably supply of cash for a widely-distributed race-baiting movie launched simply weeks earlier than the presidential election of 2008, the place the unconventional proper hoped to defeat presidential candidate Barack Obama by pushing conspiracy theories that he wasn’t born within the U.S. and was a Muslim. (Obama’s religion is Christian and he has launched his start certificates displaying he was born in Hawaii.)
The Salon article captivated our consideration as a result of it constructed on an earlier article we had printed at CounterPunch on October 26, 2010 a few darkish cash slush fund known as Donors Capital Fund that was sluicing cash to the unconventional proper.
Pair pleads responsible to stealing Ashley Biden’s diary, promoting it to Project Veritas
[ABCNews 2-25-2022]
Two Florida residents have pleaded responsible to stealing the diary of Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, after which promoting it to right-wing activist group Project Veritas, the Justice Department introduced Thursday….
“Harris and Kurlander stole personal property from an immediate family member of a candidate for national political office,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams stated in an announcement. “They sold the property to an organization in New York for $40,000 and even returned to take more of the victim’s property when asked to do so.”
[TW: Has Seid ever helped fund Project Veritas and its pimp, James O’Keefe? ]
“We reject the free speech-trampling rules set by J.D. Vance and Ron DeSantis for covering their rally: Letter from the Editor”
[Cleveland Plain-Dealer, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-25-2022]
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate in 2024, scheduled a trip to Ohio Friday to stump for Senate candidate J.D. Vance, and our reporters were not there because of ridiculous restrictions that DeSantis and Vance placed on anyone covering the event. The worst of the rules was one prohibiting reporters from interviewing attendees not first approved by the organizers of the event for DeSantis and Vance. When we cover events, we talk to anyone we wish. It’s America, after all, the land of free speech. At least that’s America as it exists today. Maybe not the America that would exist under DeSantis and Vance. Think about what they were doing here. They were staging an event to rally people to vote for Vance while instituting the kinds of policies you’d see in a fascist regime. A wannabe U.S. Senator, and maybe a wannabe president. Another over-the-top rule was one reserving the right to receive copies of any video shot of the event for promotional use. That’s never okay. News agencies are independent of the political process. We do not provide our work product to anyone for promotional use. To do so would put us in league with people we cover, destroying our credibility.”
Louisiana board stalls New Orleans flood support over metropolis officers’ place on abortion
[Insider, via Naked Capitalism 8-22-2022]
‘Pro-Life’: America’s Most Patently Absurd Misnomer
Harold Meyerson, August 25, 2022 [The American Prospect]
A professional-lifer in motion: Last week, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s Republican legal professional basic, persuaded the state’s bond fee to withhold $39 million from the town of New Orleans. The funds had been to go for a brand new energy plant that may hold pumping ingesting water to the town’s almost 400,000 residents the subsequent time a hurricane descends in town and knocks out its at present inadequate energy sources.
The state ought to deny these funds, Landry insisted, till the mayor, metropolis council, and district legal professional rescinded their pledges to not implement the state’s new abortion regulation, which bans the process after 15 weeks and makes no exceptions for pregnancies ensuing from rape or incest.
It’s not as if abortions had been truly being carried out in New Orleans. Indeed, there are no services wherever within the state which are nonetheless performing abortions. Landry, nonetheless, plans to run for governor within the subsequent Republican main, and so zealous is he to guard harmless life that he’s prepared to show the post-birth youngsters of New Orleans to the ravages of hurricane season—slated to start later this month—the higher to guard the zygotes and fetuses being aborted there, regardless that there are none.
Landry, I’d recommend, is a reasonably truthful poster boy for the self-proclaimed pro-life motion, whose chief defining characteristic, to not put too effective some extent on it, is a raging contempt for all times….
It’s unimaginable to clarify these ostensible pro-lifers’ indifference to life after start—to offering the applications that pro-choice states supply that make the lives of newborns and their dad and mom simpler.
GRAPH States With Abortion Bans Are Among Least Supportive for Mothers and Children
[New York Times, via The Big Picture 8-21-2022]
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 8-27-2022]
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The (Anti)Federalist Society Infestation of the Courts
The Sins of the High Court’s Supreme Catholics The New Yorker, through Naked Capitalism 8-22-2022]
How Sonia Sotomayor Became the Conscience of the Supreme Court
Elie Mystal, August 22, 2002 [The Nation, via DailyKos 8-23-2022]
The former prosecutor was by no means a liberal firebrand. But now it’s she, greater than another justice, who places progressive outrage into phrases….
There is one other essential quantity that shapes the courtroom’s docket, and that’s six. With six votes, justices can deny appeals of decrease courtroom rulings which are clearly flawed, with out drawing the type of consideration that comes once they maintain hearings and concern rulings that proactively change the regulation for the more serious. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was changed by Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, conservatives gained their essential sixth vote to cease meritorious appeals from ever getting a listening to in entrance of the courtroom.
What the Supreme Court hears, and what it denies, is a hidden lever of energy for right this moment’s conservative majority. It goes largely unremarked on by institution forces, who’ve accepted the prospect of generational conservative management of the courtroom. But Justice Sotomayor was having none of it, spending her closing hours of the time period writing a collection of pointed dissents towards the courtroom’s refusal to listen to appeals of unjust rulings from the decrease courts.
It’s common for a justice to dissent from a certiorari denial right here and there, however Sotomayor dissented in 5 instances, all on the final day. In basic, the instances had been all centered on legal justice and the use—and abuse—of state energy towards suspected criminals. The courtroom refused to listen to a case wherein cops used Tasers on a person after he had doused himself with gasoline, understanding full nicely that in the event that they shocked him, he would catch on fireplace. Sotomayor dissented. The courtroom refused to listen to a case wherein a prisoner killed himself whereas correction officers watched, by no means as soon as making an attempt to intervene. Sotomayor dissented. The courtroom refused to listen to three instances involving capital punishment. Sotomayor dissented and dissented and dissented. In every dissent, she retold the defendant’s story for the general public document, possibly for the final time….
Ginsburg as soon as stated that dissents are written for a “future age”—which means that dissents are supposed to assist encourage the subsequent technology to oppose the wrongs dedicated by the current courtroom. But I consider Sotomayor’s flurry of end-of-term dissents suggests she doesn’t need to wait that lengthy. The fireplace set by conservatives is raging proper now, and Sotomayor’s opinions learn just like the ringing of an alarm bell. Her dissents serve to place the opposite branches of presidency on discover that the courtroom is uncontrolled….
Sotomayor has but to obtain the mainstream media consideration and “icon” standing of the justice she’s most frequently in comparison with: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That’s even if Sotomayor writes in an approachable fashion, has appeared at many public-facing occasions, and, in some ways, is extra progressive in her opinions than Ginsburg was.