(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 29, 2023 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-30 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 29, 2023 by Tony Wikrent Is There a New Left Stirring Within The New Right? John Judis [The Liberal Patriot, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-24-2023] “[T]here is a segment of recent politics that is sometimes identified with the ‘new right’ but in reality offers a much more heterodox—and interesting—approach to politics and policy, one that’s well worth considering by liberals and left-wingers alike. This new tendency can be found in the policy group, American Compass, the online magazine Compact, and the journal American Affairs. Its leading intellectuals are Oren Cass of American Compass, Julius Krein of American Affairs, Sohrab Ahmari of Compact, and author Michael Lind. What distinguishes these thinkers from others is their engagement with what used to be called ‘the labor question’ namely, how America can fulfill its original promise of political and economic equality in a society where the owners and managers of capital have inordinate power over labor and politics. These thinkers consider questions that were once confined to the left: how to revive the American labor movement and now to tame the power of multinational corporations and global banks. They often cite left-wing and liberal writers like John Kenneth Galbraith and Karl Polanyi. The most recent and noteworthy examples are Lind’s Hell to Pay, Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc., and Oren Cass and American Compass’s Rebuilding American Capitalism.” 33 States Sue Meta and Instagram Over Harms to Teen Mental Health October 24, 2023 [Mother Jones] On Tuesday, 33 states filed a 233-page complaint against Meta and Instagram. The bipartisan lawsuit, in federal district court in California, alleges that Meta knew more about the mental health impacts of Instagram on teenagers—including addiction—than it had publicly acknowledged. According to the complaint, Meta—which owns Instagram, Facebook, and now Threads—”created a business model focused on maximizing young users’ time and attention.” Meta “has ignored the sweeping damage these Platforms have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth,” the complaint reads. “In doing so, Meta engaged in, and continues to engage in, deceptive and unlawful conduct in violation of state and federal law.” Behind the Curtain: Rattled U.S. government fears wars could spread [Axios, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2023] “Not one of the crises can be solved and checked off. All five could spiral into something much bigger.” Not a good time for a collapse of executive function in our governing class. “American leadership is what holds the world together.” Joe Biden October 2023 … just let that sink in. Adam Tooze [Substack, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2023] ...This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circles. As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece…. For the most part, to make sense of the sort of thing that Biden and Blinken say, you have to realize that they are talking not to the world or about the world, but to Americans about America. Above all, Biden and Blinken’s rhetoric is directed against Trump, who conjured up a scenario in which America was, as Biden and Blinken see it, a chaotic, disruptive and untrustworthy force. This shames their self-understanding as a liberal elite. With a tight election in 2024 those fears will overshadow all America’s interactions with the world, whoever actually sits in the Oval Office. American democracy, the system that produces the leadership that Biden and Blinken so self-confidently evoke, is clearly broken. Pervasive and well-merited skepticism about America’s system of government, is now a massive reality in world affairs. GRAPH: Most people in other countries believe the U.S. is no longer a good model for democracy ….intelligent, seemingly well-meaning and worldly Americans set about, in a highly organized way to sabotages the effort of most of the rest of the world to organize itself…. these are largely non-negotiable positions on the American side. They are unacceptable to the vast majority of the rest of the world. Given America’s entrenched power, all its negotiators need to do is to spell out their terms. This provokes indignation, a breakdown in trust, deadlock and thus the perpetuation of a disorganized status quo…. In this role, America becomes a force that does not hold the world together but blows it apart. War Iyad el-Baghdadi: Analysis of Middle East Options in Wake of Hamas Attack Thomas Neuburger, October 27, 2023 A must-read piece on the wants, fears, and calculations of each of the actors in the unfolding Gaza tragedy…. 16. If this is a coordinated broad plan, and if the Hamas attack planned on an Israeli ground invasion, then it would make sense for Hezbollah to wait until Israel is bogged in Gaza before they open a major new front to Israel's north…. 19. The Oct 7 attacks are a huge repudiation of much of Netanyahu's career. It's almost like everything he built for decades crashed in a matter of hours. Netanyahu presented himself as a master statesman who can do the impossible for Israel[.] 20. His project was to liquidate Palestinian national project: - Normalize with Arab regimes to break the "land for peace" paradigm - Strengthen Hamas to weaken the PA - Annex the West Bank to make 2SS [two-state solution] impossible - Treat Palestinians as a security problem to be managed indefinitely…. 22. It was also under Netanyahu that Israel expanded its disinfo capacities and leaned hard into relying upon cyber capabilities and high-tech occupation. Also a reminder, Netanyahu is one of the first pioneers of the "war on terror" paradigm, more here[:] 23. So after Oct 7 Bibi had one of two options - (1) resign & admit that this is the result of a series of failures most of which lead back to him; or (2) go all out and try to accomplish a "victory" his allies always wanted but couldn't do. Ethnically cleanse 2 million Palestinians…. 25. Netanyahu even seems willing to sacrifice the hostages for that. He's not even meeting with hostage families, and pro-Netanyahu mobs are calling hostage families "traitors" for calling for a cease fire to allow for hostage negotiations before a ground invasion[.]…. 27. (Btw, Israel will come out of this a much more polarized and right-wing country.... 33. Reminder that a significant part of the modern Egyptian national identity was forged in conflict with Israel. The current Egyptian regime itself was founded by army officers who overthrew the previous regime (the monarchy) after blaming it for the 1948 defeat vs Israel[.] 34. So not Sisi nor anyone else who wants to stay in power in Egypt would allow Gaza population transfer into Egypt. I am not exaggerating when I say that Egypt would sooner break the Camp David accords or even start covertly supply Hamas with weapons than accept such an outcome[.]… 36. Jordan too would *never* allow it. In Jordan the fear is that if population transfer happens in Gaza then the West Bank is next…. 53. Iran's network is built over decades and based on long-term relationships. The regime *really* stands by its allies (look at Bashar in Syria). They don't waffle like others. To allow one of its allies to be destroyed while it stands by will really damage its network. 54. A similar calculus applies to Hezbollah. If Hamas is gone, and Israel no longer has a military threat to its south, then it can then focus all of its efforts on the enemy to the north. Hezbollah cannot allow Hamas to fall because it'll be next…. 63. China sent navy assets to the region. It's extremely sensitive to oil shocks and its main interest in preventing escalation is to ensure the oil flows. It's also a friend of Iran, perhaps it'll want to make sure shipments headed to itself can still pass. China stationed up to 6 warships in Middle East over the past week: reports…. 71. And even if [Netanyahu] actually wins, all he'd have done is relocated Palestinian militancy from a besieged and blockaded Gaza to a slightly further but much deeper (and suddenly much less stable) Egypt[.]…. We’re Seeing the Calamitous Cost of Ignoring Palestine Yousef Munayyer, October 25, 2023 [The New Republic] ...While this might be the worst-case scenario for Palestinians in Gaza, it isn’t the bottom of the abyss. Beyond Gaza the region is boiling. Protests erupted across the Arab and Muslim world and well beyond it at a scale and scope we have not seen in the region since the Arab Spring. Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s Egypt, which has banned protests for years, is now calling for them because they know they can’t contain the people’s anger or be seen as trying to. Jordan, a key American ally, had to cancel a meeting with President Biden while he was on his way to the region because they couldn’t contain the public outrage. All this and I haven’t even mentioned Hezbollah yet, or other militias in the region who may well get involved if the Israeli ground incursion starts and churns on even as American aircraft carriers sit in the Mediterranean. However this crisis ends, and I pray it ends immediately, the implications for U.S. foreign policy will be profound. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost.… Forget about rules, forget about world order,” said a G7 diplomat to the Financial Times. “They won’t ever listen to us again.” Ukraine has been the single biggest foreign policy and military investment of the Biden administration’s tenure. Russia and China are likely watching with glee. And, of course, there is the very real possibility of a much larger regional or even global war. The moment we find ourselves in now is being described as the most dangerous for America in 78 years. How the hell did we get here? How the hell did we allow this to happen?…. Here is a big part of the answer: A week before October 7, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the region was quieter than it has been in years and that “the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced.” This is no isolated remark but rather a characterization of the Biden administration approach that, for reasons beyond my comprehension, seems to be manned by devotees of the Jared Kushner School of Foreign Policy. They have subscribed to this idea that Palestine is no longer a central issue in the Middle East and is instead one that can effectively be downplayed or entirely ignored as they pursue other objectives in the region…. Let my people in. Why Gazans are not welcome in Arab world [Insider, via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2023] Israeli think tank lays out a blueprint for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza [Mondoweiss, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2023] After this article was originally published, the Israeli outlet Calcalist reported on a separate plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza that is being circulated by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry headed by Gila Gamliel. The leaked document was reportedly created for an organization called “The Unit for Settlement – Gaza Strip” and was not meant for the public. In the plan being proposed by the Intelligence Ministry, Palestinians in Gaza would be displaced from Gaza to the northern Egyptian Sinai peninsula. In the report, the ministry described different options for what comes after an invasion of Gaza and the option deemed as “liable to provide positive and long-lasting strategic results” was the transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai. The move entails three steps: the creation of tent cities southwest of the Gaza Strip; the construction of a humanitarian corridor to “assist the residents”; and finally, the building of cities in northern Sinai. In parallel, a “sterile zone”, several kilometers wide, would be established within Egypt, south of the Israeli border, “so that the evacuated residents would not be able to return”…. On October 17, the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy published a position paper advocating for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.” The report advocates exploiting the current moment to accomplish a long-held Zionist goal of moving Palestinians off the land of historic Palestine. The report’s subtitle makes it clear: “There is at the moment a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in coordination with the Egyptian government.” …. It appears that this ethnic-cleansing plan is based on a similar logic to that of the “Abraham Accords,” involving the infusion of massive sums towards despotic regimes to write off the Palestinian issue. But this time, it is not just about slow annexation and bantustanization through “economic peace” — but advocating for the complete population transfer of Palestinians from Gaza.... Exterminate All the Brutes Chris Hedges, October 28, 2023 On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden. Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist. Let Them Eat Cement Chris Hedges, October 23, 2023 Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran. The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to "militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region." Egypt’s difficult questions in the Gaza war [Mada Masr, October 11, 2023] Following this, Egyptian and Arab media outlets reported statements from anonymous Egyptian “sovereign” and “security” sources, which is unusual, especially for a tightly state-controlled press landscape in Egypt that rarely deviates from official statements. Yesterday, Al Qahera News quoted “high-level Egyptian sources” warning of attempts to push Palestinians in Gaza toward the Egyptian borders and stating that “Egyptian sovereignty is “inviolable” and that “the Occupation authority,” not Egypt, “is responsible for creating humanitarian corridors to save the people of Gaza.” Anonymous Egyptian security sources also told Sky News Arabia on Tuesday that “there is a plan to decimate Palestinian lands and force Palestinians to choose between death and displacement,” and that Egypt will confront “Israeli efforts to settle Gaza residents in Sinai.” This seemed to convey a specific message: that Cairo rejects the mass displacement of Palestinian Gaza residents to Sinai. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi emphasized this point in a Tuesday address that there would be “no compromise or negligence of Egypt’s national security under any circumstances.” [TW: No one but the Palestinians want an independent Palestinian state, but I believe that establishing such a state is the precondition to achieving durable peace in the Middle East. So, enough rewards need to be offered to change everyone’s calculations. How much of a dream is it to think of the UN assembling a $1 trillion fund? Financed in part by an international tax on offshore financial centers. And how about an international tax on all arms sales? [The big change needed is to get Egypt to accept Palestinians, So, $200 billion to Egypt to purchase about a tenth of the Sinai for the creation of a Palestinian state. [$100 billion to repair war damage in Gaza. $100 billion to Israel to repair war damages and accept the process of creating a Palestinian state. $500 billion loan guarantees & outright grants to industrialize Sinai and the new Palestinian state, including solar panel manufacturing; pipe and valve manufacturing for water and irrigation projects; pumps, gaskets, and filters manufacturing for desalination projects; and manufacturing of electrical switches, cabling, and other components needed to build these projects. The goal must be to give Palestinians and Egyptians real hope for a future of steady employment and real nation building. [And, finally, $100 billion for underground high speed rail lines connecting Palestinian Sinai with Jerusalem and the West Bank, with full Israeli supervision of security. [Such a policy would necessarily force to the fore the issues of money and credit creation: ] Finding the Money: Winning Awards and Coming to a Theatre Near You Stephanie Kelton, October 26, 2023 [The Lens, via Mike Norman Economics [And make clear the the financial and monetary systems need fundamental reforms to actually serve the needs of humanity and society.] How the Palestinian Authority Failed Its People Ghaith al-Omari, October 19, 2023 [The Atlantic] ...Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian people have been presented with two competing, irreconcilable visions of their future. One, posited by the Palestine Liberation Organization—a secular, though by no means democratic, group and the parent of the Palestinian Authority—envisioned a diplomatic process leading to a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. The other, promoted by Hamas, a designated terrorist group and a member of the larger Muslim Brotherhood network, called for the establishment of a Palestinian state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean—in other words, the destruction of Israel—to be achieved through violence. … The PA was not solely responsible for the devolution of the peace process. Yes, it made mistakes, including failing to take matters of security seriously during the 1990s, which eroded trust among Israelis. Israel, for its part, continued expanding its settlements, which fueled Palestinian suspicion. Each side at different times adopted maximalist, inflexible negotiating positions, and the United States was unwilling to take the parties to task. Hamas, meanwhile, used terror to derail diplomacy: In a grisly pattern that dominated much of the 1990s, every advance in negotiations was followed by a spate of Hamas terror attacks against Israeli civilians.… National self-determination is a vicious idea Steve Randy Waldman [Interfluidity, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2023] U.S. QUIETLY EXPANDS SECRET MILITARY BASE IN ISRAEL Ken Klippenstein, Daniel Boguslaw, October 27 2023 [The Intercept] Government documents pointing to construction at a classified U.S. base offer rare hints about a little noted U.S. military presence near Gaza. 4 things that European states could do today to stop the genocide in Palestine. Let’s act. [X-Twitter, via Defend Democracy] x 4 things that European states could do today to stop the genocide in Palestine. Let's act. pic.twitter.com/OucPuYHbZR — Ione Belarra (@ionebelarra) October 25, 2023 . War China will have over 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, exceeding US predictions, Pentagon report on PLA expansion says [South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2023] Trump’s Plan to Destroy NATO Would Spark Untold Chaos Ryan Cooper, October 25, 2023 [The American Prospect] So if Trump yanks the NATO rug out from under the EU, European nations will have no choice but to carry out a full-scale rearmament program, with massive production of tanks, ships, planes, artillery, rockets, and so on. Without the security blanket of American protection, German dithering over the Bundeswehr will end. Poland is likely to go for a nuclear weapons program; it has already suggested hosting U.S. nukes. Theoretically, France or the U.K. could provide a nuclear guarantee, but having been burned once, Poles may conclude that it is best to have a domestic arsenal. And they might not be the only ones…. Restoring balance to the economy What The UAW Strike Looks Like, From Deep in the Heart Of Anti-Union Texas [Texas Observer, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2023] ...Workers along the picket lines in Arlington described years of pent-up frustration with how the company has treated them. The high-quality union jobs once associated with the auto industry—the ones with high wages and full pensions—have become scarce, replaced by long-term temp jobs with low pay and few benefits and protections. “With past strikes, there’s always been a sentiment of, ‘Oh, they’ll work it out.’ This time I don’t feel that at all,” a longtime Local 276 autoworker, who declined to give his name because of fears of retaliation by GM, told the Observer. “I think everyone is ready to dig their heels in and say, ‘We’re done.’ So if you want to go to the mattresses, everyone is ready to do it.”…. As New Deal reforms allowed labor unions to spread in the late 1930s, union membership in the state exploded. Vance Muse, a virulent white supremacist and New Deal reactionary from Houston, saw this as a political and social threat to Southern segregation. In the 1940s, he began pushing anti-union legislation that prohibits mandatory membership in a unionized workplace, which came to be known as “right-to-work.” Texas was among the first states to pass right-to-work in 1947. The GM plant in Arlington opened seven years later, in 1954, and was unionized as part of the UAW’s national contract with the company. It has stood as a rare unionized Southern auto plant ever since, forming the backbone of an embattled labor movement in North Texas. These days, GM’s Arlington factory—which assembles the very popular, very profitable Chevrolet Suburban, GMC Yukon, and Cadillac Escalade 24 hours a day, with three shifts and mandatory six-day workweeks—has turned into a cash cow. In 2017, the Local 276 president at the time said a GM executive had told him that the plant was the “most profitable manufacturing facility in the world.”…. Since 2016, the company has pulled down a record $35 billion in North American profits. In 2018, GM CEO Mary Barra made just under $22 million—281 times more than the median company worker. Meanwhile, the company has laid off thousands of workers and shuttered several plants while also spending around $10 billion on stock buybacks, which jack up share prices, rewarding investors and senior executives. The union’s recession-era concessions opened a Pandora’s box that workers believe GM has no intention of closing. The hope is that the strike can force GM’s hand and cut workers in on the soaring profits…. Meanwhile, the plant’s growth is fueled by precisely the sort of labor-squeezing model that UAW wants to end. GM has leaned heavily on “temporary” workers to fill out the round-the-clock production shifts. There are currently about 800 temps working in the Arlington plant, comprising at least 15 percent of the total labor force. That’s roughly double the share at the average GM plant. Temps start at $15.78 an hour—half of what a veteran assembly worker makes—and have little in the way of benefits and zero job security. The hope is that GM will eventually hire them on permanently, but that rarely happens. Increasingly, the new generation of American autoworkers are what is known as the “permatemp.” California’s Labor Victories Could Be Contagious [The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-24-2023] “Last week, labor scored its latest victory in a long run of success stories in 2023. In the face of a three-day strike by nurses, ER technicians, and pharmacists earlier in the month, and the prospect of additional strike action in November by the coalition of unions representing 85,000 workers unless an agreement was reached, Kaiser Permanente agreed to a minimum wage of $25 per hour for California employees—90 percent of its employees are based in the Golden State—and $23 for employees elsewhere in the country. The healthcare giant also accepted a 21 percent pay increase for workers over four years, and the hiring of more staff to address chronic labor shortages. The deal was finalized in a meeting in San Francisco that ended in the middle of the night, presided over by acting Labor Secretary Julie Su. It had the backing of President Biden and Vice President Harris, both of whom made strong statements in favor of collective bargaining and the right to organize. More healthcare workers went out on strike during the three-day action than had ever before walked off the job in the United States in a single action. It was, quite rightly, seen as a historic moment, in which organized labor asserted its power within the healthcare system more than it has ever previously managed to do.” The UAW’s Amazing Win Robert Kuttner, October 27, 2023 [The American Prospect] The UAW’s stunning victory with Ford, which will soon translate into similar terms as the other two large automakers settle, is not only a win for the union's audacious new leader Shawn Fain. It’s a win for union democracy…. None of this would have been possible had not the previous corruption at the UAW led to a consent decree with the federal government in 2022 that provided, for the first time, that the union president be elected directly by the membership. It was this victory for union democracy that allowed rank-and-file reform caucus called United All Workers to elect a slate of officers led by the militant Fain Solar Could Become a Model for Sectoral Bargaining Lee Harris, October 27, 2023 [The American Prospect] A new deal between the electricians, laborers, and operating engineers aims to set national standards for solar work. How the Yale Unions Took Over New Haven E. Tammy Kim, October 23, 2023 [The New Yorker] Yale University, with an endowment of forty billion dollars, is the largest landowner in New Haven, Connecticut, where one in four residents live at or below the federal poverty level. The juxtaposition is unmissable: the city is, as the labor leader and former resident Gwen Mills describes it, a “post-industrial manufacturing town with a multibillion-dollar education corporation plopped right into the middle of it.” And, because of its status as a nonprofit, Yale isn’t even required to pay taxes on all that property it owns. It would seem like a perfect setup for the kinds of intractable town-grown conflicts that roil many similar American cities. But, as E. Tammy Kim reports in a compelling new story, the situation in New Haven has been playing out differently, owing in large part to the unusual political success of Yale’s organized workers. For more than a decade, New Haven’s city council has been dominated by Local 35 and 34 of the large North American union UNITE HERE, which represent Yale’s mechanics, janitors, dining-hall workers, receptionists, librarians, and lab researchers. The council has been credited with pressuring Yale to give more back to the community, including making higher voluntary payments in lieu of taxes. Meanwhile, the union has been growing, and, this past year, achieved a major breakthrough when graduate-student teachers won their own union, Local 33. This expansion has strengthened the power of labor at Yale, but it brings new challenges as well. As Kim asks, “Could the Yale unions find enough common ground between graduate students and custodians and billing clerks to keep the experiment going?” Thank You, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for Flagging Biden Labor Policies You Hate Timothy Noah, October 26, 2023 [The New Republic] The organization’s whining makes it clear: Biden’s labor record is better than you (or anyway, I) knew. At a moment when Democrats and Republicans vie for the working-class vote, a new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce denouncing the Biden administration’s “whole of government” support for labor unions is admirably clarifying.… There was a time when the Chamber accepted labor unions as a fact of life. “Labor unions are woven into our economic pattern of American life, and collective bargaining is part of the democratic process,” Chamber of Commerce President Eric Johnson said at a labor-management summit called by President Harry Truman in 1945. “I say [let’s] recognize this fact not only with our lips but with our hearts.”…. That did not remain the Chamber’s position. “Unions are not the answer to increasing prosperity for American workers or the economy,” it said in a 2008 paper. Since then, the Chamber has softened its rhetoric, in keeping with the conservative trend of rephrasing unpopular positions in the language of pluralism. Now the Chamber says workers should be given the right to choose whether to organize—while it lobbies furiously to rig the game against workers choosing unionization. Health care crisis How to get the new COVID vaccine for free, with or without insurance [CBS, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-27-2023] “Federal health authorities are urging Americans to reach out to their insurers after reports of some people encountering trouble getting their new COVID-19 vaccine shot for free. Those issues have arisen despite programs and requirements designed to make the shots available at no out-of-pocket cost for all Americans. The hurdles are new to this year’s commercial rollout of COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer [but not, apparently, Novavax], which are now listed for more than $100 on the private market. Earlier during the pandemic, vaccines and boosters had all been paid for by the federal government.” A hundred bucks is cheap for a heart attack, so its hard to account for the uptake issues on that basis. More: “‘There have been a number of glitches with billing codes [and] shipping of vaccines,’ Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, said on ‘CBS Mornings’ Tuesday. Officials say this year’s hiccups in coverage of the shots should be temporary, as insurers and vaccinators work to iron out issues in the systems that handle billing for the shots.” [X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-27-2023] x RED FLAG: if your family member gets a pressure ulcer in a hospital and the FIRST time it appears in the reports you get it is labeled a "reassessment," that's a red flag that the hospital is already in the process of altering records to falsely say it was diagnosed at admission. — Olive Siffleur (@OliveSiffleur) October 27, 2023 . The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics Americans Have Never Been Wealthier & No One is Happy Ben Carlson, October 22, 2023 [awealthofcommonsense, via The Big Picture 10-25-2023] And while net worth grew 37%, total household debt grew less than 4% from 2019-2022. Sign me up for that every three years, please. This is what the change in net worth looks like every three years going back to 1989 Car Owners Fall Behind on Payments at Highest Rate on Record [Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 10-23-2023] How a Fertilizer Shortage Is Spreading Desperate Hunger [New York Times, via The Big Picture 10-22-2023] Across Africa and in parts of Asia, disruption to the supply chain for fertilizer is raising food prices and increasing malnutrition. Lies My Corporation Told Me David Dayen, October 27, 2023 [The American Prospect] A new book lays out 150 years of corporate stooges making bogus arguments. Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America By Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh & Donald Cohen New Press Black-Owned Land Is Under Siege in the Brazos Valley [Texas Monthly, via The Big Picture 10-22-2023] Acre by acre, families have lost long-held property near Bryan and College Station—much of it to the efforts of two men who weaponized arcane documents to acquire plots potentially worth millions. The horrifying, nearly forgotten history behind Killers of the Flower Moon [Vox, via The Big Picture 10-22-2023] A century later, we still don’t know the full, stomach-churning extent of the Osage murders. High steaks society: who are the 12% of people consuming half of all beef in the US? [The Guardian, via The Big Picture 10-24-2023] [TW: the study failed to ask the most important question: what income groups are responsible. I doubt the half of households with less than $36,000 in income consume much beef.] Why America Is Out of Ammunition Matt Stoller [Big, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2023] ...One of the more important side stories to the recent wars in Ukraine and Israel, and competition with China over Taiwan, is that the U.S. defense industrial base, composed of 200k plus corporations, is being forced to actually build weapons again. Defense is big business, and since the end of the Cold War, the government has allowed Wall Street to determine who owns, builds, and profits from defense spending. The consequences, as with much of our economic machinery, are predictable. Higher prices, worse quality, lower output. Wall Street and private equity firms prioritize cash out first, and that means a once functioning and nimble industrial base now produces more grift than anything else. As Lucas Kunce and I wrote for the American Conservative in 2019, the U.S. simply can’t build or get the equipment it needs. There are at this point a bevy of interesting reports coming out of the Pentagon. The last one I wrote up earlier this year showed that unlike the mid-20th century defense-industrial base, today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments. And now, with a dramatic upsurge in need for everything from missiles to artillery shells to bullets, we’re starting to see cracks in the vaunted U.S. military. The signs are unmistakable. In Ukraine, fighters are rationing shells. Taiwan can’t get weapons it ordered years ago. The Pentagon has put together a secret team to scour stockpiles to find high-precision armaments in demand on every battlefield and potential battlefield. But the problem goes beyond national defense. In Lake City, Missouri, the largest small arms ammunition plant in the world has decided all ammo production is going to the military, meaning that there is going to be a domestic shortage for hunters, sportsmen, and maybe even police. This shortage may look like a story of a sudden surge in demand, but it’s actually, as Elle Ekman wrote in the Prospect in 2021, a story of consolidation and de-industrialization. Surges due to wars aren’t new, and there’s always some time lag between the build-up and the delivery. But today, the lengths of time are weirdly long. For instance, the Army is awarding contracts to RTX and Lockheed Martin to build new Stinger missiles, which makes sense. But the process will take.. five years. Why? What is new is Wall Street’s role in weaponry. We used to have slack, and productive capacity, but then came private equity and mergers. And now we don’t. The government can’t actually solicit bids from multiple players for most major weapons systems, because there’s just one or two possible bidders. So that means there’s little incentive for firms to expand output, even if there’s more spending…. Bidenomics and the Left [nonsite.org, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2023] The go-to crises of the socialist left have been “American declinism” and “inter-imperial rivalry.” These crises have not only been predicted by the left but often wished for, the left seeing them as doing much of the heavy lifting it cannot do on its own. This is both bad analysis and worse politics. It overstates declinism, wrongly projects the (very real) tensions between the U.S. and China into a contest over who will lead global capitalism, and assumes that things getting worse inherently advances progressive politics. The U.S. is not—apart from China—facing any definitive decline relative to its main economic competitors. Nor is it facing a profit squeeze; corporate profits have been running at their highest ever share of GDP (see chart below), and non-financial profits per unit of real output were 74% higher in 2022 than in 2006 (i.e., before the 2008-9 Financial Crisis). As for the relationship with China, economic competition has indeed intensified, but the mutual dependence of the U.S. and China block the kind of rivalry that shaped left thinking a century ago. The challenge—for both countries—is how to manage the militarization of technology without undermining the broader free trade and capital flows that characterize the present global order each are so dependent on. America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy Noah Smith [Noahpinion, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2023] “[T]he U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money.” Not to mention the corporations the NGOs and consultants bring in! [Big Issue , via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2023] [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/30/2201088/-Week-end-Wrap-Political-Economy-October-29-2023?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/