Tuesday, February 1, 2021
Dear Naked Capitalism Reader,
Presenting The Best of Naked Capitalism: February 2022. From well over 90 posts and over 50 Links & Water Coolers we've compiled our favorites for this month. Below you'll find Posts, Links and Comments from you, our readers -- boldfaced names -- plus Antidotes.... And away we go!
| |  01/03/22 Post, by Lambert Strether, Yes, Maggie, There Is Such a Thing as 'Society'. "'The average American lives to 79 and spends 70 of those 79 years inside buildings.' And unless we are Ted Kaczynski, in solitary confinement, living on the street, or Simeon Stylites — all surely edge cases — we spend our time indoors with others, sharing air. In other words, breathing is a social relation[2]. We have the most material social relationship possible — sharing air — between two individuals, and they do not have to be family. Ergo, Maggie Thatcher is wrong."
ChrisRUEcn comments: "I've seen this replayed many times, and it still does not absolve her or explain away her apathy. In fact it makes it worse. To wit: 'And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.' Sound familiar?! ... Why on earth should anyone elect people to that kind of power only for those elected to stand from their perches and proclaim pusillanimously, 'Oh no, it is not we, the powerful who can change your lives for the better … nay, it is you! You, the powerless have the power!' Sorry. Hard sell."
01/03/22 Post, by Yves Smith, Life Insurer: Deaths Among Working Age Americans Up 40% Under Covid."Now you might say, but isn't this out of line with excess death estimates? Yes, but an insurer is in much better position to have granular information about deaths, and Davison says his company's experience is shared across the industry. Second, it's often forgotten that some of the changes during Covid would have reduced deaths. For instance, in the first Covid wave, in early 2020, Alabama locked down in anticipation of an infection spike that turned out to be mild compared to the likes of New York and California. Alabama had negative excess deaths due to the reduction in driving and therefore road accidents."
Joe Well comments: "Just imagining a few hypothetical scenarios of how COVID could increase deaths not from COVID: 1. Bob has a mild case of COVID which nonetheless causes a persistent arrhythmia. Three months after recovering he has a heart attack and dies. 2. Alice gets lung scarring from a mild case of COVID which aggravates her COPD, which sets off a domino effect of health problems until she too dies of a heart attack. 3. David develops depression and brain fog from asymptomatic COVID which he doesn't believe is real and so doesn't recognize. He does not seek any mental healthcare because on top of denial and stigma there is less outreach going on by doctors. A year later, he dies in a car accident after driving recklessly. And then there is all the delayed healthcare during the pandemic. And the depression from lockdowns and seeing people you know suffer and die."
01/04/22 Water Cooler, by Lambert Strether, The Left's Middle-Class Problem. "Not only does Bascuñán seem unaware that cash-strapped police departments are often more lethal than better funded ones, and that several of the whitest (and poorest) states in the country experience some of the highest rates of police killings — he fails to ask whether the call to defund the police is even supported by the working-class black and brown people activists claim it would benefit the most. The available evidence suggests this is not the case. … This is not to suggest that proponents of defunding the police do not have legitimate and serious criticisms of policing — they do. And we certainly aren't claiming that all workers are necessarily leftwing. But a new study provides data to support Class Unity's belief that the best way to appeal to working-class people of all backgrounds is to focus on bread-and-butter economic issues"
Stanley Dundee comments: "This is a valuable contribution to enquiry on class in the USA, while also supplying a critique of DSA as currently constituted. Well worth reading if those are topics of interest for you. I particularly value the notion of an iron triangle of media, academia, and NGOs [emphasis in original]: 'The purported distinction between fake liberal identity politics and authentic socialist intersectionality is a fiction, but it is a fiction that persists because it is rooted in a specific political-economic formation. The US left's population is not only skewed significantly to the middle class, its leadership stratum is skewed to a specific subset ofthe middle class. The actually existing US left, particularly in major cities, is almost exclusively based in the educated liberal middle classes, and is completely interpenetrated at the leadership level by the Iron Triangle of academia, media, and NGOs. It therefore not only lacks an independent political base capable of upholding genuinely socialist politics, but is in fact subordinated to capital via these institutions.' Useful structural analysis, mostly avoids painful jargon. Compare to tinkzorg and Scipio Sattler. "
01/05/22 Post, by Lynn Parramore (Institute for New Economic Thinking), Is the Doom of Humanity Really Inevitable? Maybe Not.. " But Graeber and Wengrow make a strong case that none of this is actually supported by the evidence. They highlight how in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, for example, there was never any 'switch' from Paleolithic forager to Neolithic farmer. The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production actually took place over 3,000 years – hardly a revolutionary timeframe. And while the authors acknowledge that agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after farming got going. In the centuries before, people were effectively trying farming out, switching between modes of production, hunting a bit here, growing a bit there. Changing things up as new conditions emerged. Concentrations of wealth sometimes occurred, but other times they didn't. What looked like a static picture of the past starts to shift into a colorful kaleidoscope."
Roland comments: "As for our species' prospects, I take extinction as a given. What species is forever? The question is whether we can last long enough to get a decent rock stratum. 'Anthropocene' is still a vanity on our part. So far, from a paleontological perspective, the only lasting artefact of our existence will not be any remains of our own, but rather the abrupt disappearance of many other life forms from the fossil record. My own pet theory is that all mass extinctions are the result of sapient outbreaks. A sapient species can waste a whole biosphere within a period of time that is geologically insignificant. The sapient destroyers may not even leave detectible traces of themselves, leaving the future to ponder the cause of the sudden wipeout. They'll be prone to blame some errant meteor. As for this Western Civilization, the signs of 'breakdown,' using the word in Toynbee's sense, are too plain to deny. But remember that most civilizations spend most of their history 'in the rhythym of disintegration' (again in Toynbee's sense). The typical lived experience of a civilization is one spent during what historians would call its stagnation and decline. But, subjectively, is that necessarily a bad life?"
01/07/22 Links, by Lambert Strether (USA Today), 'A dagger at the throat of American democracy': Why Joe Biden's intense Jan. 6 speech was stunning TV. "In a remarkable speech on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, President Joe Biden laid the blame for the insurrection clearly and emphatically at the feet of Donald Trump. He never mentioned Trump by name, but it could not have been more clear whom Biden was talking about — or what he was saying. His rhetoric was heated, fiery even. Trump and his supporters put 'a dagger at the throat of American democracy.' Along with descriptions like, 'Wow,' some might add, 'Finally.' ... Indeed, this was a speech unlike any Biden has given, and it seemed to mark a change in his approach to Trump and his continuing lies."
Watt4Bob comments: "How can we be talking as if this is the first attack on 'Our Democracy' considering; 2000 election 1.The man-in-the-middle election tabulation system* engineered by Karl Rove and the republicans that exported Ohio's voting machine totals to a Republican owned system in another state, which then exported the results back to the Ohio Secretary of State's office? 2. The Brook's Bros. riot in Florida 3. The SCOTUS handing the victory to Bush because 'We say so.' And last, but not least; 4. Gore shirking his duty to defend and uphold the Constitution, by refusing to challenge the fix. Fast forward to the 2016 election and the DNC cheating us out of our favorite in conniving to stop Bernie. And every election in between being similarly flawed by forcing us to choose between the lesser of two evils."
01/11/22 Links, by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, Walk on: why 2022 should be the year of the pedestrian. "Around the world, city-dwellers seem to be coming to the same conclusion: we could do with a lot more space – and fewer cars. Cities are being radically redesigned to put cyclists and pedestrians first, and at the same time, the pandemic has allowed mayors to accelerate large urbanism projects. As some of the most ambitious plans begin to take shape, 2022 could mark a significant turning point. For example, in Paris, a ban on most vehicles from its four central arrondissements will come into effect next year. With the exceptions of residents and deliveries, cars will no longer be allowed to drive through a massive chunk of the city – around 5.59 square kilometres."
Adam Eran comments: "Then there's the social disenfranchisement of the very old and very young who can't drive, persuading them they are powerless to navigate shopping, work and school without mom driving them there. Our elders can't age in place–something that's their strong preference–they must go to the nice warehouse…er, I mean Retirement Home, where their remaining assets are depleted. And don't forget the health effects. Even as little as a 10 minute daily walk makes for fewer late-life health problems. The U.S. currently suffers from an epidemic of obesity, heart attacks, strokes and diabetes. Sprawl design builds the exercise out of daily life."
01/12/22 Post, by Yves Smith, More Covid Delusion: Thermography for Health Endangers Patient Health via Eschewing Masks in Favor of Ozone. "I can't recall a single instance of our savvy readers, many of whom have been hard on the prowl for non-pharmaceutical interventions to increase their odds of not contracting Covid, ever mentioning ozone as a Covid protection. That is presumably because, if the thought had occurred to them, they discovered with minimal effort on search engines that it is a non-starter. The use case for ozone with Covid is to bomb a sealed area that has Covid-contaminated air in it, say a room used by a Covid-positive patient after he has been discharged. The reason that hospitals and nursing homes don't use ozone machines to try to zap circulating Covid is that the concentration of ozone needed to kill Covid is harmful to other living things. Running an ozone machine at a level humans can live with and pretending that the air is pure and masks are unnecessary is foolish and reckless."
Duke of Prunes comments: "Have my own air purifier story. ... Anyway, a while back, my father-in-law, bought an air cleaner at a garage sale. This was an 'ionizing' air cleaner that didn't even contain a filter. There were charged metal bars that supposedly captured contaminants and needed to be cleaned once in a while. He had me set it up for him. At the time he bought it, I figured it probably didn't help, but what's the harm, and why speak ill of the 'great deal' he made. Wrong. After doing the research on ionizing air filters, I was at his house and noticed his bedroom smelled like a dry cleaner. I asked what that was about, and he pointed to the air filter (that I had forgotten about). He said it started smelling like that after he ran the air purifier. I told him to unplug it and throw it away -- after which the smell went away. I bought him a HEPA filter for Christmas to dissuade him from finding another garage sale filter."
01/16/22 Post, by Lambert Strether, An Introduction to Family Offices (and Generational Wealth). "So what kind of investments are family offices 'comfortable' with, besides co-working spaces and carbon trading? Here are a few: SPACs. From the Financial Times: Family offices have participated in the [SPAC] boom, albeit in smaller numbers than hedge funds and other institutional investors. Among the most prominent names active in the sector are the family offices of tech entrepreneur Michael Dell, billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht and former hedge fund executive Dan Och. Some billionaires have even set up their own Spacs, with or without family office backing, including former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Billionaire financier George Soros's family office has also begun hunting for Spac opportunities. Startups. Also from the Financial Times: Family offices are planning to significantly scale up their start-up investing in the coming year, according to an SVB Capital/Campden Wealth survey published in October, and the effort is being led in many cases by next-generation family members, suggesting it is a trend that will endure."
griffen comments: "I've scoured this summation and the comments more than once. One of the very fundamental issues is the very rich* and obscenely wealthy have a legitimate 100 year+ head start. I read a book in the last 10-12 years which was quite interesting, from the historical perspective. The 'lowly beginnings' of a few barons in the book were indeed, quite humble. Rockefeller was a bean counter, apparently with an alcoholic father (one example). The Tycoons, written by Charles R Morris, gives great detail on this history of factories and manufacturing. In our modern times, it is a class war designed for most of the people to lose, and especially now incur the debts (higher ed, mortgage) so that maybe you too can win. The wealthy are not going to lose. *Very rich is defined in varied terms. I suggest starting at $50 million in total wealth, or earned income (labor, dividends, etc) exceeding $5 to 10 million per year. Others mileage may vary. **Several times in recent months, articles featured dynastic wealth and the families that enjoyed the fruits of their ancestral lineage. Mellon family, Mars candy heirs, Anheuser Busch heirs. Naming only a few. Very much old money, just not the Rothschild old money."
01/18/22 Post, by Balihar Sanghera and Elmira Satybaldieva (openDemocracy), Rentier Capitalism and Class Warfare in Kazakhstan. "At the heart of the crisis is a fundamental question: what kind of a 'free' market and capitalism operates in Kazakhstan? For supporters of neoliberalism, a 'free' market means that economic actors are free to extract rent, free of state controls. Rent refers to income generated by the mere virtue of owning and controlling scarce assets, such as credit money, land, retail estate, natural resources, digital platforms and patents. This ideal of a 'free' market has hugely benefited Kazakhstan's banks, property developers, oil, gas and mining corporations and retail chains, collectively known as the rentier class. Rent extraction contributes to inflated prices, indebtedness and precarity in the wider society These rentiers receive income by partly siphoning off surplus value that others produce. It is unearned income, and their rent extraction contributes to inflated prices, indebtedness and precarity in the wider society. Their income is parasitic and harmful to most of the population."
Polar Socialist comments: "The phased transition began in January 2019 and ended at the beginning of this year. So there were two years for the corporations to find a suitable price range. Right after the first minor protests in Zhanaosen the energy minister Mirzagaliyev announced an investigation on the obvious price fixing by the gas station owners in the region. The next day 2000 kilometers away in Almaty the protesters were demanding resigning of the whole government. Which kinda confused observers, because protests in Kazakhstan tend to stay local due to the large distances and sparse population. A couple of curious things that have not yet seen much focus. The first is that after the dust settled at least three high ranking security officers have died: two suicides and one heart attack. A purge? A conspiracy? A coincidence? The second is that Kazakhstan (well, Nasarbayev) was the initiator of Organization of Turkic States, of which Erdogan is the current chairman. And yet, when Kazakhstan needed help, it turned to CSTO (Russia) instead of OTS (Turkey), which more or less wrecked everything Erdogan has been trying to build for years in Central Asia."
 01/19/22 Links, by Yves Smith (Daily Mail), 5G goes live in the US and sparks international chaos: British Airways and Cathay Pacific become latest carriers scrambling to change transatlantic flights over safety fears around airports as AT&T and Verizon activate their networks at 90% (suggested by: Brian C). "Major international airlines are rushing to rejig or cancel flights to the United States after AT&T and Verizon activated their 5G wireless networks at 12.01am on Wednesday. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had warned that potential 5G interference could affect altitude readings that play a key role in bad-weather landings on some jets, and airlines say the Boeing 777 is among models potentially affected. Despite an announcement by AT&T and Verizon that they would pause the 5G rollout near airports, several airlines still canceled flights, switched aircraft models, and warned of delays and travel chaos. "
DC Informant comments: "I work on broadband and wireless policy issues. 5G service is mostly run using 4G antennas. In fact, your phone needs to communicate with a 4G antenna first to tell the system you want access to a 5G antenna before that antenna activates. 4G already offers internet browsing, email, calls, texting, video streaming, location services and practically anything any consumer requires. The 4G infrastructure will be with us for many, many years to come. Does it sound to you like you need 5G? Or do the companies simply need you to buy a 5G phone?"
01/24/22 Post, by Yves Smith, 'The Narrative Is Crumbling'. "(Quoting GM) Vaccination has been used to shift the frame of thinking about COVID and that shifting continues. First, it was a way to shut down any discussion of eliminating the virus. We were going to solve this with vaccines alone, and remember that what was actually peddled was that vaccines stop transmission and that once we vaccinate enough people, transmission will stop. That was known to be false by all that were actually paying attention, but the trick was played very cleverly -- people are mortally afraid of being called anti-vaxxers, because that threatens their social class status, so the majority of voices calling for actual infection control went quiet once we had vaccines. Saying that the vaccines suck and that they have been oversold was enough for you to be labelled anti-vaxxer. I myself have experienced it on numerous occasions."
The Rev Kev comments: "Many things I can forgive and forget. But after reading this post and the attached comments, I know some things that I will never forgive -- or forget. I will never forgive governments allowing what is still a deadly virus to spread so that they would not have to make any changes to the 2019 economy. I will never forgive the medical establishment siding with the government to spread not only dodgy reasoning but outright lies which led to me breaking trust with my own doctor. I will never forgive the business community for constantly undermining any effort at elimination of this virus but wanting it spread so that they could keep on raking in their profits, now matter how many of their customers got sick or even died. And as it turned out, their profits disappeared as the virus spread as people are hunkering at home. And of special mention, I will never, ever forgive the media which has done nothing but to spread misinformation and demand that everything be open in the middle of a pandemic -- and criticize all those that try to keep it out. They say that trust is like a bank account that you can only make so many withdrawals at. As far as I am concerned all of those groups bankrupted that account."
And another thing….
01/02/2022 upstater comments: I am a small business owner, maybe like you JB. I had a very innovative methodology for evaluating the reliability electric transmission lines. We had a 25 year run. In spite of having an unambiguous contract protecting us with my customers, they decided to misappropriate my IP and take it into a closed industry group (normal people call such things 'theft', but that is a potentially libelous term). It took 5 years of litigation and a jury trial to remedy. Financially we came out ahead. But the business was destroyed. They spent $10M trying to grind a mom and pop shop into pulp. But that's a deductible business expense and the cost was simply added to everyone's electric bill (7.5 cents for 150 million customers). Yes, Bezos started Amazon humbly sending books all over, a wider and cheaper inventory that bookshops could never match. He used USPS book rates, which were dirt cheap. It took decades before Bezos began collecting sales tax, something a bookshop wouldn't get away with. Lawfare as a core business practice works wonderfully. People like Bezos and most corporate CEOs are clearly psychopaths. It is all about power and control over everything. They are not chasing the American Dream. They are destroying it with their payoffs to politicians, fighting anybody that opposes them with armies of lawyers. ... Most importantly, they abuse their workers in a manner that George Orwell could never imagined. Billionaires, like the MIC or COVID response, are a vivid example of the rot present at all levels of government. This is the American nightmare and it isn't a dream. 01/14/2022 JBird4049 comments: ... both parties have a much weaker foundation today, than they did even thirty or forty years ago. Previously, the parties used inclusion instead of exclusion to define themselves and to gain power, which made both of them coalitions, with the most extreme wings of each party broadly overlapped the other party. For example, the then very liberal, even leftist Democratic Party was considered, and I have my class notes on this somewhere, a center-left party and the Republicans were a center-right party. The DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) with the enthusiastic help and later control by Bill Clinton purged all all left and many center-left Democrats from office; they abandoned the various groups in the party, if they did not have money, helped to vaporize most of the manufacturing, and started welfare cuts, made the drug laws draconian, and became the servants of the FIRE economy, while keeping the language of social justice, but not the acts, including any actual help for the poor and minorities. Essentially, neoliberalism. Instead of the thirty to fifty percent of the population spread throughout all industries, which gave them a very broad base or foundation, the Democrats are now balanced on a thinning poll of the ten percent who are the PMC (Professional Managerial Class), the money machine of FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate), Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big War, all camouflaged with the the tent of Liberal Justice with Wokeism add now. The Democrats became a conservative center-right party. The Republicans did a similar process where the left wing of the party was purged of the more liberal, even mildly left, members. The process is still going on as a conservative Republican of forty years ago might would be labeled as a RHINO (Republican In Name Only). President Richard Nixon, with the use of the Southern Strategy, ejected the Blacks from the party (Abraham Lincoln was a member of the Republican Party and that party used to be an advocate) and inviting in the more conservative, very frequently more racist, but not always as the terms are not synonymous, members of the Democratic Party. ... The Republicans have moved so far right that they could be considered reactionary, even a bit unhinged. So, it is a question of which party is most vulnerable to replacement? Which party is going to lose so much support that it will lose all power and disintegrate, first | |
And there you have it - The Best of January 2022. Putting this newsletter together is an amazing experience (challenge!) and we hope you've enjoyed it. See you again in March!
The Crew at Naked Capitalism
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