Dear Naked Capitalism Reader,
Friends, this has been quite a month, culminating with breaking news nearly every day this week. And we have that covered here. But there are a lot of other things going on in our world too, and we'd like to share some of the posts that we are particularly proud of.
| | Breaking News 02/28/22  Post by Yves Smith, A Very Preliminary Look at the Partial Suspension of Russia's Access to SWIFT."'Just say no' to SWIFT entirely is Russia's cleanest play. The West has effectively admitted it can't (either practically or politically) take the hit of going cold turkey on Russian energy. "
02/25/22 Post by Lambert Strether, Ukraine Update: Back of the Envelope Calculations, Digital Evidence, Maps, Scenarios."Wars are bad, even small wars. At least that is the principle I think leadership should begin from. Of course, a small war can have large geopolitical effects, as this war doubtless will; the lightest touch can collapse a house of cards. And if you have a bet riding on that house of cards, a light touch can have enormous leverage."
02/28/22 Post by Michael Hudson, America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: The MIC, BARE and OGAM Conquer NATO ."It is more realistic to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the military-industrial complex, the oil and gas (and mining) complex, and the banking and real estate complex than in terms of political policy of Republicans and Democrats."
Major Stories 02/10/22 Post by Lambert Strether, Thoughts on the Canadian Trucker 'Freedom Convoys'. "The demands of the truckers began, as we have seen, with quarantines, then morphed into a demand for an end to mandates, and then for an end to all emergency measures. (Now, apparently, we are bitcoin. Fine.) However, the key document is, to my mind, the 'Memorandum of Understanding' (MOU) produced by Canada Unity, a participant in the convoy, which was widely distributed. ... A word on the document itself: Material like this doesn't emerge within hours; people have been thinking about this. I will grant that the language is not as cray cray as, say, the Moorish Sovereign Citizens; in fact, Canadian trucking regulations are communicated in the from of 'Memorandums of Undertstanding,' so perhaps that's where the MOU drafters picked up the concept. (One has to wonder, however, about the epigraph from Jefferson (it's fake). Wouldn't a Canadian have quoted, well, a Canadian?)"
David comments: "Not my continent, but I'm bound to say that I find this 'Memorandum of Understanding' a very strange document. As its title suggests, a MoU is a memorandum (ie a written summary) of an understanding between two or more parties. It is specifically not a legal document, and not binding except morally and politically. It doesn't need to be, because it is just the writing down of what the parties have decided to do."
02/15/22 Post by Nick Corbishley, Spain and UK Give a Masterclass on Why Both Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Should Fear Vaccine Passports. "One of the common misconceptions about vaccine passports is that it is only the unvaccinated who will suffer the consequences. The problem with this idea is that it ignores the fact that all of us, vaccinated or not, are now living in a much more heavily controlled society. Even those who are fully vaccinated still have to submit to unfettered tech-enabled surveillance, tracking and forced-compliance in a two-tiered checkpoint society. This despite the fact the vaccine passports, tied as they are to non-sterilising vaccines that were based on the originl Wuhan strain, have failed disastrously to control the spread of COVID-19, let alone eliminate or eradicate it. It also ignores the fact that vaccine passports, as with any emerging technology, do not operate perfectly. As I note in my book, Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital IDs Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom, 'mistakes or biases introduced into algorithms could have profound effects on individual lives and society-wide, possibly becoming more pronounced and entrenched over time.'"
Cat Lady comments: "You can add Paris to the list of places with faulty vaccine passports and QR code scanning technology. We just returned from a trip to Paris where we had to pay 72 euros (36 each) to convert our CDC issued vaccine cards to the 'pass sanitaire' in order to get into restaurants and museums. It was easy enough to get the pass from the pharmacy near our rental apartment, but mine was rejected a couple of times. It worked 90% of the time, but one restaurant would not let me in. It made no sense – why would the pharmacy issue me a pass if I wasn't eligible? No logic was accepted. Luckily the next place let me stay based on my CDC card. I have the J&J vax and booster; my husband has the Moderna vax and booster. He never had any problems. I went back to the pharmacy to tell them about my 'invalide' pass, but of course it worked when they checked it. A total mystery. Luckily it was our last day. Of course, in order to come back to the US we had to get a COVID test. Another 50 euros for the pharmacy!!! We got the antigen test because we needed results for the next day. Negative, of course. Good business for them, a useless and ineffective expense for us."
02/08/22 Post by Yves Smith, Quelle Surprise! Covid Burden Falling Hardest on Low Income Workers…But Don't Expect Any Help. "The pandemic is a boon for the ultra-rich. The staggering rise in the stock-market is testament to this. In the US, over 44 million people lost their jobs and unemployment surged towards 15% between April and June 2020. Yet the fortunes of the top five billionaires rose by $102 billion, increasing their wealth by 26%. In fact, the combined wealth of US billionaires increased by over $637 billion to a total of $3.6 trillion, which is considerably more than the entire wealth of the 54 countries on the African continent."
lakecabs comments: "A lot of low income workers don't get tested. Why would they when their family would starve? They just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Why do people hate these heroes?"
02/21/22 Post by Yves Smith, 'Just Scandalous': CDC Withholding Most of the Covid Data It Gathers. What Is It Trying to Hide?. "It sure looks like the CDC thinks it's just fine to give doctors and the public the mushroom treatment in the interest of narrative control and shielding the CDC from criticism when its information quality is poor. But unpleasant truths, like the much-shorter-than-hoped duration of vaccine-induced immunity, have gotten through anyhow thanks to reporting from countries that are competent at data collection, such as Israel. The article offers other excuses, like 'The public might misuse the information!' and 'The info from states isn't always so hot.' Re the latter, gee, why weren't you offering to help? Last I checked, the CDC has 32,000 employees. Surely a few could be tasked to help out particular states? The article points out that the CDC has data for only 10% (of adults?) and it uses this sort of sampling for influenza data. But what kind of sampling methodology omits an entire state?"
Tom Stone comments: "If someone had deliberately decided to destroy the CDC they could not have done a better job. This is a systemically critical system that depended on trust to function, destroy that trust and piss away the credibility built up over decades and there's nothing left. The depraved indifference of America's elites is not a surprise, the resounding incompetence and profound stupidity is. If you destroy civil society what you end up with isn't very civil,or safe. For anyone."
Continuing Themes 02/08/22 Post by Nick Corbishley, Spain's Second Largest Lender, BBVA, Escalates Its War on Cash in Mexico. "Some banks will do just about anything to try to wean their customers off using physical money, including (in the case of BBVA) charging their customers for using cash too often. ... BBVA calls this service 'Mobile Cash' and it offers customers a means of withdrawing cash without needing to use their wallet; they just use your phone instead. The problem for the bank is that many of its customers in Mexico would seem to prefer to continue using their debit card. So the bank has decided to give them a bit of a nudge by charging them for doing things the old way."
Eduardo comments: "I live in Mexico (U.S. Citizen permanent resident of Mexico) and have an account at BBVA. My ATM daily limit is about $9,000 pesos (about $450 USD) per day. ... During covid I have avoided the lobby. Except, once a year or so I must go into the lobby and wait my turn to prove that I am still who I said I was when I opened the account. Present official identification, proof I still live where I live (copies of current utility bills) and, I guess, that I am still alive. But that seems fairly typical for banks here. They blame U.S. banking laws for that which seems reasonable."
02/20/22 Post by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, War on Cash: Banks Crack Down on Independent ATMs. "I've written before about NYC's ban on cashless businesses, passed by the City Council in January 2020 to make sure that city residents that lack credit cards can purchase goods and services, despite pandemic-imposed strong pressure towards promoting cash-free transactions. The proportion of city residents without a bank account is estimated as high as 10% IIRC, with the proportion described as underbanked numbering one in five. Many kids are included in these numbers (see War on Cash: NYC Enforces its Cashless Business Ban and War on Cash: New York City Businesses Must Accept Cash, City Council Decides). Another motivation for the NYC cashless ban was concern over the security of digital payments and their infrastructure."
timotheus comments: "I tried to buy something at a bakery in Tribeca (lower Manhattan) earlier this month and was told that cash was not accepted 'for now.' When I went past the place a few days later, there was a sign on the door saying, 'Sorry, WE CANNOT ACCEPT CASH just yet.' The state Office of Consumer Affairs has the photo, so we'll see if any sort of reminder/citation/enforcement ensues."
02/09/22 Post by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, Ocean Summit Launches Today in France. "It wasn't always like this, with the United States plodding along in the slow lane on regulating the oceans. Indeed, during my lifetime, the United States was once a prime mover behind the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty, guided by research by academics at MIT, including Dan Nyhart (who had also been dean for student affairs during a particularly tumultuous time in that institution's history). I never did much research on Law of the Sea issues, but I did conduct research on law and science policy for Dan, beginning in 1979 in the first semester of my freshman year, as as part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Alas, the U.S. never signed onto that treaty – and its lack of support is one reason for the parlous state of ocean governance efforts to this day."
Rudolf comments: "I read the other day that global heating in the oceans reached a tipping point in 2014. Ocean heating is now out of control and cannot be stopped according to the article I read last week. So whatever this commission does, it's too little and much too late. On the bright side, Oregon has a market squid fisheries that didn't exist 10 years ago. Sorry about the lack of reference. It's not my strong suit but I do remember what I read."
Business/Finance 02/18/22 Post by Yves Smith, Trudeau's Money Heist: Emergencies Act Allows Seizure of Bank Accounts, Securities, Crypto of Those Suspected of 'Links' to Convoy Members w/o Court Order. "Note that, at least according to the writeups in the Canadian press, these provisions ave more draconian and Stasi-like than even the much-hated US asset forfeiture laws. In the US, it is the government that confiscates the property; the owner then has to go to court to try to get it back.1 By contrast, the Canadian Emergency Powers Act is an extrajudicial process, and banks and financial firms are being urged to grab assets of mere suspects and those with links to them."
Bruce Elrick comments: "As a Canadian I find this discussion of our politics fascinating. We have all kinds here, in particular we have our fair share of anti-COVID-vax anti-vax-'mandate'. In principle it certainly looks tyrannical however one difference is that our norms do not appear to have eroded nearly as much as in the US. I believe that as soon as a horror story comes out there would be a political price to pay, perhaps unlike the US. Canada has always been a 'good governance' and 'institutional faith' society (for the white majority; our Indigenous people know tyranny far beyond the Emergencies Act) where we don't have or seem to politically require the level of constitutional rights guarantees that the US has (no one does). Witness the Notwithstanding Clause, which opens us up to terrible abuse. Yet we have survived."
02/09/22 Post by Yves Smith, SEC Set to Lower Massive Boom on Private Equity Industry. "Even thought the Biden Administration is rife with cronies and incompetents in important positions (Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken, Javier Becerra, Pete Buttigieg…the mind boggles), Gary Gensler is showing what a capable and determined agency leader can do, even at a considerably weakened body like the SEC. As we'll discuss, the SEC just published a simply brutal and badly needed set of proposed private equity disclosure requirements….. On a fast reading of the part of the rules that sets up the public comment, every one of the many questions I read where the SEC solicited further input were of the form: 'Or should we twist the zip ties tighter by also requiring Y and Z?'"
Susan the other comments: "There are simply too many things waiting to go wrong. As CIO Magazine noted, problem number one is that strategic alignment might exist at the top, but not throughout the organization. Just because banks want to merger at the c-suite level, it doesn't mean their legacy technology bases are in any way compatible. And even if a project is sponsored right at the very top, it still has to compete with many other priorities for funding and management time. Everyone wants a good news story, so there's little, if any, incentive, for the rank and file to 'fess up the chain of command just how bad things are and how much worse they could get, if the project is progressed."
02/07/22 Post by Yves Smith, News Flash: CalPERS Invents Time Machine! Not News: CalPERS Again Lies in Suit Over Illegal Secret Board Meeting and Smears Former Board Member Margaret Brown as Diversion. "CalPERS is just lying in a particularly shameless manner, but now to a judge, not to its captured and clueless board. And for grins, CalPERS has tossed a smear at whistleblowing former board member Margaret Brown into the mix. The reason this row over a legal memo matters is that CalPERS is trying to justify its defiance of a clearly-worded order from Judge Michael Markman in a Public Records Act lawsuit filed by former board member JJ Jelincic. Judge Markman ruled that CalPERS held an illegal 'closed' as in secret, board meeting on August 17, 2020 to discuss the abrupt resignation of former Chief Investment Officer Ben Meng. ... Markman ruled that CalPERS had indeed violated Bagley-Keene and also directed CalPERS to either produce the full transcript ... or produce the legal memorandum, called a litigation memorandum, that could justify keeping the disputed parts hidden."
vlade comments: "Fun!. Or it would be, if these clowns weren't managing serious money. I just don't get the beneficiaries though. Most of them don't seem to care, while some seem to believe that at the worst, the CA taxpayers will pick the bill. Well, that's the legislation _now_. But it doesn't mean it will be the legislation when the .. hits the fan, which may be in a year, two, five or a decade. Given the amounts involved, both the taxpayers and the beneficiaries should be very, very concerned. By now, all I can say is 'you have been warned', and pity the ones who did try to take an action."
Other Politics 02/07/22 Post by Michael Hudson, Michael Hudson: America's Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies. "The Democratic Party's class war against unionized labor started in the Carter Administration and greatly accelerated when Bill Clinton opened the southern border with NAFTA. A string of maquiladoras were established along the border to supply low-priced handicraft labor. This became so successful a corporate profit center that Clinton pressed to admit China into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, in the closing month of his administration. ... Where did America's neoliberal Cold War dream go wrong? For starters, China did not follow the World Bank's policy of steering governments to borrow in dollars to hire U.S. engineering firms to provide export infrastructure. It industrialized in much the same way that the United States and Germany did in the late 19th century: By heavy public investment in infrastructure to provide basic needs at subsidized prices or freely, from health care and education to transportation and communications, in order to minimize the cost of living that employers and exporters had to pay. Most important, China avoided foreign debt service by creating its own money and keeping the most important production facilities in its own hands."
dftbs comments: "Particularly good insight on our current situation being brought about by our 'own deliberate policy choices.' I always wondered if these choices were made in 'good faith', did Bill Clinton truly believe that he would compensate the destruction of US wages and productive via ever more inches added to the average American TV? I tend to think that the political actors were more stupid than evil, although I'm open to have my mind changed. "
02/11/22 Post by Nick Corbishley, Resource Nationalism on Rise in Latin America, As Fever for 'White Gold,' aka Lithium, Grips the World. "Since then both countries have elected left-wing governments, though Pedro Castillo's coalition government in Peru, now on its fourth cabinet in seven months, is desperately weak while Chile's new president, the 35 year-old former student leader Gabriel Baric, is still waiting to take office. Before that happens, in a month's time, the outgoing Pineda government has been trying to sell off the mineral rights to the country's recently discovered lithium deposits to mining companies. They include the rights to 400,000 tons of metallic lithium or 2.129 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LME) discovered in Chile's Atacama Desert. The contract would have awarded 20 years' exploitation rights to the company or companies that won the concession. That would have probably included the Chilean mining giant Soquimich (SQM), which is majority owned by the late dictator Augustin Pinochet's son-in-law Julio Ponce Lerou and which is accused of widespread corruption practices, including tax evasion, bribing ministers and government officials, breaking campaign finance laws and signing fake invoices. In the end, a judge blocked the sale of the rights to the lithium deposits in Atacama citing environmental concerns."
Sub-Boreal comments: "Good for the Mexicans & Chileans! I hope that they can carry through on these plans to assert sovereignty over their natural resources. How clearly these initiatives contrast with resource extraction in Canada, where the provinces get very little in royalties. Strangely, I see no cavalcades of truckers demanding that somebody fix this."
Science and Technology 02/02/22 Post by Yves Smith, A Facet of Late-State Capitalist Failure: Operational Breakage. "Planned obsolescence, the bane of tech users, and more and more are being sucked into having hardware and software dictate product life than is necessary or desirable for users. Peak word processing was WordPerfect circa 1994. The NeXT's Improv (a Lotus product) ran rings around Excel. And don't get me started on IoT. What happens when the provider of XYZ system goes out of business and your locks or heating system gets bricked? What about the inclusion of way more chip-enabled features than are necessary in everything from washing machines to cars, leading to more costly service calls and faster product death due to key components often not available after ten years? One example is the phaseout of the 3G network affecting some car models from 2010 to even as recent as 2021 models. Admittedly, the affected systems are not critical to driving the car, but their not being updated would presumably hurt resale value. Most automakers are offering upgrades but some are curiously indifferent."
JohnnySacks comments: "Why people so eagerly purchase things they don't need with money they don't have is a complete mystery and disappointment to me. Transportation appliances being a prime example. OK, I have Corolla/Civic as a fallback, notwithstanding their base models being full of useless and complicated appointments. The unavailable manual transmission in favor of basically a belt drive go-kart automatic transmission being one particular gripe. But I pity the farmer who needs a bare bones workhorse pickup with an interior they can clean with a garden hose walking into a GMC dealer looking at those $70k creature comfort monstrosities."
02/06/22 Post by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, Right to Repair: Massachusetts Auto Measure Stalls. "Alas, although originally slated to go into effect in 2022, the latest measure has yet to be enforced, stymied in the first instance by an ongoing federal lawsuit filed by the Alliance for Automotive innovation to block sharing telematics data with third party repair services. Further, pending Massachusetts state legislation would delay sharing such information for three years, according to The Boston Globe, Lawmakers propose changes in stalled right-to-repair law). Most auto repairs now require access to this telematics information, and blocking data sharing effectively excludes third-party repair services from competing with new car dealerships in supplying repair services. Both Kia and Subaru have opted to switch off rather than share vehicular data with either owners or third parties,a decision which has drawn scrutiny from Judge Douglas Woodlock, who is presiding over the federal lawsuit. "
Larry comments: "Thanks for the updated post with summaries. I've been following the question closely and expect that the right will be maintained given the size of the independent and chain third party mechanics. Cutting of the data would kill so many businesses, I can't see it happening, but one never knows."
And another thing….
howseth comments: I live in California – 20 years now – (Wow! that has gone by fast). My wife and I have actually had good fortune with the current Medi-Cal healthcare system since the 'Obamacare' days. (And not the Blue Cross/ Anthem private healthcare days previously) Because We were shunted over to the Medi-Cal program (due to our income level) from the regular Obamacare (ACA) bronze, silver, gold programs. Here in Santa Cruz County – MediCal it is run fairly well. I was nervous when at first we were put on it – but pleasantly surprised. The local provider is called – 'Central California Alliance for Health' run much better than the private health care we were on before – including the Anthem Silver plan – (Horrible). Also the county health care department is more responsive then the awful private insurer reps we were dealing with previously. (Putting one on hold for hours – lying about coverage – and which doctors were in their network) When I heard about this California Single Payer plan up for a vote – I – weirdly – got anxious for a moment. Will it get rid of our Medi-Cal coverage? Ironic. (My wife is still on – I'm older at 67 and now I'm on Medicare…) Then I thought – duh – lets go for it! California at the vanguard of the nation!! Then I thought this won't get through the state assembly because of taxes being raised – and the usual suspects freaking out -i.e. Chamber of Congress. Not surprised it did not come up for a vote: hard to get change from the crappy status quo. | |
And there it is - February at Naked Capitalism. We hope you've enjoyed this collection as much as we've enjoyed putting it together for you. Thank you for giving us your time and attention.
The Crew at Naked Capitalism
Donations gratefully accepted. | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment