Recently Noted

With yet another school shooting yesterday 9.3.2024 in Georgia I found myself barely moved. The frequency of these events and the now ritualized sequelae have extinguished any other reaction. Here is a chart I came on today in The Conversation. It is shocking, even to me,  that we have taken as the normal for the last twenty five years to have averaged 58 shootings per year!!

Americans, especially American politicians love to bask in our alleged role in the post-WWII era as the global force for good spreading Democracy and progress around the world. We bring stability and justice wherever we go. We spend a lot to maintain our presence in virtually every nook and cranny, all to promote our universal values. The real history and present are quite different. Here are some data points gathered from: American-Backed Coups, Mapped by —>> read more –>>

(reposted from https://theconversation.com/us) Denmark’s King Frederik X wipes away a tear as he waves to a crowd of 300,000 people. Martin Meissner/AP Photo Marie Helweg-Larsen, Dickinson College When a leader cries in public, is it a sign of weakness? On Jan. 14, 2023, Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik was crowned King Frederik X after his mother, Queen Margrethe II, announced she would be abdicating the throne during her annual New Year’s Eve speech. After the queen —>> read more –>>

This video from 1Dime is a very good introduction to the actual workings of money in the economy. Though for my tastes, the video is burdened with way too many gratuitous visual gimmicks and fluffery, it is very well researched and presented. You will get a solid introduction to most of the important concepts in Modern Money Theory (aka neo-Keynesianism). Much to my satisfaction the description field on YouTube provides a serious list of sources —>> read more –>>

The December 2023 issue of Scientific American contains three articles and an editorial about our nuclear weapons production, plans to spend tons of money “modernizing it”, and the environmental consequences. BOOM TIMES: The new costs—and long shadow—of living in a nuclear nation. by Abe Streep SIDE THE PIT FACTORY: For the first time in decades the U.S. is ramping up production of plutonium cores for nuclear weapons. by Sarah Scoles SACRIFICE ZONES: What happens if —>> read more –>>

Only the oldest amongst my readers will remember Edward R. Murrow’s 1960 CBS TV report Harvest of Shame (opens CBS channel on YouTube) that reported on migrant farm workers, including scenes from upstate NY and Long Island. Unfortunately, not a lot has changed for the better in the lives of migrant farm workers over the last 63 years. For instance, here in New York State “The phased-in, gradual reduction in the overtime pay threshold will begin —>> read more –>>

Reich is offering an online course, “Wealth & Poverty”, that started today. I watched the first lecture, “What Happened to Income and Wealth?” Looks like this will be worth some ongoing effort. I suggest being ready at the fast forward button for the parts of the class when Reich is querying the students and using various digital polling tools that seem to be standard issue in university lecture halls. After the introductory blather, he opens —>> read more –>>

Another few minutes with a comedian. This time it’s Jon Stewart. Prison Is America’s Real Cancel Culture | The Problem with Jon Stewart Here is a screen grab: Drop over to the Prison Policy Initiative for an in-depth look at the state of incarceration in America. Especially troubling are the over 400,000 people who are in jail without ever having been tried. As Stewart notes, they are there because they can’t make cash bail. “It —>> read more –>>

I can’t seem to forgo comedians. Sometimes a laugh brings brief relief. Stumbled on this typical brief rant (3 minutes) from Lewis Black. A bit of context. This is shortly after the election of Obama. He had run against John McCain in 2008. These are the politicians he is referring to at the opening. (apologies for the ads) Lewis Black on Capitalism (Stark Raving Black)

Original posting – 3.6.2023 Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City3, has a new book Poverty, by America set to be released shortly. He has written a piece for the NYTimes, “Why Poverty Persists in America”4 that is worth a read. He poses this question early on, “Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing?” He cites a ton of statistics to prove —>> read more –>>

Catching up on reading The New Yorker brought me to the January 16th issue and Jill Lepore’s “What the January 6th Report Is Missing”7. As noted elsewhere here, I am somewhat possessed by the question of how we can explain that 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020 after having four years to observe this pathological narcissist lie over 30,000 times in his four years in office.8 That is 20 lies per day! Jill —>> read more –>>

Just when I thought I could put this topic away for a while, I came across this video by John Oliver. As I have noted earlier, it continues to amaze me that some of the best commentaries come from comedians. The little note, nearly at the end, of EU efforts to establish regulations to control AI developers is worth a note. We definitely cannot trust AI companies to exercise adequate controls and there appears to —>> read more –>>

“Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought.” Noam Chomsky circa 2023 Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull have weighed in on the ruckus about ChatGPT and its many brethren in the AI world in a very sharp opinion piece in the 3.8.2023 NYTimes, “Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT” The quote —>> read more –>>

Financialization is an awful word. It sounds clumsy in the mouth and refers to a process that has been underway for over 40 years but is nearly unknown to most of us. Before we get to Norfolk Southern, the railroad company, what is financialization? Basically, financialization is a nested set of changes in business concepts and operations that center around the notion that money is the only purpose of business. Money is the only object —>> read more –>>

The recent release of a pile of emails, text messages, and memos from within Fox News has raised the Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit to large public view. Here is a 52-minute discussion between Stewart and Anderson Jones that explores the facts revealed in the data dump, the boundaries and conditions that must be met to win a defamation suit and much more about the state of our politics, free speech, collusion to undermine the —>> read more –>>

The 12/4/2020 NYTimes ran a very interesting opinion piece, “Why Did Racial Progress Stall in America?” by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett. This is a great summary of why, despite appearances, actual progress towards racial equity stalled after the surge of the post-WWII era.

If you are struggling to get your head around how racism works you will probably find it helpful to have a general framework as a guide. This one hour lecture from 2017 features an overview by Brown University Professor Tricia Rose of the structure of racism and how it works in the US (approx. 29 minutes). Then follows a case study by Samuel Rosen, senior researcher, How Structural Racism Works Project at Brown, of how —>> read more –>>

The May 21, 2020 Issue of the London Review of Books contains a review article, “The Corrupt Bargain” by Columbia U. Professor Eric Foner15. It is a wonderful review of the history of this peculiar institution, The Electoral College. In the midst of his survey of the history of the electoral college system he notes: A candidate can carry a dozen or so large states by small margins and capture the presidency while trailing far —>> read more –>>

Essay explores the grim reality of life in one small corner of America within the broader landscape of the bottom 90%.

Over 90% of plastic materials in consumer items and packaging end up in landfill dumps. Time for industry to take responsibility for their waste.

The Visual Capitalist added another graphic example of the increasing concentration, monopolization, of markets, in this case for groceries. Even here in Hudson NY we can see the impact of Walmart locally. Two years ago we had three large supermarkets within 4 miles. Price Chopper gave up the ghost leaving us with two, Walmart and ShopRite. While it’s more likely for a small town to become dominated by a single grocer, Walmart’s clout isn’t exclusive —>> read more –>>

A challenging take on the state of racism in the US. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson reviews books on Clarence Thomas and his views on countering intractable white racism.

The New Yorker published “Value Meal: Impossible Foods wants to save the world by inventing a better burger” by Tad Friend in the 9/30/2019 issue. During the introductory paragraphs the following statistic was cited: Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London—and the average American eats that much each month.

We’ve written quite a bit about the US Empire. A key component of this US foreign policy is regime change. Here is a list of the posts here on this topic. Recently Democracy Now! ran a 22 minute discussion of the history of US regime change actions over the last 100 years plus. It features discussion with Stephen Kinzer the author of many books on the history of American foreign policy.

The recent controversies surrounding Joe Biden’s anti- school busing collaborations with racist politicians from the south has for the moment aroused new comment on segregated America. The New York Times published an excellent review of the history of school desegregation by Nikole Hannah-Jones, “It Was Never About Busing: Court-ordered desegregation worked. But white racism made it hard to accept.” As the article notes the yellow school bus has been in use for almost a hundred years. —>> read more –>>

Robert Reich provides us with an accessible, brief analysis of why the rich and corporations are feasting while the rest of us experience the rigors, oppression, and discipline of the capitalist marketplace. Only a bit over 4 minutes long.

It is not often that one can make a judgement that is nearly absolute in its accuracy. Most things in life are complicated, complicated by circumstance, money, class, family, just plain errors in judgement, execution, and on… But, when it comes to the American justice system you come face to face with a system that is a gigantic fraud. This is as close to an absolute truth as one is ever likely find in our —>> read more –>>

Modern marketing began in the 1920s when mass circulation newspapers were joined by radio as regular parts of most people’s days. Some of the early practitioners of marketing were quite open about their function in the capitalist market system. They referred to themselves as “demand managers”. Today we have “attention engineers”. Here is an article from a military-security focused magazine OVER THE HORIZON – MULTI-DOMAIN OPERATIONS & STRATEGY: Attention Engineering: What it is, How it —>> read more –>>

We have written earlier about the fact that effective legal representation and trial by jury is a rarity making one of our cultural icons a complete sham. As Jed Rakoff has noted: In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone. In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges —>> read more –>>

Hudson NY and Its SWAT Team State St Hudson NY 6/12/2018 – photo by Lance Wheeler for Columbia-Greene Media. Even here in our little city of Hudson NY (population ~ 7,000) we have a police SWAT team, benignly referred to officially as the Columbia County Shared Services Team. There has been plenty of concern over its use here in the last couple of years, most recently in June of this year. The website CityLab has published —>> read more –>>

Reich’s latest cartoon does a good job of describing the changes in the US economy, weaker on the underlying political campaign by the rich and corporations to restructure the economy to their benefit. Worth the 6 minute viewing time.

At a time when the Republicans are transferring income and wealth to the rich and corporations over 40 million Americans fall below the official poverty line.

Inequality in wealth and income is a continuing global crisis. The World Inequality Report 2018 defines the problem based on wealth ownership and the transfer of public wealth into private hands. Their are solutions but they require political organization and will.

The Watson Institute at Brown University has just released an updated report: United States Budgetary Costs of Post 9/11 Wars Through FY2018: A Summary of the $5.6 Trillion in Costs for the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Post 9/11 Veterans Care and Homeland Security by Neta C. Crawford. This report includes many war costs that the official Pentagon figure of $1.52 trillion leaves out.20 Compound Interest Adds Up Neither of these estimates includes —>> read more –>>

Corrective History The NYTimes posted a bit of Turkey Day corrective history: “Most Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong” By MAYA SALAM “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth,” from 1914, by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe borrowed from NYTimes Adaptive Turkeys The Trump pardoned two turkeys yesterday at the White House. But, no surprise for us here in Columbia County, wild turkeys are doing just fine. Once again the NYTimes, ever on spot for trending issues, has an article —>> read more –>>

The Prison Policy Initiative has released a new study “Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017”. In a pattern that is similar to the fate of men in our mass incarceration system that charades as justice, 60% of those in local jails are there because they cannot afford bail. 29% of these women held for lack of cash are charged with drug offenses.

The NY Times published an interesting article by Max Fisher and Josh Keller, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer” on 11/7/2017. The analysis shows that there is a strong correlation between the high level of gun ownership and mass killings. No other factors are well correlated. Are you surprised? Read the article here >>>

Otto Budweiser beer delivery The shape of jobs in the US and around the world it’s changing rapidly. On 11/5/2017 NBC News reported: Self-driving trucks One year ago this week a truck rolled into history as it traveled from a Colorado brewing plant to a warehouse 120 miles away carrying 45,000 cans of Budweiser beer. The early morning run was done using a truck developed by a start-up called Otto, now an Uber subsidiary. Though there —>> read more –>>

The National Geographic has a running list of the Trump regime’s efforts to save the environment for capitalism. A Running List of How Trump Is Changing the Environment –  “The Trump administration has promised vast changes to U.S. science and environmental policy—and we’re tracking them here as they happen.”

Bumpy Ride – Why America’s roads are in tatters This article by Dale Maharidge explores some history of our road system and the current mess of our infrastructure. It is a charming read and interesting in what it has to say about our approach to maintaining infrastructure.

Capitalism, Monopoly, Oligopoly and John Oliver Capitalism does a number of things very well. Concentrating power, wealth and income is one of them. Though we naturally focus our attention on wealthy individuals, fat cats, tycoons, money bags, but corporations, the legal entities with personhood (at least in the US) are also recipients of this concentrating power. John Oliver in his HBO program “Last Week Tonight” took on monopoly and oligopoly. His focus on the airline —>> read more –>>

More evidence that today’s segregated America didn’t just happen out of individual choices and preferences. The 1930s redlining of neighborhoods by the Home Owners’ Loan Corp, a New Deal housing agency, has had long term effects of segregating people.

The US has the worst maternal mortality rate by far of any developed country in the world.

Ira Katznelson (see my earlier post “Affirmative Action for Whites – began in the 1930s”) wrote a brief opinion piece in the 8/13/2017 NYTimes, “Making Affirmative Action White Again” that encapsulates the real history of affirmative action for whites.

New Trump focus on race reminds us, “All of the liberal praise for civil rights has produced no results over these six decades excepting the ritualized celebration of African American History Month. This is so embedded in our calendar that even Trump issued another executive order announcing it.”

Recent NYTimes article broadly acknowledges what every other developed country has recognized for decades, healthcare is not a good candidate for market control.

A report about an amendment to the defense budget that would end the 2001 AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force) that has provided legal cover for more than forty military actions around the world without Congressional oversight, just the decisions of three Presidents.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has released another of their series of infrastructure report cards. The 2017 report card shows a “D+”…….

Mirror, Mirror 2017:International Comparison Reflects Flaws and Opportunities for Better U.S. Health Care from Commonwealth Fund.

Capitalism is driven by a single internal logic that requires the transformation of people and nature into commodities to produce profits. This logic is amoral and the system, excepting for external controls by government and social institutions, just churns on.

from the New York Times an article that covers some earlier history of the US healthcare industry. How Did Health Care Get to Be Such a Mess? By CHRISTY FORD CHAPIN “The problem with American health care is not the care. It’s the insurance. Both parties have stumbled to enact comprehensive health care reform because they insist on patching up a rickety, malfunctioning model. The insurance company model drives up prices and fragments care. Rather than rejecting this —>> read more –>>

Companies must externalize as many costs as possible in free-market capitalism. Without adequate government protections you will end up with this kind of environment. from the New York Times: Nearly 14,000 Companies in China Violate Pollution Rules By EDWARD WONG “Environmental inspectors in northern China have found that nearly 14,000 companies, or 70 percent of the businesses they examined, failed to meet environmental standards for controlling air pollution, according to a state news agency report. The inspectors working —>> read more –>>

Giving tax breaks to the rich and corporations has been basic to every Republican since Hoover. President Reagan piled on with trickle-down economics. I wrote about it here: Trickle-Down Returns to Enrich the Rich. Now the great state of Kansas proves again the tax breaks do not generate more jobs or income excepting for the rich and corporations through their lower tax payments. It’s a great day: Kansas legislature pulls the plug on Gov. Brownback’s failed —>> read more –>>

An enormous entitlement in the tax code props up home prices — and overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy and the upper middle class.

It is fairly widely known that income and wealth inequality in the US is as high or higher than at any time except perhaps the Robber Baron period at the end of the 19th century. Lots of articles and books explain how this has come about over the last 30 years. In a recent NYTimes Magazine article, “The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy” by Adam Davidson, we are even offered an affirmative —>> read more –>>