Fernand Braudel on The Structures of Everyday Life between the 15th and 18th centuries, 1400-1800: 

"Luxury then can take on many guises, depending on the period, the country or the civilization. What does not change, by contrast, is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and the theme, a choice spectacle for sociologist, psychologist, economist and historian. A certain amount of connivance is of course required between the privileged and the onlookers-- the watching masses. Luxury does not only represent rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor, and in so doing immediately loses its old glamour. Not long ago a medical historian wrote: 'When food that has been rare and long desired finally arrives within reach of the masses, consumption rises sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularised [in both senses of the word - becoming "less exclusive" and "more widespread"] the food quickly loses its attraction... The appetite becomes stated.' The rich are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their justification: they try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later grasp. 

The moral is not surprising: every luxury dates and goes out of fashion. But luxury is reborn from its own ashes and from its very defeats. It is really the reflection of a difference in social levels that nothing can compensate for and that every movement creates. An eternal 'class struggle.' 

In short, as Marcel Mauss wrote: 'it was not in production that society found its driving force: luxury is the great stimulus'." from The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979-1981.  

************

Does this mean we can expect the masses will soon all be owning yachts? Or boats? Or at least vacation getaways? 

Luxuries are things that set the rich or elites apart but also tantalize ambitions in the poor. It's possible with a generous reading to imagine in this social relationship some possibilities for progress, and not just the dreary treadmill of the "eternal class struggle," IF so many actually existing rich were not such cold stingy misers. 

This is also a capsule chunk of an argument economic anthropology has with formal economic science. Econ 101 assumes production is the driving force in social development. Anthropology, Mauss and Braudel, say the pursuit of luxury, this eternal class struggle, is the driving force in social development. Although not "class struggle" like Marx, a dialectic struggle that will eventually resolve itself with armed revolution and then some fully-automated communist Kumbaya utopia. But eternal struggle like there will always be rich and poor and the latter will always desire the exclusive privileges of the former; a cultural social hierarchy in constant state of tension and flux. 

World building, or politics, from this anthropology angle then, Mauss, Braudel, Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, might concern negotiating some sustainable peaceful balance between those that would rather defend existing inequality and property relations by force, conservatives, Republicans, police state fascists, and those that would rather liberate the poor from the predations of the rich. Braudel's sympathies are obvious and appreciated; if too CRT for the present. 

Liberal in the sense of government protections for individual human rights. Governments, communities, investing in progressively reducing the hardships of poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, lack of health care, education, etc. Not neoliberal in the sense of protecting wealth and markets from democracy and basic human rights. 

 

Dollar trap or empire by invitation? The global political economy of the dollar system.

"This succinct and powerful analysis adds a key element of political economy that is often missing from arguments over the dollar system, all too often phrased in national terms. We talk as though the rest of the world as a collectivity suffers the unequal terms of trade implied by America’s exorbitant privilege. It is often said that the “safe asset” status of US Treasuries is ultimately grounded in America’s national military power. Both claims have an element of truth to them. But as Atkeson et al remind us, global investors flock to the United States not simply because the United States supplies protection, or serves as a unique issuer of “safe assets”, but because investing in America offers outsized returns thanks to the country’s lop-sided domestic political economy. America is a great place for corporates to make profit and that is ultimately what attracts investors and accounts for a large part of America’s net foreign liabilities. Managers of foreign capital enthusiastically buy into the American profits bonanza."

-Adam Tooze @ Chartbook

Super curious speculations about the global political economy of the dollar system, of which I probably understand about half. So for the sake of trying to organize my own partial understanding and for the curiosity of the equally economic literacy challenged I summarize: 

There is an old economic saw that goes, more or less: If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem but if you owe the bank $100 million that's the bank's problem; it's usually attributed to mid-20th c oil magnate J. Paul Getty but its actual origins are older and murkier.*

The US owes the world, our bankers in this respect, so much that defaulting on that debt or devaluing the dollar is viewed as a threat to foreign economies heavily invested in the dollar system. Some people call this the "Dollar Trap." Countries become dependent on dollars and their stable growth value. 

One large factor reinforcing foreign investment in the dollar system-- and so making it more invitational than just a trap-- is that returns, profit returns, interest rates, are better in the US, and in the dollar system than anywhere else. This is attributable (significantly, if to an uncertain degree) to reduced labor claims on corporate profits (which US economists refer to euphemistically as "higher productivity") in the US. Likewise, the priority placed on "share value" in the stock market reinforces this anti-union, anti-labor, anti-government bias in the US, which makes foreign investment more lucrative than places where labor (and/or the state) take a bigger piece of the pie. This is particularly so in other developed capitalist states like Germany or Singapore or Norway or Japan, etc. 

So in a terribly dreary twist domestic inequality, living wages, public infrastructure, are casualties to a booming dollar system; and so foreign investment in the dollar is hedged by domestic austerity measures for workers and the public good, health care, environment, whatever, in the US. You know, all that "waste, fraud, and abuse" stuff. In the ultimate boomerang that which makes the dollar invitational to foreign investors makes it an austerity trap, the "dollar trap" at home, for labor and the caring economy in the US. 

It's also possible global use of the dollar is viewed more as a debt "trap" or lucrative "invitation" based on global asset positions. In modern times until maybe two decades ago the amount of foreign assets owned by the US and foreign ownership of US assets was more or less equal. Since then the imbalance has shifted dramatically towards foreign ownership of US assets exceeding US investment in foreign assets by nearly $29 trillion. This is not like Trump's crude Tariff obsession with balance of trade numbers that leave out lots of relevant economic exchange. The claim here is that the imbalance in foreign assets works against the value of the "invitation" and increases the sense that investment in the dollar system is a "trap" that foreign states will look for ways to escape. 

My general understanding, woefully limited, is that the dollar system has proven remarkably resilient because ultimately it makes global trade easier and more profitable than the Euro or China's RMB or any other currency and has been doing so since WW2. There is some stabilizing hegemonic power in a single currency system that is conducive to global growth and prosperity, or let's say the belief that it does possess this power has survived some pretty big disruptions, which includes on and off non-stop Cold Wars and getting off gold in 1972. 

But will the dollar system survive Trump? Can labor and the caring economy ever escape the dollar trap? Can the dollar stay relevant in the global energy transition of the 21st c if the US opposes and cuts investment in that transition? Stay tuned to Professor Tooze to find out, he of a comically pompous accent is in no way to blame for my crude misinterpretations of his super interesting work.

*- Reportedly, Grump likes this economics proverb as well and relates it in his speeches this way: "If you owe the bank a million dollars, you got a debt problem. But if you owe the bank a billion you actually own the bank." In business terms Trump has always wanted to be a chip off the old block. Using size and scale of business projects to extort concessions and profits from other smaller stakeholders is a business model specialized in by his father the real estate developer, Fred Trump 

Solar Power Boom Times in Global Economy

 Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this [unprecedented expansion in solar energy production] is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:

• It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.

• That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.

• Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.

• In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

• Meanwhile, battery-storage capability has increased seventy-six per cent, based on this year’s projected estimates; at night, those batteries are often the main supplier of California’s electricity. As the director of reliability analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation put it, in the CleanTechnica newsletter, “batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.” As a result, California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.

• Texas is now installing renewable energy and batteries faster than California; in a single week in March, it set records for solar and wind production as well as for battery discharge. In May, when the state was hit by a near-record-breaking early-season heat wave, air-conditioners helped create a record demand on the grid, which didn’t blink—more than a quarter of the power came from the sun and wind. Last week’s flooding tragedy was a reminder of how vulnerable the state is to extreme weather, especially as water temperatures rise in the Gulf, producing more moisture in the air; in late June, the director of the state’s utility system said that the chances of emergency outages had dropped from sixteen per cent last summer to less than one per cent this year, mostly because the state had added ten thousand megawatts of solar power and battery storage. That, he said, “puts us in a better position.”

• All this is dwarfed by what’s happening in China, which currently installs more than half the world’s renewable energy and storage within its own borders, and exports most of the solar panels and batteries used by the rest of the world. In May, according to government records, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. The pace was apparently paying off—analysts reported that, in the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased; emissions linked to producing electricity fell nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal. In 2024, almost half the automobiles sold in China, which is the world’s largest car market, were full or hybrid electric vehicles. And China’s prowess at producing cheap solar panels (and E.V.s) means that nations with which it has strong trading links—in Asia, Africa, South America—are seeing their own surge of renewable power.

• In South America, for example, where a decade ago there were plans to build fifteen new coal-fired power plants, as of this spring there are none. There’s better news yet from India, now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and most populous nation, where data last month showed that from January through April a surge in solar production kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter. But even countries far from Beijing are making quick shifts. Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.

• Over the past fifteen years, the Chinese became so skilled at building batteries—first for cellphones, then cars, and now for entire electric systems—that the cost of energy storage has dropped ninety-five per cent. On July 7th, a round of bidding between battery companies to provide storage for Chinese utilities showed another thirty per cent drop in price. Grid-scale batteries have become so large that they can power whole cities for hours at a time; in 2025, the world will add eighty gigawatts of grid-scale storage, an eightfold increase from 2021. The U.S. alone put up four gigawatts of storage in the first half of 2024.

Bill McKibben @ NY-er

So astonishingly positive of a story I'm still looking for cracks thinking they got to be there, right? 

What about the Chinese dominated rare earth minerals, lithium, mining elements I really know nothing about but thought I understood were essential to solar panel production? Isn't their scarcity a big obstacle? (Isn't their scarcity why Grump is talking about taking over Greenland and Canada?) Nope. Some think with rapid gains in solar technology all the minerals needed will be mined and circulating in the global economy by 2050. To produce the solar power needed will require transitioning about half the corn fields of the midwest to solar but this would not threaten food security and is quite doable, infers McKibben; depending on how the voters in Iowa feel about this, I cautiously suppose. 

One of the most striking parts of this explosion in solar technology story is how wrong the forecasters have gotten this growth. Fifteen years ago conventional economic wisdom said solar would never be cheap enough to be viable in free markets. McKibben shares that the closest forecasts to the meteoric growth in solar have come not from industry, who have obstructed green energy development at every step, but from environmentalists and even they underestimated the scales of the growth noted above. 

China is obviously leading this boom and transition. Maybe one of the most hopeful aspects of this story is how in the real economy there's all kinds of evidence of open trade and cooperation between China and the US and other parts of the world expanding solar together. 

That's not what we get from the current gov and in a lot of media, which tends to framing the relationship between the US and China as always adversarial, win/lose, zero sum, the new cold war 2.0 battle of world superpowers. 

For instance, the republicans are actually doubling down on drill baby drill, as if in direct opposition to China's green energy boom. But is there any long game to this strategy beyond garish TV/online spectacle fueled by Big Oil? I did semi-recently learn in some Vaclav Smil books that some material production will likely resist or be more difficult to transition off fossil fuels, like heavy metals, steel, military weapons, airplanes. If this still holds, maybe Grump's braintrust figures they've lost the coming green energy economy so they are banking instead on fossil fuels to retain significant power in the coming century, particularly because of their likely long-run importance to military production. 

It would certainly make sense the US would have to maintain a solid position in fossil fuel production until the relevant national security questions are resolved. Still not clear why this strategic position would require hostile attacks on alternative energy production that benefits everyone? 

Except as a crony capitalist gift to Big Oil! 

So much of Grump 2.0 appears so incompetent and destructive, so obviously fueled by hysterical racist panic that it is hard to imagine how it can last or even survive the disasters it only seems to know how to make worse. Like attacks on FEMA?! Why would anyone oppose FEMA helping people in weather disasters?   

I don't know but on the bright side it appears solar energy production is booming in spite of all the opposition and beyond anyone's predictions. And decarbonizing our energy system remarkably quickly. 

Yay for our side: Future humanity!  

Laughing to Keep from Crying

I'd forgotten how important the Colbert Report and Daily Show were for getting me through the Bush years and beyond. Truth is I've never been able to take conservative media straight, ever; too cruel and enraging and bad for my peace of mind. I need filters. So I've gone back to watching Colbert's opening monologues for his Late Show. These days they're almost always about the latest stupid affront to human decency perpetrated by the current regime and make it easier to laugh when you might otherwise feel like crying. Clearly a fan favorite are Colbert's impressions, mostly of Grump, but this one includes a hilariously spot on rendition of Bernie Sanders. For some much needed comic relief to our rolling disaster, I would like to suggest. 

Likewise, I feel increasingly out of step with my age cohort on Israel and Palestine. When a longtime favorite music writer issued a hysterical post about the protests on college campuses against the war in Gaza last year I felt initially some sympathy for his obvious duress as a Jew but also felt increasingly alienated by the intransigence of his position. I believe Israel has a right to exist; I believe it has a right to defend itself against the violent attacks of its Arab Muslim neighbors. But I don't think it has a right to settler colonize the West Bank, or even the Muslim sections of Jerusalem, which it has been doing for decades. And I don't think it is has the right to indiscriminately bomb civilian targets in Gaza, as part of any military mission to remove Hamas, or win the return of hostages; and which, let's stipulate, nearly two years later has NOT achieved either of those goals but has resulted in over 50,000 deaths, many women and children, and, I'm sorry to say, at this point looks exactly like a genocidal terror campaign to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Arabs and Muslims. That is fucked up and wrong. And, of course, we shouldn't be harassing and jailing or even deporting people in the US for protesting Israel's war in Gaza. One of my go-to journalist sources, Josh Marshall @ TPM (might be behind a paywall; so subscribe, essential perspective on the news), shared the other day the longwinded reflections of a Jewish friend, worried about the impact of Mamdani's possible election as mayor of NYC. Not as hysterical as my music writer last year but my takeaway from this person's remarks was more or less the same: any opposition or protest of Israel or Zionism or Judaism has its way, even if unintended, of expanding antisemitism and so random violence and acts of terror against Jews. Maybe. There is certainly no lack of evidence of that in history. And I do think that terrible history does lend credibility to Zionism, the Jewish aspiration for a national homeland, even when I don't think Ethnonationalism as a rule is a very good idea. But this history can't exempt or pardon Israel from turning that same kind of violence and terror on others. Obviously, that is not okay and, equally obviously, it is only isolating Israel in the world. I hope Mamdani can reassure the Jewish community in NYC, while not abandoning the plight of Palestinians, because, to me, a Muslim-American mayor of NYC, the most populous center of Jewry outside Israel, a Muslim-American mayor that allies with Jews like Lander, and one that opposes all violence and war and terror in the Middle East between Muslims and Jews, might be in fact one of the best things that could possibly happen to the Israel vs Palestine conflict, or outside Israel anyway. Netanyahu is all pumped up with Israel's recent military success but Israel can't bomb their way out of their problems with their neighbors. Maybe some cooperation between Muslim and Jewish Americans can demonstrate a better way.   

Anyway, now that I've heard Mamdani speak a little I'd have to say he sure doesn't sound like an antisemitic terrorist to me. Hear him for yourself. 

Thomas Piketty Urges Dems to Turn Working Class Left

There is this now somewhat buried but nevertheless enduring and corrosive factional conflict amongst Dems going back to the 2016 primaries (at least). It is between Bernie Sanders leftists/democratic socialists and Hilary Clinton's moderate/centrist corporate elites. In its most caricature form, back when I was on Facebook/Twitter, Bernie Bros vs HRC's "Me Too" Pussyhats. Now it's Bernie/Warren/AOC, "stop the genocide in Gaza," progressive Dems vs corporate DNC septuagenarian plus pro-crypto Dems. My sympathies have always been more with the good gov "dirtbag left" (read: poor or in sympathy with the multicultural working poor) Berniecrats but I voted for HRC in '16 without hesitation. 

And some of this partisan circular firing squad stuff is probably inescapable after a electoral loss but nevertheless it drives me nuts how much of a self-defeating distraction it becomes when the contest that unites us is violent bigot fascism and monstrously corrupt corporate oligarchy. So I tend to avoid these squabbles like the plague. But looking up something about Thomas Piketty (my favorite academic economist) I found this story from 2018. Some reporting from Salon's Keith A. Spencer's about Piketty's take on this enduring factional Dem debate. In brief: 

"Left" parties — e.g. the Democrats in the United States, Labour in the U.K. or the Socialist Party in France — have lost the constituencies they once supported [working class people] and now appeal to the [educated and wealthy] elites, leaving a vast underclass politically unrepresented and rudderless," and, I might add, easy prey to reactionary bigots hating on whatever cultural scapegoats they are hating on this year,  and violent crackdown style law and order made-for-TV bullshit.

Piketty @ Salon 

But do I really think Bernie could have beat Trump in 2016? I doubt it. But do I think the Dem leadership's on and off hostility towards the progressive left wing of the party was/is, basically, proxy for the DNC's resistance to taking clear progressive positions on working class priorities like living wages, health care for all, and other basic cost of living measures because their big corporate billionaire donors don't want them to? Absolutely. 

The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. 

BBC

Is bringing Fordism back even possible?

"At its core, the promise of Trumpism, at least in its idealized forms, is supposed to be all about the idea that working people have gotten screwed by a rigged economy for a half-century, and that to rectify this, Trump will end the elite gaming of it. But the new tax break for wealthy investors smuggled into the GOP bill—the same one that takes a hatchet to programs benefiting working people—perfectly epitomizes exactly this sort of elite rigging." - Greg Sargent, The New Republic

"The model used to be that of Henry Ford, mass production and ruthless efficiency to create high quality cheap cars with low profit margins, underpinned by machine tooling. You’d get rich by deploying a lot of capital, selling a lot of units, and being ruthless about productive efficiency. Today, the model is to do something that doesn’t require a lot of investment, so software or advertising or finance, essentially leveraging someone else’s capital. To do something like make screws for a low margin, you can just go to China, which seeks lower returns on capital. Indeed, we’ve been leveraging China’s capital for a long time.

There are many downsides to our model, but one of them is that high profit margins without discipline ends up causing bloat. Procurement consultant Rich Ham described the dynamic in corporate America, which is wildly inefficient, masked by excessive and persistent profit margins.

All of these dynamics are a result of law. I’ve gone over this dynamic many times, the basic idea is that a lot of the policies we implement, like strong patent rights, financial deregulation, and low corporate tax rates, are designed to ensure very high profits on any dollar of invested capital. Just having skilled labor and machine tooling around doesn’t fit in that model...."

Matt Stoller @ BIG

From a Fordist manufacturing economy to financial speculation economy, a process hastened by neoliberal financial deregulations during the 1980s and '90s. This really happened. 

But I'm much less sure about the possibility of any big revival in manufacturing. Some manufacturing in chips, weapons production, medications, stuff like that will be revived, a process that was already started by Biden. Big corporations have been offshoring their cheap labor needs since the 1980s and now it turns out some of that manufacturing should be done here for national security reasons. That will increase manufacturing jobs some. But manufacturing jobs as a percentage of all available jobs appears to be falling everywhere, like agriculture before it. Thomas Friedman talks about the development of dark factories in China, so automated they operate without lighting. Bringing back the motor city manufacturing boom of the mid-20th century is probably not realistic.  

Nonetheless, the neolib rationales for NAFTA and the rest of the globalizing free trade agreements were always bad. Basically, stiffing the working classes, wage workers, laborers, to goose corporate expansion in global trade. Move American labor up the value chain, offshore cheap manufacturing labor for better jobs in global trade and the financial sector, the free trade economic rationale went. It sounded good if you didn't think about it too much but it didn't pan out, unfortunately. One job in trade and finance was added for every four living wage union jobs in manufacturing were lost; and a Great Lakes rust belt grew to eventually engulf nearly all the flyover states. 

And, sure, blame the Dems for NAFTA. They contributed to this corporate fascist mess we're in for sure. Weak, dithering, sold out, Lucy and the football, all there, but still never as cravenly bigoted and corrupt as the repugs. Or not since Nixon at least, anyway. 

I've heard a Trump voter insist that Trump may do some bad stuff, hurt people's feelings, but he's not as bad as the Dems. My own view could not be more polar opposite of this Trump voter; another example of the extreme political polarization Ezra Klein talked about in his last book. The cruelty may be popular but not with me and, I'd argue, it does not promote economic prosperity or law and order and will never make America great again. 

At any rate, to believe Trump or the republicans will revive living wage jobs or reduce the cost of living for working people even if they could is preposterous and so oblivious to the actual historical record or positions republicans have taken on jobs and wages and reducing the cost of living for workers since, I don't know, forever?! 

Workers have been screwed by a rigged economy over the last half century. But to imagine Trump as someone who is going to end the elite-gaming of the economy?! He is the aristocratic progeny of the elite-gaming of the economy. He is a Frankestein creation of the neoliberal rigged-economy. 

He promised to drain the swamp but that isn't even his biggest hit, either. His greatest hit is obviously blaming the rigged economy on an invasion of non-white immigrants and foreigners ripping us off. The Christian Nationalists and rural bigots love scapegoating people, immigrants, LGBTQ+, women, the poor, and Grump is the bigot insult artist as Reality TV POTUS. These regular skits they're doing now with foreign dignitaries are talk show grotesques but, apparently, playing well enough with his X/Fox base. 

And the anti-DEI stuff is pathetic. White supremacists always have to be punching down at somebody to reassure themselves that they're above somebody else. This might be the essence of the paranoid style in conservatism. It goes way back in American history but has perhaps never been so popular or so big of threat to democracy and the rule of law. 

MAGA Might Makes Right vs Catholic Golden Rule:

New Pope Leo XIV Greets Trump World  

"[VP JD] Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “[Y]ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” When right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, who is Catholic, posted Vance’s interview approvingly, Vance added: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.”

On February 10, Pope Francis responded in a letter to American bishops. He corrected Vance’s assertion as a false interpretation of Catholic theology. “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

“[W]orrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth,” Pope Francis wrote. He acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but defended the fundamental dignity of every human being and the fundamental rights of migrants, noting that the “rightly formed conscience” would disagree with any program that “identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He continued: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”

The new Pope Leo XIV greeted the world today in Italian and Spanish as he thanked Pope Francis and the other cardinals, and called for the church to “be a missionary Church, building bridges, dialogue, always open to receiving with open arms for everyone…, open to all, to all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love…, especially to those who are suffering.”

Letters from an American Historian

My parents never took us to church. Or, well, they sent us to this Baptist week-long day camp one summer but I think that was mostly just to get us out of the house. I remember coloring pictures of Jesus but no music. With some music they might have had a better chance at making me a believer. I like some gospel music. The Soul Stirrers from the 1950s: peak rock & roll era vocal group tightness. That Harry Smith gospel stuff from the late 1920s early 1930s. The Old, [Awesomely] Weird America in Sister Mary Nelson's "Judgment" (1927). Mahalia Jackson on Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige (1943). Achingly beautiful. I did attend a few Catholic masses with relatives and friends, several in Latin which made them feel impressive and a little scary to me as a little kid. And then as a bigger kid a little tedious sitting in the balcony of a 5 o'clock Saturday mass with a buddy so we didn't have to get up early on Sunday after partying like it was 1999 the night before. Of course, the Catholic church should immediately make transparent efforts to expose and root out the sexual abuse of children in the church. And then probably have one of their conclaves reevaluating the priestly vows of celibacy. Anyway, my point, I've got my gripes with the Catholic church. Opposition to birth control to me is barbaric and an assault on the basic individual rights of women. But in this battle I'm rooting for Pope Francis and Pope Leo standing up for poor migrants and refugees. The Catholic church is the last cultural remnant of the Roman Empire, and before it took over the empire it was a refuge to those who were marginalized and left behind and lived on the fringes of the empire. And here they are a millennia and a half later still speaking up for the suffering and speaking out against criminalizing people for their immigration status. I like that.    

The Darwin Awards Apocalypse:

From Techno-Optimism to Warlord Techno-Feudalism 

"Musk believes that humans must colonize Mars in order to become a multiplanetary species as insurance against the end of life on Earth. On Monday he explained to Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel that eventually the Earth will be incinerated by an expanding sun, so humans must move to other planets to survive. In 2016, Musk predicted that humans would start landing on Mars in 2025, but in the Watters interview he revised his prediction to possibly 2029 but more likely 2031.

Critics note that while it is true the sun is expanding, the change is not expected to affect the Earth for another 5 billion years. As a frame of reference, humans evolved from their predecessors about 300,000 years ago.

Musk has the power of the United States government behind him. In December, Trump nominated Musk associate and billionaire Jared Isaacman to become the next head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Senate has not yet confirmed Isaacman, but the Republican-dominated Senate Commerce Committee advanced his nomination last week. The president’s proposed budget, released Friday, calls for cutting about 25% of NASA’s funding—about $6 billion—and giving $1 billion of the money remaining to initiatives focused on Mars.

Musk is trying to make Starlink dominate the Earth’s communications, a dominance that would give him enormous power, as he suggested last month when he noted that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” In April, Trump delayed the rural broadband program in what appeared to be an attempt to shift the program toward Starlink, and today Tom Perkins of The Guardian reported that the administration is going to end federal research into space pollution, which is building up alarmingly in the stratosphere owing in part to Musk’s satellites.

The attempt to gain control over artificial intelligence and human communication networks regardless of the cost to ordinary Americans might have a larger theme. As technology forecaster Paul Saffo points out, tech oligarchs led by technology guru Curtis Yarvin have called for a new world order that rejects the nation states around which humans have organized their societies for almost 400 years. They call instead for “network states” organized around technology that permits individuals to group around a leader in cyberspace without reference to real-world boundaries, a position Starlink’s terms of service appear to reflect.

Mastering artificial intelligence while dominating global communications would go a long way toward breaking down existing nations and setting up the conditions for a brave new world, dominated by tech oligarchs."

Letters from an American Historian 

This reads like a mad comic book bid for world domination. As if rewriting Zager & Evans 1969 number one hit, and comically dreary apocalyptic ballad, "In the Year 2525," as "In the Year 2025." They couldn't wait! Musk removing scientific research capacities to make room for AI technologies that don't yet exist is potentially the Darwin Awards winner to beat them all. What happens if the AI can't replace the scientists or the research they do? How many lives will be lost or setback because of this disruption in basic research? Of course such alarm is dismissed by the other side as a variation on TDS and rooting against America. But, actually, I'm rooting for America and against the country turning into a handful of ethnonationalist High tech corporate warlord island gulags. In 25 years of teaching I never shared the alarm raised at times about the moral direction of young people. If anything, I'd say the Millennials and Gen Z kids I taught seemed less frivolous and more generous than my generation. But the emergence of Musk as a icon to the young, so popular he might have swung the election to Trump, is very alarming. Particularly so because as his stature as a public figure has risen it has become increasingly evident to me that, like Trump, he can be a profoundly arrogant idiot. And that many young men believe in and admire this guy as a world building futurist is tragic and hateful. His thing against USAID is sick and inhumane. His support for white supremacy and Nazism repulsive. Apparently, he's a driven high tech production manager; achieving market dominance first in EVs and now satellites. If ever there was a good reason to ask someone to stay in their own lane, enforce some antitrust, and  leave the politics and moral leadership to others, this would be one such case. In Musk the fantasy of absolute private property and technological automation have fused. He makes greedy Robber Barons of old appear relatively benign. 

How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate By Isabella Weber (2021)

"Shock therapy" is a form of market liberalization, or privatization, ripping off the bandaid of government meddling in the economy and ending state control of the economy with one Big Bang. No half-way measures, no incrementalism; "Let's get rid of all regulations so we can get something done!" The tariff trade war being perpetrated by the Trump regime right now actually obscures understanding Musk's DOGE and the Christian Nationalist's Project 2025, slashing consumer protections, disarming the IRS, eliminating government services, as essentially radical privatizing economic shock therapy projects; perhaps the biggest ever embarked on. 

Some irony then that here's a relatively little book, an economic history study, contending, basically, that China escaping the adoption of economic shock therapy in the 1980s, avoiding the policies being pursued by the current US regime, was crucial to building one of the greatest economic growth spurts in the world since the launch of the industrial revolution.   

Shock therapy economics emerged originally as a quick-fix strategy for transitioning from a "planned economy" to a "market economy" in the crude binary that dominated conventional economic thinking and became entrenched in the Cold War of the 20th century. It was a branded package of austerity economics promoted by economic theory heavyweights like the University of Chicago school of Economics, Milton Friedan, and marketed to communist or socialist states, any state really, looking for ways to open and grow their economies. And as such it was a hot topic of market reform debates in China in the decade following Deng Xiaoping's opening of China in 1978. 

Actually, to step back for a moment, austerity economics like shock therapy-- i.e., campaigns to cut public spending and reduce democratic oversight of the private economy-- are not new and go back at least to the 19th century beginnings of the modern economy. They kick-in whenever capital, the rich,  feel threatened by democratic pressures and government reforms; popular suffrage, labor organization, minimum wage laws, environmental regulations, antitrust, anything that might impede maximizing private profits and wealth. In WW1, 1914-1919, governments naturally expanded involvement in their economies, organizing production for the "total war" effort. This improved working conditions for labor, and after the war workers pressured big employers and the government for better wages and job security. In response, big business elites, in Italy, Great Britain, and to one degree or another nearly everywhere in the developed world, launched austerity campaigns to discredit these democratic demands for better working conditions as budget busters, socialism, etc. 

The Reagan Revolution, 1980 to the present or until proven otherwise, bent on deregulation, disarming antitrust enforcement, tax cuts for the rich, hostility to labor organization, was another such campaign of austerity economics and has resulted so far in the redistributive transfer of 50 trillion dollars of wealth from the bottom 90% of the income scale to the top 1% of Billionaires. 

During the industrial revolution, from 1800 to the present, whenever labor asks for a raise and/or a government asks private industry to pay their fair share for the development of basic public infrastructure they are condemned as anti-business, overreaching sound Laissez-faire or "free market" principles, and offered instead some austerity economics. The only state or public spending capital, or Wall Street, likes are contracts with private industry and strong police and militaries to protect their massive holdings in private wealth. 

Shock therapy, specifically, a radical Big Bang austerity project to expand private control of the economy, grew out of neoliberal reforms developed at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB); both established after WW2 to promote global economic development. In the 1960s and '70s the IMF/WB peddled Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP)'s to member borrowing states. As an end-run around the Group of 77 and the growing democratic influence of Global South countries in the UN General Assembly, and as a condition for loans, states receiving IMF/WB funding were required to aggressively privatize public utilities and other public assets and eliminate or dramatically reduce or pull back on taxing and regulating capital, implementing price controls, and supporting labor organization. The World Trade Organization (WTO), formed in 1995 ostensibly to update and replace the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade or GATT (1948), but, again, formed essentially to get around the growing democratic pressures of states in the Global South has promoted privatization and shock therapy since it began operation.

The market fundamentalist ideas behind shock therapy economic policies are relatively simple, if increasingly in gobsmacking contradiction to reality. Privatizing public assets, letting private industry drive the economy unfettered by government interference leads to more economic expansion and modernizing technological development. This philosophy of political economy has gone by numerous names in the modern period, classical liberal economics, Laissez-faire, free market capitalism, ordoliberalism, neoliberalism, and probably others I don't know or I'm forgetting. But why I say they contradict reality is because the historical record increasingly indicates all these so-called "free market" regimes promote hoarding, monopoly, oligarchy, class war transfers of wealth, endemic exploitation of labor and plutocracy, corporatist state authoritarianism, and, yes, even fascism and Nazis, all of these things before and over general economic prosperity, in nearly every historical instance.  

Isabella Weber's relatively humble case in How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is that China's state-directed growth spurt between 1980 and 2020, better known as "China's economic miracle," is at least in part, significantly, attributable to China escaping privatizing capital shock therapy policies in the crucial 1980s.  

In the middle of the 1980s China held several international economic conferences to address market reforms. China wanted to expand economically and develop technologically, and had been moving in that direction since Deng's first big visit to the US in 1979. The conferences in China were attended by WB/IMF officials, conservative economist Milton Friedman and his entourage, the usual suspects in international finance, including Eastern European states like Yugoslavia, all making pitches to the Chinese leadership in Beijing to privatize their economy with shock therapy economic reforms. And no doubt all the while drooling at the prospects of getting more access to China's potentially massive markets. 

So how did China escape the shock therapy onslaught? Scholars at an economic research institute in China set up by Deng reviewed shock therapy doctrine and concluded it was too preoccupied with hypothetical principles and ignored real economic impacts. Unfettered capital pitted private property against the state and encouraged self-dealing capitalist corruption. These Chinese economists promoted, instead, pragmatic, incrementalist, "crossing the river by touching the stones" market reforms.  

Scholars dug into Chinese history. They studied closely "The Discourses on Salt and Iron," appearing in the 1st century BCE during the Han Dynasty, and recognized price stability as crucial to sustained economic development. They found evidence of the rudiments of a dual pricing system going all the way back to the Shang Dynasty and the second millennia BCE. They noted persuasively that China prioritized, from its imperial beginnings, price stability over unfettered growth on the principle that wild swings in prices and jobs generated social unrest and depressed commerce.

They found a tradition in Chinese history of separating commodities into Heavy and Light categories. Heavy commodities, like salt and iron, like grains, were in heavy demand (or inelastic demand), everyone needed them, and so people, communities, were very vulnerable to sharp changes in the prices or supply of these commodities. And so the state took a role in stabilizing these Heavy markets; maintaining stable prices and supply. They did this less by price controls as we think of them today, although they did use them to set strategic boundaries constituting fair trade, but stabilized markets more by state procurement, or reserves, of the given Heavy commodity sufficient to offset fluctuations in private prices and supply. When private supplies in grain ran low, and prices rose, for instance, the state would release more grain reserves into the market; when supply exceeded demand, and prices fell, the state would purchase more grains to hold in their reserves. 

In this way China's state protected consumers from price gouging and other manipulations of private profiteers. Most commodities, the far longer list, were designated Light commodities and required no state interventions or fewer and looser price controls. When you get into the weeds it should be noted that some commodities moved between the Heavy and Light categories by the season and over time the Heavy commodities list, rice replacing millet, for example, evolved, naturally. But the position of the state in this tradition of Chinese economics remains a constant, trying to protect people from predatory greed and the wild swings of the market. 

My overall sense after reading Weber's study is that the pressures to privatize and deregulate the Chinese economy in the 1980s were particularly intense and consequential to China's subsequent economic boom but the neoliberalizing pressures never really stop. Weber, late in the book, references slackening price controls, enacted in the early 1990s that precipitated some wild swings in inflation and social hardships. The formal dual track pricing system was given up by 1989 but by then Weber makes the case they had already established a big state role in stabilizing the markets for so-called Heavy commodities, which was a shifting but relatively short list. 

Weber's biggest claim, or one I'm giving her anyway, is China's resistance to full-on Big Bang shock therapy privatizing market reform in this crucial historical moment, coming to head in two big international economic conferences held in China in the 1980s, was also likely very crucial to China's big modernizing push, enabled state-guided economic growth in China, industrial policy, "market socialism with Chinese characteristics," to reach a scale and resiliency that enabled it to effectively resist being taken over by private global financial interests. 

And resulted, let's remind ourselves, in a state-directed growth spurt between 1980 and 2020 that rivals any in modern economic history; growing by 10% a year when overall average annual growth rates in GNP around the world over the same period hover around 2.8-3.0. And led to China's global dominance in nearly every technology relevant to the coming 21st centuries energy transition: solar, wind, rare earths and battery technology, and EVs. 

China still puts significant limits on capital flows, again, seeing the unlimited flow of capital from outside China as a potential threat to China's political independence, presumably. 

In the first period of the opening, the 1980s, they were very careful about how they setup the first market reform zones, special economic zones (SEZs), the biggest one setup next to Hong Kong and another across from Taiwan; both in southern China, far from Beijing, the center of Chinese political power. Expanding the freedom of capital to flow first into these SEZs, experimentally, and then incrementally outward from there. They were wildly successful almost immediately but did unleash a lot of capitalist hustle and corruption.  

I've heard in recent commentary that China's limits on capital flows in and out of China have made it harder for China to expand the global trade in yuan/renminbi as a global reserve currency, as a viable alternative to the dollar or euros. Global investors want more liquidity, confidence they can cash out their assets in China whenever they want, and China doesn't want to be subject to extortion by global capital. It's in the news again but it's an old tension; and one, again, it should be noted very likely closely associated with China's tremendous economic growth over the last forty plus years. 

China, or Deng Xioaping, set out in the late 1970s to build a market socialism that worked, expanded, and prospered, but didn't threaten the authority of the central political state or China's sovereignty. They were wildly successful on the economic side of this equation but much less so on the political side, where Xi Jinping is now paramount leader for life and Uyghurs in western China live and work in or near concentration camps. 

This is Weber's first book. I first heard of her via Zachary Carter, my favorite Keynes biographer. And she's recently appeared in the news by helping the Biden admin deal with inflation. To offset rising oil prices triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and abetted by Saudi Arabia, the Biden admin released strategic oil reserves in 2022 or 2023, bringing back down the price of gas or at least mitigating the impact of Russia and Saudi Arabia's weaponized gas inflation against Bidenomics and the US. But when Weber's part in these policy actions first got out, Paul Krugman, the most popular economist in the US, called her an idiot. He was apologizing shortly thereafter but it's another illustration of the orthodox economic reflex against price controls and industrial policy, and the mainstream economic bias against the caring economy and essential government services and state capacity to build in America. It's a problem; I know I keep repeating myself.  

Meanwhile, we'll see how shock therapy economics works out this time for the US. 

Footnotes: 

1. First, pulling back again to world history scales, if you ask me, you have to add China's Century of Humiliation, 1850-1950, as relevant and crucial here to understanding Weber's study. China felt ripped off by the West and Japan in the 19th century; and has felt so since the Opium Wars with Britain in the 1840s and "unequal treaties" allowing imperialist nations to run nearly all China's biggest port cities and foreign trade until after WW2. Foremost, I think, China's resistance to shock therapy economics and "free market" shock doctrine is rooted in their deep suspicion that such foreign ideas can be threats to Chinese sovereignty and independence, as Western ideas and foreign relations have been in the past. Deng Xiaoping's strong hand and general Chinese wariness were a ballast moderating the market fundamentalist pressures coming from outside (and inside) China. Deng's aim was to open China one step at at time, without ever compromising China's sovereignty and political independence. His intolerance for political dissent was too harsh and illiberal but his state support for economic and technological development, research, and education were astonishingly effective and productive. 

2. Still, any study of China's economics comes up against how much economics are influenced by China's police state crackdowns on political dissent. Many of China's liberalizing economic reformers, those on the side of shock therapy reforms, found themselves on the wrong side of the authorities in the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square during demonstrations in 1989. And it's not clear at all that the crackdown was necessary; there was no evidence of any organized armed uprising against the state. Up close it appears what protesting college students wanted most was more control over choosing their own career paths. They showed no interest in handing China's independence over to multinational corporations; they appeared as committed to overcoming the Century of Humiliation as any previous Chinese generation. But to the communist party leadership in China, Deng Xiaoping, masses of street protesters were a political threat. Overall the crackdown didn't even slow economic development in China much or for very long but it did draw a red line suggesting that economic reforms would not be allowed to challenge or threaten political authority in China. It subordinated economic power to political power, a political power that did not tolerate political dissent, could brutally disregard basic human rights, and still agitates against international standards on human rights and democracy today. Nor is it clear China has solved the problem of poverty and inequality domestically, by any stretch. But China has been exceptionally successful at fostering economic growth and technological development. It's something of a paradox, perhaps, but one that deserves more of our attention, not less. 

3. Worth noting also that Weber insists on this deep historical tradition in Chinese economics; its conception of the role of the state in economics: that, in the main, Chinese state economics prioritizes price stability over market freedoms. Weber takes a detour in her discussion of the market reform debates in the 1980s to point out that China maintained relative price stability in the inflationary aftermath of WW2 far better than Ludwig Erhard's "Economic Miracle" in West Germany during the same period, the latter a cherished model of shock therapy trumpeted by Friedman and neoliberals to this day. A year or two into Erhard's so-called miracle Berlin was rocked by inflation rates over 20% and suffering brutal poverty before abandoning the privatizing obsession for price controls and social democratic reforms; by the early '60s Erhard is already denying there was any liberalizing shock therapy economic miracle in West Germany at all. But Friedman and the neoliberals would rather go with the legend, of course. Which when you get down to it might be most of what market fundamentalist economics, neoliberalism, Econ 101, continues to run on. Myth and legend.  

4. Naomi Klein's 2007 book Shock Doctrine chronicles the disastrous results of shock therapy in Chile in the '70s and Russia in the '90s. Friedman's Chicago School, the neoliberal braintrust in the US at the time, working with the CIA, fomented a military coup that overthrew a democratically elected government in Chile. In Russia selling off public assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union subsidized the rise of a corporate oligarchy that brought to heel by Putin undermined democracy in Russia, generating a political system that How Democracies Die's Steven Levitsky calls "competitive authoritarianism," and what everyone else calls a murderous dictatorship. And, needless to point out, serves as a model to the current regime in the US. Klein's book is a big takedown of shock therapy economics and a brilliant example of investigative journalism. But her admittedly sensational account got a lot of pushback from mainstream economists at the time, castigating it as muckraking journalism depending on economic over-simplifications. None of the economic criticism I've seen is very convincing but I'm just a poor retired school teacher partial to New Deal social democratic economic reforms. The reaction, though, does encapsulate for me, again, the reigning power of free market dogma amongst economic policy elites and the populist Chamber of Commerce mob. The prevailing binary formula since the 1980s goes something like this: 

Deregulation, tax cuts, free (legally unfettered) capital=Pro-economic growth. 

Consumer protections, living wages, and regulations/environmental reforms=Anti-economic growth. 

It's becoming increasingly obvious this is a ridiculously false choice but money talks and here we are. 

5. At any rate, this last bit about Klein raises a question about who is a an academic economist that might appreciate the insights in Weber's study and corroborate the critique of the shock doctrine and has their own interesting takes on the real history of shock therapy economics, neoliberalism, and economic privatization being discussed here? Here's one: Ha-Joon Chang! Scholar at Cambridge for over thirty years, long time consultant to the World Bank and other international economic development agencies. Chang's like the Mr. Roger's of liberal economic development and reform. He unpacks and gently demolishes various "free market" orthodoxy in Bad Samaritans (2008) and many other delightfully readable economics books; Kicking Away the Ladder (2002) and 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (2010) being only two more I've read of the over ten Chang has written on the topic. For an example of his thinking: The Asian Tiger economies since the 1960s, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, are often held up by mainstream economists as models of successful neoliberal capitalist economics. Chang argues, by contrast, that South Korea, where he grew up, and the other Asian Tigers, actually took off economically and continue to develop with lots of essential state guidance and industrial policy; tariffs protecting infant domestic industries, price controls, etc. He makes the case that so did Great Britain, and the US, in the 1800s, when they were first industrializing, but they forget this now that their principle economic aim is to sustain and extend their own dominant position in global economic markets. Anyway, I'm a fan and would recommend his books to anybody interested in the history of political-economy.  

 

Bruce and James Baldwin: "There isn't as much humanity in the world as I would like but there is enough." By "enough," they mean, enough to endure and overcome the current humanitarian and democratic and constitutional and authoritarian crisis gripping America and much of the world. Hope they're right. 

Cuts to Science Funding Are Anti-Economic Growth

The study, by a team of economists at American University’s Institute for Macroeconomic and Policy Analysis, is among the first efforts to quantify the risks posed by Mr. Trump’s cuts. Because the full extent of the administration’s plans is not yet clear, the researchers studied a range of scenarios.

Even the mildest approach — a 25 percent reduction in public support for research and development — would correlate to a drop in economic output.

U.S. gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, would be 3.8 percent smaller in the long term — a decline similar in magnitude to that in the Great Recession, which ended in 2009. The drop in output would be much more gradual than that downturn, taking place over years rather than months. But it would also be more lasting. Cuts to scientific research would sap innovation, leading to slower productivity growth and, as a result, permanently lower economic output.

The researchers estimate that a 25 percent cut to research funding would reduce government revenues 4.3 percent in the long term.

Larger funding cuts would have even greater effects. A 50 percent reduction in funding would lower gross domestic product nearly 7.6 percent, the researchers estimate, and a 75 percent cut would reduce it 11.3 percent — a larger decline than in any recession since the Great Depression.

NY Times

Economic historians argue over what contributed most to China's economic miracle between 1980 and 2010. I've read a book recently that argues a huge factor was China's refusal to adopt privatizing shock therapy policies during market reform debates that were conducted in China in the 1980s; privatizing shock therapy policies that resemble the privatizing thrust of DOGE and Project 2025 today, notably. But typically the biggest contributing factor mentioned as foundational to China's astonishing economic development is Deng Xiaoping's massive investments in education, science, and research, after taking over China in 1978. Again, near the opposite of what the republicans are doing right now. Or look to US history. The success of the industrial revolution in the US in the late 1800s is typically credited with large investments in scientific research and university education. Neolibs like to grouse about how taxes and regulations are anti-economic growth. Want to know what's really anti-economic growth: anti-science culture war politics. 

To Be Or Not To Be Equal Before The Law

"Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”- Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American Historian

Fifth Amendment: "nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"

Note, "person," doesn't have to be a "citizen." If the Grump admin ignores the law, as they are doing now, make no mistake everyone not wearing a red Maga hat is vulnerable. It is family separations all over again but scaled up now by Project 2025's culture war doomsday agenda. It starts with illegal deportations to notoriously brutal gulags in El Salvador, without any due process. We're all just supposed to go on Grump's say-so: they're all "terrorists and violent criminals," which he can't even say without an evil cartoon sneer. 

And now these degrading shit-shows in the WH are apparently going to become part of regular Trump 2 programming. Maga kayfabe. The inner circle braintrust lounging uncomfortably on couches; Grump and his guest in individual chairs, repartee so painfully awkward and smarmy and insulting I can't even watch it straight through. A gaggle of reporters on the side, the doofus chorus in The Thucydides Trap. The scene is the same as the embarrassing ambush of Zelensky a few weeks back. But this time the leader of El Salvador, Bukele, is more like a scary smart powerful drug lord in the Netflix series Narcos. Grump's new global dictatorship alliance: Russia, El Salvador, Israel, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, etc. Trump jokes with Bukele about building more prisons for our "homegrown" criminals, otherwise known as American citizens, but at this point Grump's slinging around charges of criminality at anyone or anything that opposes him. Owning the libs is everything for these guys. 

Even if the regime keeps to illegal disappearances of non-citizens we're still already living in a fascist dictatorship, and will be until further notice. The ruling regime refuses to submit to judicial review and in an aggressively dictatorship way. They could get back Abrego Garcia, of course, they admit they apprehended him mistakenly but they don't want to be told what to do by the court. We are now living under Trump's version of the "Unitary executive theory." It's like Trump still insisting on the guilt of the Central Park Five after they'd been exonerated by DNA evidence. Deporting people, anybody, citizen or not, without due process rights, is authoritarian; targeting and scapegoating groups, DEI, immigrants, women, Trans people, liberals, is fascist. Firebombing political enemies is fascist. Impeaching judges and punishing law firms that challenge your lawlessness is fascist. Courts and media and universities covering for this fake news BS is fascist. 

(As I've said before, Grump didn't invent fake news but he is its greatest practitioner. Certainly the biggest in my life time and has to be on a short list of the biggest liars in US political history.) 

Turns out it not only can happen here but is happening here right now and will go on happening until something stops what to this point has been, with the brief interruption of the Biden admin, an unstoppable force. We're now painfully dependent on the law to at least slow down his lawlessness but the law as an institution, Robert's Court, is probably more responsible for our corrupt police state trajectory than anything else, save the boss himself. 

Resistance is growing but Trump's illiberal reaction has control of crucial legal and media power centers. Most pundits insist now it comes down to the people, most of whom are too busy working and supporting families and trying to keep up with the bills to go on a general strike. But this stuff is so bad, slashing government services, slashing scientific research and education; snatching people off the streets, trampling human rights with sadistic glee. It's so bad people are already protesting in impressive numbers but what about the silent majority, the people whose politics are basically anti-politics?

It's grim but if you're a real glutton for this kind of punishment-- I am but there are much bigger gluttons, of course, real pros--consider this NY Times survey of 13 "independents" about how they think Grump is doing so far. Trigger warning: unbelievably depressing. 

I paraphrase: 

Trump is doing what he promised. At least he's doing something, Biden wasn't doing anything. Illegal immigrant violent gang members and criminals ought to be deported. But shouldn't courts confirm that those picked up are in fact violent criminals or here illegally before they are deported? Isn't due process a basic human right? These questions aren't brought up by the interviewers or the voters surveyed. Trump can be trusted on this is the confident vibe conveyed. 

Same goes for tariffs and Doge. Maybe they are going too fast but Trump is just trying to bring back good manufacturing jobs and Musk just trying to eliminate waste in government. The background historical rationale appears to be foreign countries have been ripping the US off since WW2; and business men are all government efficiency experts. As I've mentioned before, these are wildly popular sentiments with the working classes and go back to at least to the mid-20th century; even if never true and never less so than now. 

(And this isn't to suggest their aren't really foreign countries competing with the US for their own economic advantage. It goes both ways, all the time. It isn't crazy for Grump to try to get the US a better deal. It is dumb and destructive beyond belief if, however, Grump single-handedly gets countries to turn away from US trade and the dollar. And I'm not saying that there aren't foreign countries hostile to the US that have to be watched and checked by intelligence and diplomacy. But, point of fact, Trump is actually best buds with the foreign leader most hostile to the US!) 

But Trump wouldn't let Musk screw up Social Security, one of the focus group members concludes. You were not born yesterday, right? That Trump and Musk are actually destroying departments of government that protect consumers and labor or have already removed government officials whose job it is to reduce corruption and self-dealing in government, the kind of stuff the independent voter above is sure Grump would never do, gets not a peep, again, from the NY Times or any of these 13 "independent" voters.     

Trust in Trump prevails. Biden was a do-nothing and Harris a "joke." Russiagate, denying women and immigrants basic human rights, the reckless endangerment of public health, extorting Ukraine to cheat in an election, fake electors, Jan 6, selling out to Musk and billionaires, all just fake news attacks by Democrats trying to bring Trump down.

If these "independent" voters aren't cult members they are encased in a cult world, Trump World, and a conservative stranglehold on media and the courts bares much responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. Anyway, direct contact like this with Trump World can be despairing or I find it so anyway but a couple, hopefully comforting, reminders:  

1) Trump actually won by only 1.5% of the vote, and that was with a bunch of voter suppression and Musk's billions. Less than half of the electorate endorsed this tyranny and fewer still support it now. 

2) None of the stuff they are actually doing polls well; from deporting people without due process, abandoning Ukraine and Nato, trash talking our neighbors, to trade war tariffs and more tax cuts for the rich. Clear majorities oppose this stuff. Unfortunately, it appears most voters will never even realize and/or believe any of this is going on until it explodes in their faces. 

3) One voter attributed much of the current crisis to a civil war between elites, leaving the rest of us on the sidelines. This is especially true in the sense that there are many economic elites, republicans, billionaires that supported and voted for Trump, for reasons we don't need to go into here, that are waking up to a realization that Trump's control of the economy, erratic unilateral trade wars, threatening to take over the Fed, is potentially a catastrophic threat to US leadership in the global economy. (See Krugman's recent interviews with financial infrastructure super nerd Nathan Tankus.) 

Truly Trump 2 has the potential to turn into one of the biggest imperial faceplants in history. Grump is stress testing the US's super privileged and lucrative role of playing the reliable and trustworthy house banker to the global economy. He's counting on the dominance of the American economy forcing US trade partners to submit to his Snidely Whiplash/Mr. Potter machinations. We'll see. 

In the meantime, I do still also find some comfort in books, novels, memoirs, that resonate with the present. During Trump 1 I especially enjoyed Albert Camus's The Plague and Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. And I'd still recommend them. But I've come across nothing that resonates with Trump 2 so far as well as Butler's second book in her Earthseed series, Parable of the Talents. Published in 1998 it's a post-collapse America with an uncanny Trump-like potus character. 

The countervailing positive force to the illiberal catastrophe unfolding around people in Butler's America is spread by protagonist Lauren Olamina in her writings, Earthseed: Books of the Living, and her itinerant teachings, like this snatch of epigrammatic wisdom:

God is change, 

God prevails,

Kindness eases change,

Love quiets fear,

Sweet and powerful,

positive obsession blunts pain, 

diverts rage,

and engages us in the most intense of our chosen struggles. 

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. 

How Trump Could Dethrone the Dollar

"The dollar has not always been the world’s reserve currency or the currency of choice for international trade. In the nineteenth century, it was the pound sterling that enjoyed that status, and British financiers would have felt secure in its reign. The United Kingdom had deep, liquid capital markets, and the British Empire was the world’s largest economy and the central player in global trade. Yet after two world wars and decades of political and economic decline, London watched as sterling’s global status ebbed away. There was nothing inevitable about the pound’s slide or the dollar’s emergence, just as there is nothing inevitable about the dollar’s potential demise today. Choices, not destiny, determine reserve currencies; if the dollar is finally dethroned, it will be a disaster of the Trump administration’s own making. 

A serious impediment to adoption of the Chinese renminbi is the rule of law, or rather the lack of it: companies would rather end up in an American courtroom than a Chinese one any day of the week. Should this U.S. advantage erode, the results could be catastrophic."

Foreign Affairs

The biggest takeaway here, really, in spite of the title, is the ongoing dominance of the dollar in the global economy. It will not go down easy and has a long way to go before being dethroned. Nearly half, 45-50%, of all global financial transactions are in US dollars; 22% Euros, 4-7% Japanese yen and British pounds, and then more Canadian and Australian dollars, the Chinese yuan/renminbi, and the Swiss franc in the low single digits. Business people especially like old reliable ways of doing things that work, reliable ways of conducting their business, and for going on eight decades, going back to the Bretton Woods conference after WW2, the Keynesian dream of stable, expanding, prospering global markets running on dollars have more or less worked; surviving Nixon abandoning the gold standard and several banking crisis, including the Great Recession of 2007-2009. The book Underground Empire tells the story of the US weaponizing the Swift system for facilitating global transactions after 9/11, the electronic plumbing undergirding nearly all global financial transactions today. You'd think this would have increased alternative systems of currency exchange. And it has in Crypto, for a popular instance; primarily for money laundering and tax evasion, apparently. But in fact global dollar transactions as a share of all global financial transactions has grown by 10-15% since the Bush era. It is generally recognized most every where else in the world that Bidenomics led the strongest economic recovery after Covid but this wasn't persuasive enough for the US electorate. But now can the US dollar standard in global trade survive Trump? Remember, this is a guy who bankrupts casinos, which people say is extremely hard to do. This is a guy for whom dominance is everything; and zero sum dominance displays his single-minded conception of the "art of the deal."  If anybody can dethrone the dollar Trump can. 

Environmental rule-shredding at the EPA will put lives at risk, ex-EPA heads say.

 Three former Environmental Protection Agency leaders sounded an alarm on Friday, saying rollbacks proposed by the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, endanger the lives of millions of Americans and abandon the agency’s dual mission to protect the environment and human health.

Zeldin said on Wednesday he planned to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush. 

AP @ The Guardian 

This techno-feudal war lord stuff going on at the EPA sounds more like a prequel to the Road Warrior franchise than anything else. Grump wants to be King of Gastown! 

And, recall, the Associated Press is the long-standing news organization that is now banned from White House press conferences because they won't call the Gulf of Mexico what Grump is calling it now. So now the AP is part of the resistance. Bet me the Grump admin is strictly ordered to use Pocahontas when referring to Senator Warren. Like the first 2016-2020 edition, Grump is already inexplicably recruiting hard for the opposition and resistance. 

I still maintain that at least half of all this, Grump winning the election, stems from Big Biz resistance to government efforts to address climate change (and the other half due probably to Lina Khan's antitrust and minimum wage pressures and IRS reforms). Or to put it another way: these are the relevant economic factors for the 8 out of 10 billionaires that supported Grump. 

The problem is not just that markets have failed to confront climate change, a problem largely of their own making. But they have actively sabotaged and obstructed efforts by governments to protect the environment. Read Private Empire by Steve Coll for one big case example. Big Biz knows the coming energy transition means reducing the burning of fossil fuels, and in general will mean more regulations and taxes and government planning to incentivize the coming energy transition. This threatens their profit margins. And they also know their argument that environmental reforms and regulations are bad for the economy, a Chamber of Commerce staple for going on a half century, is losing its persuasive steam as it becomes increasingly clear that GNP growth in the neoliberal free market fundamentalist period of the last half century, 1980 to 2025, is nearly half what it was during the New Deal liberal period, 1935 to 1980. 

The tragic part is billionaires would rather support a fascist authoritarian state, a dictatorship, than accept any increased financial responsibility for climate change or face antitrust or living wage union pressures. They see government, other than securing and protecting private property, as extraneous to profit seeking efficiencies of building a business and making a fortune; something to be evaded or  minimized with austerity measures (cut gov spending, higher interest rates). Big Biz is essentially hostile to any democratic claims (taxes, regulations, living wages) on their business interests. I'm not saying it has to be this way, there are really existing social democracies (EU, Canada, Japan). But this has been more or less the posture of the merchant classes, capitalists, classical liberals, free marketeers, ordoliberals, neoliberals, and corporate rule, i.e., hostility towards democratic claims on private wealth, since the Bourgeoisie Revolution in England in the 17th century. 

And also bonus for the Christian Nationalist cause the billionaire that steps up is a Neo-Nazi and an extreme bigot asshole. Making all of this rhyme ominously with the way business interests in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s turned to fascist authoritarian state rule rather than compromise with labor unions and communists. 

And this failure of capital, business elites, the Mellons, the Hoovers, Laissez-faire, to compromise with labor, yes, to appease labor, Keynes believed, I might add, led to police-state crackdown regimes like fascism in Italy and Germany. 

Neo-Nazi Privatization Scam Against DEI

 — Musk’s Trojan hounds: DOGE operatives penetrate Social Security & USPS in shocking power grab. Nobody elected this South African billionaire, Trump’s largest campaign donor, to do anything to America, but here he is with his chainsaw and his band of seemingly sociopathic barely-post-adolescent young men tearing our government apart. New reporting says of their invasion of Social Security’s offices, “This team appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.” Musk and his billionaire buddies must be drooling over the $2.5 trillion sitting in the Social Security trust fund; if they could privatize the institution and have the new banking operation he’s planning to connect to X distribute SS checks, just a tiny 1% skim off the top could make his money bin bulge obscenely. And then there’s the Post Office, the agency that Ben Franklin first led and is listed in our Constitution, that Louis DeJoy says he’s cut a deal with Musk to begin gutting, presumably with the ultimate goal of privatizing (both Musk and Trump have called for privatizing the mail service). To top it all off, in a post on his Nazi-infested social media site, Musk just listed other programs he alleges are being used as part of the Jewish-funded “Great Replacement” theory to give Black and Hispanic people jobs and lifestyles that should rightfully belong exclusively to white men. In response to a tweet from Senator Mazie Hirono which read, “Musk is spreading a lie that Dems use Social Security & Medicare to pay undocumented immigrants to come into the country” the Nazi-saluting billionaire posted: “Not just those programs! Democrats also use every other government money tool to attract and retain illegals, like unemployment insurance, disability insurance, tax rebates on nonexistent income, SBA loans, student loans, COVID payments, FEMA money for luxury hotels, etc., etc.” 

— Musk’s Hitler post sparks public-sector union fury: Billionaire blames public workers for the Nazi genocide! Musk is famous for his Hitler salutes and his propensity to post 14 little flags in his tweets, presumably representing the “14 words” that every white supremacist must memorize and recite: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He’s also made wildly inappropriate jokes about the slaughter of Jews, retweeting: “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming!” But this time he really stepped in it, although the almost complete lack of coverage of the story by the nation’s mainstream media is downright eerie. Musk just tweeted, “Hitler didn’t murder millions, public sector workers did,” arguing that it was German government employees who were responsible for the Holocaust, not Adolf Hitler and his senior leadership who planned the so-called Final Solution. This strategy probably is designed to justify his mass firing of federal public sector workers, and Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, blasted back at him, writing: “America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich. They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers. Elon Musk and the billionaires in this administration have no idea what real people go through every day. That’s why he’s so willing to take a chainsaw to people’s jobs, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.” 

The Hartmann Report 

Few bring the receipts like Hartmann; he's a progressive Dem media machine. 

We've always been a racist country, but racists in public life that go off on some racist rant usually get cancelled, or are at least marginalized, remember when ESPN dropped Rush Limbaugh? But I guess the racists never completely went away, of course. They were just closeted in segregated "white power" communities listening to Limbaugh on the radio. And we've never been post-racial, to be sure, but Obama was something, incremental progress; no gainsaying that, although people try. And we've been at least post-Jim Crow racist since, I don't know, let's say the Voting Rights Act of 1965? But the racists and extreme bigots are calling the shots again, trashing women, immigrants, and minority communities, and defending Hitler and the Nazis. And a bunch of my relatives and people without college educations and Bro Culture gamers, in short, billionaires and bigots, voted for this. It's a cryin' shame. 

Every time Leon opens his mouth, or at least every time he opens it to talk about government, or government waste, it is apparent-- OMG!-- he has no fucking idea what the gov does or doesn't do. He's enthralled with the business lobby's favorite zombie ideology: any governance (consumer protections, labor protections, environmental proections) that isn't protecting absolutist property rights is a libertarian threat to the freedom and independence of capital and so government waste. He's pumped up on ketamine and some neoliberal techno-optimist delusions of grandeur and now it comes out a proud Neo-Nazi. 

As some consolation he is now also more pariah than ever in the original Nazi homeland. Tesla sales have crashed in Germany and many other places around the world. If there is any justice and humanity this whole authoritarian scam will come crashing down around these monumental creeps but you know there will have to be terrible amounts of humanitarian destruction before that day will come. 

Grump Is Nero While Washington Burns

"What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago [post-ww2], in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations."

French Senator @The Atlantic

I like the dark urgency, sure, but especially the simple clarity of this French senator's analysis. 

I'll only add, again, the great powers and spheres of influence politics of the late 19th century that Putin and Grump, apparently, would like to return to did NOT turn out so well but led directly to two devastating world wars. During WW1, before the US got involved, the press once asked Wilson, 'Mr. President, What is this war in Europe about?' "England owns the world and Germany wants a bigger piece of it, Son," Wilson quips, or something like that anyway. (Yes, I'm making this up as I go.) The first principle of the post-WW2 UN mission was to prevent military aggression like the great powers bombing each other into rubble as they did a lot between 1914 to 1945, like Gaza now, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Grump's threats to take over Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal. 

I've heard this positive spin building for this aggressive imperialist turn in US foreign policy as a "vibes shift," releasing the "animal spirits," you know they love using Keynes for their malign purposes, and releasing private industry from the bureaucratic slog of government regulations and taxes, boosting Big Tech to win the AI arms race with China, which by the way might require taking over Canada, etc. It's both cartoon ridiculous and so maybe more performative than anything else but then just so basically insulting and disrespectful of other nations and human rights, what can anybody do but say Hell No in every way possible?

I don't know where the bluster begins or ends with Grump but it feels to me inevitable that this will license more conflict and violence around the world. And, yeah, half the electorate voted for this; an obviously violent and fascist government won in a democratic election. This is who we are as a nation. Constitutional crisis doesn't seem to cover it any more. Josh is calling it an inter interregnum, or an interruption, a timeout, in the constitutional order. Most settle in dismay for "not normal." At any rate, the anti-DEI campaign is racist propaganda and hate speech; abducting the Palestinian protester is police state stuff, etc. 

I guess I also especially appreciate Claude Malhuret's, right of center pol perspective, former head of Doctors Without Borders, his confidence in American democracy to figure this out. I'm much shakier on that part. There's that Churchill line, when he was badgering FDR to join the fight against fascism in WW2 in Europe, "Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else." 

I guess we're still in one of those "everything else" phases and it doesn't seem to be working out but how bad will it have to get before his faithful give him up or the numbers turn against him in overwhelming super majorities? I don't know. But too long.