Trump Links

This series from Voice From Russia is a good synopsis of the current state of geopolitics.

While it includes the prevalent, current misunderstanding of "debt" of monetary sovereigns, it is otherwise an excellent summary of Season 2 of the Trump Show, up to last weeks episode.

Thanks to Sonar21, Larry Johnson for bringing this to my attention.

The American Yeltsen Years Begin

The Fall of The United States has begun. 

2.0rump

Pass the popcorn! Forget security, your family and friends, your future, don't let yourself get psychologically sucked into this fecal tempest, it's stinking blasts will blow you away! 2.0rump is what shiving Bernie in 2016 gets the PMC, unfortunately the rest of us get to be collateral damage. And 2.0rump is a real upgrade, a complete new operating system! Between Susie Wiles and Elon Musk, all the bumbling on implementation and personnel that bedeviled Trump 1.0 are gone, it's like the iPhone killing off the Blackberry! Think of it, what the iPhone did for teen suicide and adolescent attention spans, 2.0rump will do for America writ large! What may be a boon for the rest of the world won't do much, on present course, for the USA. I really should have studied Chinese and Russian, but I do identify as American, even with all it's problematic and newly re-forged, genocidal, colonialist baggage: we had a moment when we overcame ourselves and found true greatness, and that's the greatness I'll be chipping away at MAGA to try and find, or be fined for, or incarcerated, or whatever... I doubt anyone will notice.

Climate change has, of course, not gone away, any more than Covid has. Consigned for now to America's Id, perhaps we can stoke them there for the psychic energy our survival instinct has been denied with them out in the open. The Capitalism death cult has given them the FUD treatment making certain any climate or Covid action can only juice profits. Genocide is Kosher now, Danes in Greenland take note, it appears there's a plan for the last kill of Cancel Culture to be the 20th Century, leaving all the predations of  prior epochs gleaming with amoral glitter. Tariffs rather than taxes, no Social Security, no FDIC, a new Gilded Age, but one shorn of any Progressive Movement, never again a New Deal. Abolition absolved by the absence of a Welfare State: now labor is completely disposable, you don't even have to feed and house it like you did with slaves. Human life as pure commodity, a feedstock for whatever your corporate con, whether you call it "health care", "transportation", "housing", "logistics", "education" or whatnot, people exist to be profited from and where that's not possible, discarded. Trump, the anti Teddy, the anti FDR of plutocratic recidivism. 

Minted in NYC, in the crucible of Roy Cohn's 1970s, our second double struck President is embossed on both faces with Neoliberalism: government is the problem; either gold or bitcoin, money is the solution. The former precludes any public use of anything, the later blinds him to the real power he has as a head of State, a public figure and as such invisible to the imago of himself he embodies. So, real climate change, real public health failures, real military failures, real economic failures, and the real economic power of the State are pure absence to our new governing ideology. The vast teleology of social cooperation underlying the innumerable layers of technological, cultural, and social infrastructure on which modern existence rests, including the social relation we call money, vanishes into the personal relationships of the olgiarcs who've conspired to to steal all the upside from these generations of proliferating cooperation.  It's already an incoherent cascade of collisions happening in real time, the early phases of a political Kessler syndrome, what stops it remains an open question.

Hope in the unlikely visage of Kash Patel raised, yesterday, the first real opposition to the Nerd Reich! He stopped the gutting of the FBI, one can only suppose to preserve his capability to wreak revenge on those of Trumps' antagonist now suddenly in his employ: the chaos of institutional dismemberment is a fabulous evidence shredding opportunity! One supposes the Democrats are looking hopefully towards some similar cleansing opportunity which they'll "fight" to prevent with the same fervor and success as all the other things they've been "fighting for" these last forty years. If they actually wanted to reinstate Constitutional government, if they really wanted the FDIC, Medicare and Social Security they'd shut the government down over the Debt Ceiling until the Administration agrees to behave Constitutionally. But that would require a quorum more committed to the body politic than career prospects. As I recall, it was only the Tea Party that prevented Obama from gutting all these with his "Grand Bargain". 

In fairness to Trump, I don't find him worse than what he's replaced, he has, at least for the moment, stopped the Kosher Genocide, he's spoken with Putin, (if I believed in Liberals I'd have expected that to re-set the Doomsday Clock, but apparently the Atomic Scientists are all Democrats) and the cut-off of USAID has been hilarious, "independent media" in all the States we don't like suddenly begging for money or shutting down. He's proposed nuclear arms reduction talks with Russia and China and told the EU Ukraine is theirs to do with as they please. So far, a net positive for the world and Life on Earth, but a wrecking ball for the US Empire. And I do expect Trump to still be Trump: which of those famous names he's appointed are there for the episode closing, "YOU'RE FIRED!"? Ever the optimist, I dream the silence of Bannon in the wake of apparent H1B abandonment by 2.0rump stems from a sotto voce "Elon's toast once we control the Letter Agencies" from El Jefe. One can dream. 

So, what do I think is really going on? I think we're in the middle of a smily-face purge, without show trials and thankfully without bullets to the head, just cancelling of incomes and intelligence access so far. This on the heals of a soft coup back in the summer when "the collective Biden" opted not to run, but neither to stand down. Who was behind that little mystery and what their motives were (did they really think they could force the "Joy" candidate down a disaffected electorates throat? Or was/is something else going on?) fades in intrigue against the question of who theorized and then implemented the Leninist decapitation of the US Government in the first three weeks of 2.0rump? As Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism observed, this is no modest technical accomplishment. Foundations have been shaken, we would be in a Constitutional crisis if there remained a party or Party independent of the "donor class", the Oligarchs, to contest power. It's early, but so far there's no such entity in evidence. It's something like a revolution, or something like a coup de'etat, but maybe more a low level civil war, so far contained within the multiple silos, the innumerable and anonymous verticals of the Alphabet Agencies of our secret government. 

The Kash Patel move, linked above, suggests the DOGEbags may be little more than a fixing operation implemented to pin and immobilize the bureaucratic state before it could operationalize it's legendary knife fighting and trench warfare. Now with a Trumpean head and assistant head, FBI is more useful to Trump as an operational agency with bureaucratic paper trails to return the favor of Lawfare Trump enjoyed in the down time between his terms. But the cynic in me can't imagine a gangster like Musk getting into the Federal data structure and not compromising it for his own purposes. Like Netanyahoo, he's a sociopath running for his life right now. Of course, I'm writing the episode of The Apprentice I want to see, the one where when Musks utility to the Big Cheeto has arrived at its point of diminishing returns, the Don can walk in with a prima facie case of treason, toss him in jail and expropriate his State financed businesses. After a banner headline "You're Fired", turning to a smiling Bannon, ending H1B Visas and adding another brick in the wall. 

Exactly what Witkoff thinks will get Hamas to exit Gaza remains, at least to me, elusive. Otherwise Trumps foreign policy position seems to be taking a classical "Realist" mien. MOABs perhaps? As I understand it Uncle Sam will have to personally deliver the really deadly ones to Gaza, which really would be the genocidal, racist colonialist icing on the cake for the whole Imperial Collapse theme that would inevitably weave itself through the melodies of all our other international relations. I find it hard to believe someone as egotistical as our President would be happy to have that as his epitaph, but plenty of GOAT Emperors predate Donald with that predilection. He's very transparently comfortable with Empire and his position at the head of one, one he'd like to make "great again", so all quite possible. But if he intends to really take on that challenge, the "great again" part, he'll need a lot of that machinery he just uprooted from USAID and dropped in a jumble on Little Marco. Bloated to the point I find myself theorizing it's having its own, invisible, infinitely siloed civil war, the inherent economy relative to war fighting of cybernetic control, which is the business USAID was in, is what conjured it into existence under Truman, cutting it's teeth under Eisenhower and Kennedy, hiving off from CIA, along with NED only after the Agencies embarrassments of the 1970s.

Defined as "control and communication in the animal and the machine", in "The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society", Norbert Wiener warned of the moral implications of integrating humanity into a cybernetic "control machine". It was a concern arrived at in the context of designing better mechanisms to destroy enemy aircraft, machines operated by men who were themselves guided by the machine to destroy other machines and men. From this nexus of technological death Wiener had a visceral sense of the potential amoral deadliness of the integrated control of animal and machine. And an equal understanding of what I've elsewhere referred to as "the naturalization of infrastructures", that property of the mind that normalizes experiences of complex, layered, and integrated technology, to the extent the expected outcome is delivered, accepting it as one of nature's givens. Wiener knew the tools of control he was creating would find their most avid users amongst the socio & psychopaths most interested in power, in control, people like those who made the war which itself called Wiener's insights into being.

Fifteen years later, Marshall McLuhan struggled to state what Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" would take another two generations to crystalize: McLuhan's "the medium is the message" asserts that optical displays engage with our oldest, fastest and most highly developed capabilities of mind, "heuristics" in Kahneman's terms, fast modes of perception/thought. Previously, constructed representations of what "slow" perception and thinking had systematized were painstaking artifacts to create and reproduce. The camera, film, and then video collapsed much of the work of "slow" systemic representation into a quick flow which mediation then structured into a recursive "feedback" machine built around the principles of Wiener's cybernetics. And because these visualizations engage heuristic thinking there is an inherent tendency to elide the signifier with the sign: perception and thought fuse, the minds visual heuristics internalize the sensory input, leaving critical analysis of contained thought content on the mental cutting room floor. Like Wieners anti-aircraft gun, the mediated image is a naturalized infrastructure, visible, and maybe even in our hands, yet out of mind as it steers us towards whatever purpose it represents.

Wiener was acutely aware by 1950 of the political intention towards which his insights were deployed. Between George Kennan's 1948 "The inauguration of organized political warfare" memo and and the 1967 revelation in "Ramparts" of Frank Wisner's machine, a “mighty Wurlitzer”, a big theater organ “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired”, Wiener was watching his ideas be implemented towards an anti-humanist agenda of imperial control. Ramparts revelation of the corrupting of a huge swath of American institutions and famous individuals through CIA subsidies was Americans' first look at the politics of institutional secrecy. This three paragraph digression is to point out what we are seeing now with Musk's Squadrizi shutting down USAID is a refrain of the same tune Ramparts was playing almost 50 years ago, and like that and the next one, "The Church Committee Report" of 1975, this refrain in all likelihood will simply lead to a new verse of the same old tune: once Hair Presidente has established loyalty and control within the implicated institutions, the cybernetic system will be re-funded and re-populated towards the foreign and domestic propaganda goals of whatever it is he's up to by that point. As artists of the earlier eras, from Frank Zappa with "I Am The Slime" to  The Last Poets in "Mean Machine" saw, and as McLuhan and Wiener had anticipated, it's' too convenient for power, for control. 

As for domestic policy, we appear to still be in the "shake the foundations" (and see what comes loose) phase. If he is really serious about cancelling the 20th Century, his browbeating of foreign central bankers makes little sense, on the other hand, if he's really set on adjusting the terms of trade through intimidation, current framing for a dramatic "Fort Knox is EMPTY" reveal could be his imagined trump card to collapse the dollar without lowering interest rates. While from a flow of funds and international trade perspective, there may be something to this, with the hollowed industrial, education, and public health bases fifty years of Neoliberalism has left The United States, as they say in Maine, "you can't get there from here." In any case, its way too early to have any sense of what his real intentions are. His "coalition" is a fissiparous amalgam of repulsive elements, in the chemical sense as well as the political one. Can the parasitic and destructive qualities of the various minerals and compounds be made to cancel one another out, yielding a coherent populist set of reforms that would empower the American workforce with the health, skills, mindset and confidence to take the decade or two it will take to become great again in stride? It seems unlikely, but then so did FDR.

Cognitive Dissonance Links

Claim Denied ;Maya Miller; ProPublica

Suicide Watch: Heisenberg Report

Borderline Case; John R. MacArthur; Harpers

NeoLiberal Utopia; Natylie Baldwin & Renfrey Clarke

Neo-Euginicists; Satoshi Akima; ThreadReader

Killing Us Slowly: Andrew Nikiforuk; The Tyee

And Lying About It; Ed Young; The Atlantic

To Kill Our Children; Gregory Travis; Twitter

Public Service Message

AI Chaos; Tristran Harris & Raza Askin

Ukraine'a Nazi Problem; Josh Cohen; Reuters

NYT's Nazi Heros; V. Hopkins, S. Kerr & A. Tiefenthaler; NYT

No See of Azov; Alex Cosh & Davide Mastracci; The Maple

Everything's Average in Texas; Katelyn Jetelina; Substack

Goop At Sea; Lauren Oyler; Harpers

Greedflation; Will Daniel; Fortune

Criminalizing Dissent; Joe Lauria; Consortium News

Criminalizing Politics; Jeff Gerth; Columbia Journalism Review 

The State and Capitalism: Michael Pettis; Twitter

US Can't Get There From Here; Godfree Roberts; Substack

A Sane Alternative Dismissed; Kate Arnoff; Dissent 

Experiencing Imperialism; Prabhait Patnaik; Peoples Democracy 

Why We're Fighting; Benjamin Swartz & Christopher Layne; Harpers

Math Made You Rich: Alvin Chang: Pudding.Cool

Those Familiar Winners; Talmon Smith; New York Times

Cause For Hope; Cory Doctorow; Medium

Cause For Despair;l Wesley Yang; Substack

Interregnum Links

 Western Incompetence: Patrick Lawrence: Sheerpost

The Winter of Yuri: Big Serge: Substack

& Mobilization: Jacques Baud: The Postil

Financial Fallout: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism

Social Fallout: Thomas Fazi: Unherd

Political Fallout: Diana Johnstone: Consortium News

Economic Fallout: Michael Hudson

COVID Isn't That Hard: Victoria Colliver: Politico

If You Care About The Living: Mary Hui: Quartz

Profiting From Death: John McGreggor: Naked Capitalism

Has Consequences: T Ryan Gregory: Twitter

As The World Burns: Martin Zeigler: Twitter

Institutional Delusional Links

Negative Sum Capitalism: Ian Welsh

False Consciousness: Sparkman, Geiger & Weber: Nature

False Finance: Michael Pettis: Carnegie Endowment

Indigenous Innovation: Lazonick and Li: Naked Capitalism

Lookin West: M. K. Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline

From The Alps: Jaques Baud: The Postil

From Anatolia: Connor Gallagher: Naked Capitalism

With Your Eyes Squinted: Mahmut Cengiz: Small Wars

From Quantico: Lambert Strether: Naked Capitalism

As Far As I Can See: Patrick Lawrence: ScheerPost

Wunderwaffe: Andrei Martyanov: Smoothiex12

Combined Arms: Larry Johnson: Sonar21

Bad Assumptions: b: Moon Of Alabama

Mar-a-Lago Blues: Jeremy Kuzmarov: CovertAction

Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Nick Corbishley: Naked Capitalism

Great Bitter Lake After Taste: M. K. Bhadrakumar: Indian Punchline

Gas Goes East: Simon Watkins: Naked Capitalism

Polio: Sophie Reardon: CBS

CDC Pox: Lambert Strether: Naked Capitalism

It Ain't Labor: Servaas Storm: Inet

Bringing Down The Average: Philip Schellekens: PandemIC

The Long March: Katie Bach: Brookings 

Risk Society: Mitchell Aboulafia: Up@night

Forever: Andrew Nikiforuk: TheTyee

Welfare Queens: Scott Galloway: ProfGalloway

Fog Of War Links

 Why Biden Picked A War: Margaret Kimberly: Black Agenda Report

His Muse: Yasha Levine: Substack

His Plan: TTG: Turcopolier

His Troops: Asa Winstanly: Twitter

Alternate Reality: Stephen M. Walt: Foreign Policy

Bigots All The Way Down: David Greenberg: TNR

Losing Perspectives: Patrick Armstrong: Russia Observer

And Security: Corey Doctorow: OneZero

Joining The Herd: Dror Poleg

In The Risk Society: Ulrech Beck: Justor

Of Airborne Toxic Events: Ben Ehrenreich: Baffler

And Few Bodies: Notes From Disgraceland

Casus Belli: Sarah Steffen: DW

Bigger Picture: Paul Jay & Vijay Prashad: The Analysis

Weaponized Justice: Freya India: Declassified UK

Climate Zeros: Eugene Linden: The Guardian

The Global COVID Divide

The Pandemic isn't over, it is at the end of its beginning. 

Incessant messaging that Omicron is "milder", that COVID is endemic, that there is some "normal" to return to are all wishful thinking at best, cynical propaganda at worst. In the face of an indifferent Nature that would just as soon see human extinction on the spikes of the COVID virus as it did that of the Buffalo in the trajectory of our rifles, we contend with the existential threat COVID represents with our all too human foibles. COVID has revealed a stark division in the worlds civilizations obscured by an apparent capitalist homogeneity as evidenced in the chart above. 

The state of play is thus: the virus continues to mutate in the Neoliberal West, nations in the Far East experienced with SARS have contained and eliminated it, some repeatedly. There is no reason to believe it will mutate into something benign, the belief viruses evolve towards endemicity and that that's okay is self delusion. The  "Shock Doctrine" approach of maximizing profit from disease deployed across the West with varying degrees of ideological intensity has ensured mutations will continue by maintaining immunocompromised populations at scale, such as that of South Africans with AIDS, where Omicron was bred. Those Far Eastern nations are at the point of recognizing themselves as peers of a particular sort: societies with functional States, the anathema of Neoliberalism. It is only a matter of time before they begin acting on it.

Update: when I launched this post, the SMO in Ukraine had not yet begun, nor the Gaza, kosher genocide. In combination with COVID they have reshaped the world towards a multipolarity in which it may prove difficult for the US to maintain a pole. 

Freefall

Lost Futures: Keith Mahnken: The 74

Lost Justice: Charles Pierce: Esquire 

Privatized Politics: Clio Chang: CJR

The Health Con: Luke O'Neil: Welcome To Hell World 

The Marks: Patrick Martin: WSWS 

Humility, Reality: Siobhan Roberts: Technology Review  

Fading Colors; Patrick Armstrong: Strategic Culture 

Fading Prospects: James Galbraith: Democracy Journal 

Unreal Estate: Bowman, Myers, Southwood: Works In Progress 

Indefensible: Stephen Bryen: Asia Times 

Wolf Trappers: Gary Brecher: Exiled 

Opioid Odysseys: Tarence Ray: Baffler  

Aerosol Heads: Megan Molteni: Wired

Ill Faith: Scientific American

Eroded Trust: Matt Taibbi: Substack 

Persecuted Heroes: Joe Lauria: Consortium News 

Uplift, Off: Adolph Reed: The Baffler

Antifestivities: Charles Eisenstein: Substack

Xi's Milestones: Jeff Pao: Asia Times

Xi's Millstones: Tanner Greer: Scholars Stage 

Xi's Stones: Noah Smith: Noahpinion 

Putin It Out There: Kofman, Kendall-Taylor: Foreign Affairs 

Know Your Staff: Reddit.IT

Right To Work, Right To Quit:  Dartagnan: Daily Kos 

Striking At Kings: Charles Eisenstein: Substack

And Those Around Them: Ugo Bardi: The Senecca Effect

Chilling China: Shivani Singh: Reuters

Burning West: Drought Monitor

Mostly Embers (At The Moment): NWEG

Monsoon Lingers: Amrit B L S: The Wire 

Famine Futures: Katherine Dunn: Forbes

What Is Economical? Mat Forstater: MR Online

What Is Property? Peter Barnes: Evonomics

Accelerating Disintegration Links

Neoliberalisms Next Logical Step:  Alex Hochuli: Americna Affairs Journal

Systemic Redistribution:  Richard Murphy: TaxResearch.org

Alternatives: eclogiselle

Corporate Communism:  Robert Pollin & Gerald Epstiem: Boston Review

What You Can Do: Ian Welsh

Treating The Future: David Heal: Davidheal.org

Killing Poor: Fisk Jeremy: Twitter

Duh: Bob Herman: Axios

Popular Populism: Antonio Spilimbergo: VoxEU

Take Care: Ian Welsh

Getting Sloppy: Rachel Sharp & Lauren Lewis: Daily Mail

Catches Up With You: Brazil Wire

Comes Home To Bite On The Left: BlackSocialists: Twitter

Comes Home To Bite On The Right: MartyrMade: Twitter

Lucrative Delusions: James Meek: LRB

Choosing What To Measure: Adam Tooze: Substack

Absent In Media I: Payday Report

Absent In Media II: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism

Containing Reddit:  Alan MacLeod: Mintpress

Laws Can Be Enforced: Matt Stoller: Substack

What's Up: Patrick Lawrence: Substack

Smart Seizure: Stephen Diehl

Poverty Is Policy: Ian Welsh

Nothing Will Fundamentally Change Links

 Nothing Will Fundamentally Change:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/why-biden-is-not-a-transformational-president.html

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/michael-hudson-why-biden-wont-cancel-student-debt.html

1619 Project:

https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html

Policy for Sale:

https://www.dailyposter.com/debt-collectors-spending-big-to-block-a-crackdown/

Your Money or Your Life:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

https://www.ianwelsh.net/cdc-decides-to-just-not-count-all-covid-cases/

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/what-really-happened-with-that-weird-yankees-covid-outbreak.html

https://zeroanthropology.net/2021/05/24/the-world-health-organization-who-a-problem-of-trust/

https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-science-has-been-corrupted/

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01246-x

Structural Propaganda:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19srByafx4z79bMRm4buo5u7Fm1bj5EShTkj1gdGUzTg/view

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cj-hopkins-critic

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy-a32

https://ghionjournal.com/revisiting-russiagate-donald-trump-barack-obama-ndaa/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/spies-journalists-and-info-ops-against-america/

Golden Age of Fraud:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/will-goldman-penis-envy-crash-the-da9

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/con-of-the-week-greensill-capital-99c

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/racket-of-the-week-the-2-billion-7a2

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/warren-quarles-spar-over-fed-role-in-banks-archegos-losses

What's Left When You Don't Believe In It Links

Information Power: Kathirina Pistor: Duke.Edu

Powerlessness & Participation: Martin Gurra: ThePullRequest

Alternate Power: Andrew Cockburn: Harpers

Fictitious Capital?: Blair Fix: Economics Top Down 

Fictitious Power?: Nitzan, Jonathan and Bichler, Shimshon: ORKU 

Power People: Yasha Levine: SubStack

Climate Imperialism: Keston Perry: Africa Is A Country

Imperialism Burns: Jerri-Lynn Scofield: Naked Capitalism

Truth Eclipse: Kevin Gosztola: Shadowproof

What Goes Around: Danny Chrichton: TechCrunch

Racism Institution: Clark-Pufara & Cox: Smithsonian

Sausage Links

Google is trying to kill off old school bloggers by only allowing double spacing. Please accept our apologies for the vast wasted screen space and the excessive scrolling Google now insist on putting you through

Abolish Race: Inaya Iman: Spiked-Online                                          

The Edge Of Capitalism: Bill Fletcher: Monthly Review 

It's Deadly False History: Mapping Inequality: dsl.richmond

And Stolen Past: William Darity Jr: Bloomberg

Burning The West: LA Times

Intending Disaster: Thompson-Deveauz & Paine: FiveThirtyEight

Left Open: Peter Turchin: Cliodynamica

Billing The Vicitims: Blumenthal & Hudson: Naked Capitalism

Seeing It Coming: Adam Tooze: Foreign Policy

And The Winners Are: Gunnels Warren: Twitter

Stealing The New Way: Barry Linn: Harpers

Stealing The Old Way: Science Blog

Amongst The Ruins: Susan Zakin: Baffler

Globalization's Shadow: Greg Mabury: Consortium News

And It's Explosion: Firas El Echi: Twitter

Anti-Marxist Marxists: Editorial Committee: Class Unityy

Leading Horses To Water: Alyssa Meyers: Morning Consult

Worst Place To Raise A Family: Laura Begley Bloom: Forbes 

Blacklisted Truths: Andrew Dittmer: Naked Capitalism

She Who Must Be Obeyed: M C Yates: Twitter

Blank Stares: Patrick Armstrong: Russia Observer

To Start A War For: Yalensis: Awful Avalanche 

Into Decline: Timofei Bordachev: Valdai Discussion Club

Past Compulsions: Zachary Carabell: Foreign Policy

No Class Party: Michael Lind: Tablet

Baking In Failure: Ryan Cooper: The Week

Destroying Surveillance Capitalism: Cory Doctorow: Medium

Eviction Eruption: Gabriel Schivone: NYROB

The Toad To War: Caitlin Johnstone

Day Of Reckoning: O'Brien Kaissar: BloombergQuint

Innovating Starvation: Patti Waldmeir: Financial Times

Corona Crash Links

The Politics Of Things: Langdon Winner: MIT Press
In Action: Buford, Waldron, Syed, Shaw: ProPublica
In Maps: Mapping Inequality: dsl.richmond
In Space: Kniffin et al: HBS
At The Border: Ryan Cooper: The Week
In Institutions: Andrey Bystritskiy: Valdai Discussion Club
Of The Virus: Adam Tooz: Foreign Policy

What Should Be Done: William Spriggs: House Financial Services
But Isn't: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism
Confused By Numbers: Micheal Pettis: China Financial Markets
& And Reaction Time: Oshrat Carmiel: Bloomberg
Action On The Ground: Strike Map: Ppydayreport
Apportioning Responsibility: Jack Crosbie: Discourseblog
For This: Rose Ann De Moro: Twitter

Geography Of Police Killings: Christian Parenti: NonSite
& The Industry Behind It: Mike Elk: Paydayreport
Built In Secret: Caitlin Johnstone
Eroding Institutions: Derek Thompson: The Atlantic

With Bipartisanship: David Sirota
Class Conservativism: John Burtka IV: TAC

Canceling Collaboration: Glenn Greenwald: The Intercept
To Protect Idiots Like This: Max Abelson: Blooberg
Making Free Speech Moot: Steve Randy Waldman: Interfluidity
Which Leaves Only Rage: Chris Arnade: AmericanCompass
& Despair: Case & Deaton: Der Spiegel
& Incompetence: Fazelminallah Qazizai: AsiaTimes

How Beliefs Kill

Markets can be mesmerizing and seemingly magical things. By making purchases according to their values and needs, individuals cause reality to be reconfigured, out of site, invisibly and often at a great distance, satisfying those desires and needs. The intricate tapestry of markets with which we now live, having stitched the world together, is a marvel to behold. But the minute rhythm of its weave can all to easily hypnotize us into misunderstanding what's really happening. Markets exist, like money, only in our minds, their warp is our belief and their weft our action on those beliefs. There are people and things that markets organize, but themselves, they are just ideas: agreements between people that function as institutions in the same way as all our social institutions, by shared consent, as ideological representations of how people and things can be arranged. For better or worse, real resources are configured by these belief and agreements.

Demand, supply and money interact in logical relationships of ever expanding complexity through markets. For instance it can be shown mathematically that "profit" across an economic system is equal to successful "investment" where investment is defined as money spent to reconfigure capital goods and/or re-organize labor into more efficient processes to exploit the reconfigured or existing capital goods. The resulting profit across the system equals the combined input of successful investments. Function by function, the subsystems that make up modern markets are conceived symbolically to allow their situation within the larger system to be understood in order to identify those points where real resources can be reconfigured or new processes introduced to create more profit. And the further one is from actual production, the more symbolically loaded the math becomes, it is in these abstractions, and mostly in their manipulations, that finance finds it's millions.

This symbolic aspect of markets, for the elite, is their most enchanting characteristic: that all the complexity of reality need not clutter the stimulus and response of "price setting", the essential symbolic function of the market equation around which all other terms are organized to distribute resources efficiently. But for markets to deliver on that potential, every symbol in the construct which contains assumptions about some real thing must have these assumptions continuously tweeked. To track reality they must constantly be tuned, modified or abandoned as the feedback of reality dictates. "By making purchases according to their values and needs," for instance, assumes people with money to spend, an inherently political question where policy, not the market, determines reality. The most important assumptions are all political in this way. As what we think of as capitalism was taking its shape, an important vein of its development opted to deliberately exclude essential  populations from participating in markets, chose to prevent them from having money to spend to impact price signals, keeping them as slaves for the sake of money profits in markets elsewhere. This political decision made business very profitable.

By the time of the American Civil War, slaves constituted almost 40% of the population of the American South and were a key traded asset on the London Stock Exchange and the key to profitability in the plantation economy. For profit in markets, "people cause reality to be reconfigured, out of site, invisibly and often at a great distance, to satisfy those desires and necessities." For the end buyer of cotton, or the traders of slave mortgages in London, the mass early deaths and appalling treatment of American blacks was an invisible externality. Or for those who knew, which those profiting most certainly did, they were an acceptable cost of doing business. This is the essential problem of markets: every symbolic construct of the system has real referents that however distant or obscure can take on staggering moral weight. The Corona Virus is underlining and highlighting for all the world the moral failures of America's markets now which are currently destroying, by conflating, both our politics and economics. 

Remember way back in early March when the combined Democratic field was dogpiling on the Sanders campaign for its "irresponsible" Medicare For All proposal? At the cost of (bites pinkie) ONE TRILLION DOLLARS (over ten years)! Then, ...remember a few weeks later in late March, when Congress handed $1.6T to the Fed? Who within that same week gave ALL OF IT to Wall Street. From the same Congressional Act there is another $4.6T similarly pre-authorized for the Fed to play with but no one can tell what's going on with it because Congress provided meaningless oversight provisions. Only licensed financial institutions have accounts with the Fed, so there is that inherent limit on where it can spend. The Fed is doing as it pleases within that limit. Mysteriously the financial markets are near an all-time high. So is the US Covid infection rate with the US already the world leader in Covid deaths. The United States of America, I submit to you, can pay for whatever it CHOOSES and these are the choices our elected representatives have made.

In a previous post, I made the claim that in the political market US policy making has become, with policy for sale to the highest bidder, policy cannot be coordinated towards any public aim, public health for instance, that conflicts with some private profit flow: profit comes first, that's what the buyer paid for. This is what I'm talking about when I say that markets and money are nothing but social agreements and that our beliefs about them reconfigure real resources: one day the money isn't there, the next it is, some people get rich, some people die. Because of these beliefs. Where did that money come from? Why can't the US contain the virus? The nations around the world with socialized medicine have, the US and other nations that don't, haven't. We can insure the profits of corporations but not ensure the health of citizens because of what we choose to believe.

No taxes were raised, no extended debate determined who would get rich, nor who would die. This is what was legislated with the Orwellian named "Cares Act" and passed by voice vote. On what grounds can anyone claim that our elected representatives care about their voters? Donors got rich, voters died. Winners and losers had long since been selected by four decades of legislation that made it very difficult to help voters at all while astonishingly easy to help corporations, particularly financial ones. Corporations, operating within their new Citizens United rights as persons, had lobbyists available and prepared for a crisis with comprehensive wish lists to shield corporate leadership from consequences of mismanagement under the banner of Covid relief, and had pre-bribed Congress adequately through "campaign finance" to ensure results. Voters only had their votes which don't register in the market for policy where only money has purchase.

Like the nineteenth century London traders in slave backed mortgages, our legislators have shown that their first priority is preservation of capital, followed by ROI. They have arranged the apparatus of governance to dependably produce on these priorities. In addition, to inforce this they're generous in funding the coercive power of the state, from a vast overseas military empire to increasingly militarized domestic police forces. They have arranged the apparatus of governance to ensure fossil fuels continue to make profits even as they destroy the ecology required for human existence: the particular humans benefiting, small in number as they are, are remote from the dry and carcinogenic environments their profits require elsewhere. Death and ultimate extinction will be far from them or after they're gone, what do they care? A politics cannot get more bankrupt than this.