Is China Now Number One?

 Actually I think focusing on such questions can be a not very useful exercise, but here I am asking it anyway.  As it is, indeed the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC) is indeed Number One on a number of important grounds, although probably the bottom line is that the world is now dominated by a G2, the US and China, with it unclear which is Number One overall.  What has happened is that up until quite recently there was no question: the US was Number One as it had been for a long time.  That is not the case now.

Probably the most important fact lying behind PRC moving into a possible Number One position is that it indeed does have in real PPP terms the world's largest aggregate GDP, probably on the order of 30% higher than the US's, with this gap continuing to grow.  Most people are unaware of this, and it is hidden by the fact that the US continues to be Number One on nominal GDP, which gets constantly reported in the US media with no commentary or recognition of the situation regarding PPP GDP.  As it is this complicated situation signals the likely current quasi-equality, because indeed nominal GDP is important as it reflects the ability of a nation to assert itself globally.  But PPP does show how much it is really producing. And, assuming current trends hold, PRC probably will surpass the US even on nominal GDP within the next several years, almost certainly before the end of the decade.

Another important matter is that sometime in the last few years China replaced the US as the world's leading financier of development. Indeed, the PRC has accepted this role in a coordinated plan of action, its Belt and Road Initiative, which has come under some criticism by some nations for various reasons, including that it is an effort to achieve a dominance over the nations involved in this.  But whatever the truth or falsity of that, this initiative is indeed leading to large scale infrastructure expansion in many nations that will aid their future economic growth.  The US is not remotely providing such aid, and also is not going to be doing so.  This places China in a very important position regarding the world economy, a position once held by the US.

Of course there are some areas where the US is still ahead. One involves military.  China's military is growing and expanding, and it probably has the ability to cause US forces more damage in a conflict than many might expect, such as the ability to knock out an aircraft carrier and compete seriously in cyber and space warfare.  But the bottom line is that if there were a full-blown war, the US continues to maintain an overwhelming edge.  But let us hope we do not have to see such a test, although such comparisons are obviously important.

Certainly there are many other areas where the US retains the edge, even as PRC is rising in many of them. So in the crucial area of scientific and intellectual developments there is rising competition, but the US continues to broadly have the lead, even as China is taking it in various areas, some of them quite important, such as developing solar energy technology.

Needless to say the last four years has seen the US shooting itself in the foot on all this during the presidency of Donald J. Trump.  "America First" led to America Second or worse.  Angering allies and simply removing the US from so much going on in the world and violating treaties, left China as the relatively responsible party at the global level, and while China has engaged in hostile actions towards some neighbors, at the global level it looks more responsible than has the US, although this latter may be changing with the change in administrations in the US.

Anyway, clearly these two nations are global level competitors, with a long run trend tending toward the advantage of China, at least as it seems now.  But let us hope this relationship can be managed without actual war breaking out.

Barkley Rosser

The Oregon Republican Party Issues a Condemnation

 You have to read it to believe it.  An excerpt:

Whereas history tells us that after George Washington appointed Major General Benedict Arnold to command West Point, Arnold conspired to surrender the fort to the British; and

Whereas the ten Republican House members, by voting to impeach President Trump, repeated history by conspiring to surrender our nation to Leftist forces seeking to establish a dictatorship void of all cherished freedoms and liberties....

Whereas there is growing evidence that the violence at the capitol was a “false flag” operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans; this provided the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democrat goal of seizing total power, in a frightening parallel to the February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag....

That we condemn the betrayal by the following ten Republican members of Congress who voted in lockstep with Nancy Pelosi to support a second sham impeachment....

Wow.  Benedict Arnold, the Reichstag Fire: they sure know their history.  And I like the false flag bit: the people who gathered outside the capitol were patriots defending their country against a monstrous conspiracy to undermine democracy and impose tyranny, but the ones who actually went into it were Antifa rabble.

Is Biden Going To Blow Reentering The Iran Nuclear Deal?

I certainly hope not, but it is not out of the question.  There is a serious split within the new Biden administration over how to approach getting the US back into the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, which, just for the record, the US withdrew from even though it was the US that had violated it by not fully withdrawing economic sanctions against Iran, a decision made during the Obama administration that negotiated the deal, while Iran was not in violation and continued to adhere to it for quite some time after the US withdrew to condemnation by the other parties to the deal, which included western European nations as well as Russia and China.

Throughout the campaign Biden expressed an intention to get back into the agreement.  But some of his foreign policy appointees have raised conditions for doing so that might delay or even block doing so, with such a delay dangerous because in June there will be a presidential election in Iran where most are forecasting that current President Rouhani, who negotiated the deal and supports the US reentering will be replaced by a hardliner who may well simply oppose the deal.  There is a not very large window for doing this.  It is pretty obvious that this looks like extending the nuclear START with Russia: it should simply be done without demanding special favors or actions from Iran, just START is likely to be extended as is, with Putin apparently accepting Biden's offer for a simple five-year extension.  But then, Russia is much more powerful than Iran is.

Who  wants to hold things up?  Apparently Biden's incoming SecState Blinken and his National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan.  Both want Iran to get itself back into obeying the accord before the US makes any moves to lower economic sanctions.  On top of that, Sullivan wants Iran to agree to additions to the agreement to limit its ballistic missile program, items never in the original deal, even if it has been a source of anger by regional allies opposed to the deal like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel.  The latter would certainly delay any resumption of the deal past the June election and outright kill it, while the former very likely would.  It looks pretty obvious that the US needs to offer some sort of simultaneity of reducing sanctions as Iran moves to ending the uranium enrichment activities it started up after the US withdrew.

There is reason to be hopeful that these hawkish proponents of making it hard for Iran to allow the US back into the deal may get ignored.  The most important is that reportedly Biden has appointed Robert Malley as the special negotiator on this matter.  Malley's publicly stated views are not in agreement with the ideas of Blinken or Sullivan and he seems to support something more like a simultaneous move on both sides to put it back into functioning.  The others are the presence in the administration of people who negotiated the original deal: Wendy Sherman as Deputy Secretary of State, and although a bit more distant, John Kerry, now to be leader on climate issues in foreign policy.  I would expect them to side with Malley on this matter, and I hope Biden will ignore these people who seem to be pushing ideas that could lead to a failure to achieve possibly the most important foreign policy move Biden needs to make, or at least undoing possibly the worst foreign policy move Trump made.

Barkley Rosser 

Why Has AMLO Delayed Congratulating Biden On His Inauguration?

 Maybe he has now done it, although I have been unable to find any reports of him doing so.  But almost alone among world leaders, I think joined only by Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Mexicos's President known as "AMLO" did not basically immediately congratulate Joe Biden on his inauguration. Even very pro-Trump Brazilian President Bolsonaro did, expressing a hope to have good and beneficial relations between the US and Brazil, and although it was rather perfunctory and unenthusiastic, so did Russia's President Putin.  But nothing out of AMLO, at least not right away. 

Supposedly he somehow thinks that Biden is going to be less friendly than Trump.  The one report I saw on this said that he views Trump as having taken a "hands off" approach with him, although I remember Trump making demands that he crack on migrants passing through Mexico from Central America with threats of tariffs at odds with treaty agreements.  This is hands off?  Anyway, somehow he supposedly thinks that Biden will interfere in Mexican affairs and try to tell him what to do, although I am completely unaware of a shred of evidence that Biden has said anything at all that would suggest that, although it is possible that he has and I simply have not been aware of it.

I posted here awhile ago about how it seemed that AMLO was favoring Trump, visiting him in the White House in September and making highly favorable comments. At the time I speculated that this might because he shares some authoritarian tendencies we have seen in Trump, with those only having become much clearer with his serious effort to overturn the US presidential election. Does AMLO's delay in congratulation Biden mean that AMLO approved of these actions by Trump?  I do not know, but this adds to my concerns about AMLO.  I was criticized by some commenters for making this point about AMLO, who is mostly a political progressive and certainly has carried out some progressive policies in Mexico.  But I see nothing good for people in Mexico in having their president alienating the incoming US president for what appears to be no good reason whatsoever.

Barkley Rosser

Extending START

 It is not a big headline story among all the other things newly inaugurated Joe Biden is doing, but it is being reported that despite a generally more hostile approach to Russia, he has agreed with what Russian President Putin has said he wants, which is to simply extend the current nuclear weapons START agreement for five more years. It is possible that out of annoyance with Biden Putin might somehow at this point create a roadblock for this very important decision, but given that the existing treaty expires on Feb. 5, there is not much time to come up with an alternative, and I think that Putin understands the importance of this matter and will hopefully agree to this, even if it might have been good to make some changes in the agreement. 

I note that when this annoucement came out, the newly no longer in office negotiator with the Russians on this issue for now former President Trump, someone named Billingslea, whom I had not previously heard of, publicly criticized this move, claiming that it showed "very poor negotiating skills" on the part of the income administration.  Of course, he had been trying to negotiate a renewal of this agreement for the last couple of years and had failed, with the deadline for renewal now only a couple of weeks away.  Apparently he had failed both by insisting that China be included, which did not wish to be, and also making various demands on the Russians that they were not willing to go along with.  So their record on this was not all that much better than their effort to get Iran to go along with a supposedly better nuclear agreement than the JCPOA that the Trump administration withdrew from without any justification, but with the claim that so withdrawing would lead to a better agreement.

As it is, apparently there are some Republicans in the Congress who think it would be great to get out of the START agreement, just as Trump ended other agreements with Russia.  They think a new nuclear arms race with Russia would be a good thing.  This decision by the incoming administration also is at odds with the more hawkish views of one of its incoming members at the State Department, Victoria Nuland, who apparently supports a much shorter renewal period for the treaty.  This is the sort of thing that is why I posted here when I learned of her appointment that this was one appointment being made by Biden that I did not approve of.

Barkley Rosser

Don't get too close!

 

Politico on Fauci:

One day into the Biden presidency, the longtime infectious disease expert described it as “a refreshing experience.”

Shouldn't we have a disease expert who is not infectious?! Just sayin'.

At any rate, I realized yesterday that I have been in a foul mood for 4 years.  No longer!  We have finally rid ourselves of a Horse's Ass and replaced him with an actual President.

This MAGAzine of Untruth

With two days left in Trump's term, the cultural Marxism myth that inspired the Oslo and Christchurch terrorists has become official White House dogma.

Here is my twitter thread that cites seven of my EconoSpeak articles, going back to 2015, about the pernicious myth:

This MAGAzine of untruth: "The 1776 Report" channels terrorist Anders Breivik

Politics of Pastiche: "voters... need someone to fire all the political-correct police"https://t.co/EiPeBoOGfx pic.twitter.com/75CJTX3ZTz

— Charles Wentworth Dilke (@Sandwichman_eh) January 19, 2021

Will North Korea Explode After Biden Becomes President?

 This is what was forecast in a column in the Washington Post by Victor Cha. He sees a combination of economic collapse, massive spread of Covid-19, and a standard desire when a new US president to enter office to be behind a possible outbreak of military assertiveness, possibly exacerbated by a much more serious collapse of the DPRK economy and society.  I suspect this is overdone, but there are definitely some major problems going on there, with much of the new attention on this coming out publicly as a result of a major address by Kim Jong Un at the 8th (only?) Korean Workers' Party Congress, where he openly admits failures to meet Five Year Plan targets for almost everything and calls for a massive tightening of policy with a reassertion of stricter state control of the economy.

I have double checked this by checking on the North Korean Economy Watch blog, which has an extensive report on Kim's speech, and also seems to avoid the hysterical edge that Cha takes, although with the departure of his pal, Trump, along with all his internal problems, I can imagine Kim may well be tempted to stir up some sort of trouble.  Anyway, some details.

Indeed, targets for almost everything have not been met, ag production, manufacturing, and more.  The one manufacturing sector that seems to be holding up, and was described as "the core industrial sector," something I have not see claimed before, is the chemical industry. Apparently it is doing so well there is almost no use for some of its output, although what is useful is going to be fertilizer and other inputs to agriculture.

Both the blog and Cha noted a major collapse of international trade, with trade with China down 70%, Cha's leading evidence for a more general collapse, although the blog does not seem to be quite as dramatic about economic collapse and does not suggest that some broader or bigger one will happen, much less some major social upheaval as Cha argues. The blog notes that one failure of the plan has been that there was a goal to diversify trade away from such a focus on China, but that has not happened at all.  This in effect pushes the DPRK back onto its traditional juche self-sufficiency ideological schtick.

There has been apparently a major crackdown on a lot of private businesses, which are now a much larger part of the economy than many realize.  This is where Cha forecasts an upheaval, suggesting many North Koreans will resist being forced to turn over foreign hard currency for worthless North Korean won. The blog notes foreign currency traders have been especially hard hit in arrests.  It also says that there is a push for more local control of a lot of the private firms, which are especially prominent in ag and food.

There is however, along with the chemical industry hanging in there, plans for more development of nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems, with ICBMs capable of hitting the entire US now being developed.  This is another development that has Cha worked up.

The blog also notes that there seems to be a renewed emphasis on control of "cultural production" and other such matters, all going along with the general tightening and move toward orthodox views.  Indeed, the blog says this is the end of hopes many had that market experiments and other loosenings that went on early in Kim's regime now seem to be seriously over.

Not clear what is going on with Covid-19, although part of the trade decline with China is due to DPRK sealing off borders seriously.  They claim no cases, but Cha thinks the place is overrun with it.  The blog reports nothing on this front.  Whatever is going on is being kept secret.

Probably is hyperventilating and things will not be as bad in North Korea as he predicts, with Kim hopefully not going completely gonzo.  But it does seem likely that the incoming Biden admin will face some sort of unpleasant challenge out of there, quite likely pretty soon, which may be quite difficult to deal with.  Welcome to the White House, Mr, Biden!

Barkley Rosser

Rescuing Disposable Time from Oblivion

Two hundred years ago this February, Charles Wentworth Dilke anonymously published a pamphlet titled The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy. Four decades later, Karl Marx would describe the pamphlet in his notes as an "important advance on Ricardo." In his preface to volume two of Capital, Friedrich Engels described the pamphlet as the "farthest outpost of an entire literature which in the twenties turned the Ricardian theory of value and surplus value against capitalist production in the interest of the proletariat" and credited Marx with having saved the pamphlet from "falling into oblivion." 

In the 1960s and 70s, Marx's notebooks from 1857 to 58 were published in translation as the Grundrisse, a section of which – known as the "fragment on machines" – became the subject of much enthusiastic commentary and theoretical controversy. Some of the most evocative and heralded passages of the fragment dealt with the concept of "disposable time," which Marx had adopted, with citation, from the anonymous pamphlet. But Marx's rescue of the pamphlet from oblivion was far from convincing. With few exceptions, the discourse on Marx's fragment on machines ignored The Source (pun intended) of Marx's category of disposable time.

For Marx, disposable time referred not only to time off work for rest and recreation but more crucially to an explosive contradiction at the heart of the capital accumulation process. Continued accumulation required both the continuous creation and appropriation by capital of ever more disposable time. Marx's fragment on machines was received as prophetic when the translations appeared. It was as if Marx had been anticipating precisely this time -- when automation, computerization, and robotization seemed to either herald "the end of work" or threaten universal precarity. Nevertheless, The Source and Remedy continued to languish in obscurity – if not total oblivion. Few copies and no translation of the pamphlet were to be found in the archives of libraries. Eventually, a microfilm copy of the pamphlet became available in the 1970s as part of the Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature. The full collection of old documents cost around $200,000 in 1978 dollars – the equivalent of $800,000 in current dollars. 

In 1999, I posted the first 6 pages of the pamphlet to the TimeWork Web. Five years later, I uploaded a PDF of the full pamphlet to the website of B.C.'s Work Less Party. By 2010 a copy was available on the Marxists Internet Archive. Regardless, Marx scholars continued to ignore the pamphlet, aside from the occasional mention that it was cited by Marx. In 2019, however, the journal Contributions to Political Economy reprinted the pamphlet along with a descriptive essay by Giancarlo de Vivo. This year, my essay commemorating the bicentennial of the pamphlet's publication, "The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at Two Hundred," is forthcoming in that journal. I am hopeful that the scholarly neglect of the pamphlet will soon end.

In my essay, I document specific links between the pamphlet's advocacy on behalf of disposable time and William Godwin's exaltation of leisure in his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its influence on morals and happiness and especially in his 1797 book, The Enquirer: reflections on education, manners and literature. In a later book, Thoughts on Man: his nature, productions and discoveries, Godwin confirmed and clarified his earlier ideas about leisure.  

While documenting the connections between Godwin's writings about leisure and Dilke's disposable time, an intriguing thought occurred to me. Godwin had been trained as a minister in a strict Calvinist sect and had retained his intellectual orientation as a "Rational Dissenter" long after leaving the church. His discourses on leisure and on occupations ("vocations") can plausibly be regarded as a secular and modernizing reformulation of Calvin's doctrine of the calling. I ran this conjecture by a leading Godwin scholar who found it entirely plausible and consistent with his own writing on Godwin's secularization of religious motifs. "The Calvinist doctrine of the calling," observed William Stafford in 1980, "can be discerned just below the surface of Political Justice."

The continuity between Godwin, Dilke, and Marx raises startling questions about the elective affinities between Marx's class struggle, Godwin's perfectibility of private judgment, and ultimately Calvin's doctrine of Grace. In terms of political activism, the Marx-Dilke-Godwin-Calvin connection suggests possibilities of immanent critique and direct challenge to the proverbial "work ethic" and its deviations: Carlyle's "gospel of work," Carnegie's "gospel of wealth" and, finally, the blasphemous "prosperity gospel" of latter-day television evangelism. One of my long-running frustrations with ecological economics and the degrowth movement has been its default treatment of work-time reduction as primarily a work-sharing strategy. I have nothing against work-sharing, but my complaint is that it is about the fourth best reason for reducing working time. The top priority is emancipation from social domination through taking back disposable time. Second is the elimination of uncompensated overwork. Third is elimination of the bargaining disadvantage that long hours of work impose on labour. Instead of contesting growth economics on the tilted playing field of the quantity of GDP, attention to the redemptive doctrine of disposable time could help us, in the words of Artemy Magun, to "understand rationally the crucial elements of the religious world-view that have been ignored by modern science, but which nevertheless are highly relevant to orientation in the contemporary world."

Happy Birthday MLK!

 While the official holiday is coming up on Monday, today is the actual 92nd birthday of the Reverand Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Happy birthday, MLK!

More than most this is one where if he were alive he would be especially pleased and proud.  Ten days ago a successor to him and his father as a minister at the famous and historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Raphael Warnock, was elected to represent the state of Georgia in the United States Senate, something he could only dream about.  Obviously there are many other dramatic things going on at this time, including the fact that Rev. Warnock's election was part of a change power in the Senate and Washington more generally, with the Senate coming under actual physical attack the day after the election, nine days ago, an attack that also market an unprecedented display of the Confederate battle flag for in the Capitol building.  However, all that looks to be working out well.  MLK would be pleased and proud.

Barkley Rosser

 TRUMP IMPEACHED AGAIN

The Weirdest Thing about Claims of Electoral Fraud

Imagine that, on the eve of a national election, a candidate is far ahead in all the polls and seems to be cruising to victory.  Then the results come in, and the unthinkable has happened: the candidate has lost handily.  Your first instinct would be to take a look at how the election was carried out and the votes tabulated to see if everything was kosher.

But that’s not what happened in November 2020.  In case you forgot, here’s 538's final forecast from November 3.  The actual results were a big setback for the Democrats on all fronts, House, Senate and President.

That’s what’s so bizarre about the claims of Trump, Hawley, Cruz et al.  They did way better than the polls said they would.  It’s as if the Democratic bust of 11-3-20 disappeared down a memory hole.

Exploiting the Stupids: The Intellectual Foundation of Movement Conservatism

 From about the age of 8-12 I read a lot of sci-fi.  Along the way I stumbled across Robert Heinlein, in particular his novel The Day After Tomorrow, initially published as The Sixth Column.  It was so crudely racist I avoided from then on anything with Heinlein’s name on it.

The plot went like this: The evil PanAsians have conquered America and set up a vicious tyranny.  A few scientists, holed up in a secret lab in the mountains of Colorado, have discovered a powerful weapon that can turn the tide.  They’ve tweaked it so it can kill only “Asians”, leaving white people unaffected.  How to organize a nationwide resistance that can take advantage of it?

The PanAsians, to pacify their subjects, have permitted religious activity to continue, so the scientists organize a new religion.  They use their skills to perform “miracles” that suck in the ignorant masses.  Meanwhile, a cadre is secretly recruited who use the religion as a front in order to disseminate the new weapon and train an underground army who know how to deploy it.  

The crisis arrives when the time comes to kill all the Asians, but it turns out that one of the inner group is a “good” Asian who will be killed as well.  If that’s your idea of a moral dilemma, you’re a lot more twisted than I was when I was hitting double digits.

Later, as I became more politically aware and started noticing the emergence of a cult of William F. Buckley acolytes at my high school in Wisconsin, I could see that Heinlein was on to something.  No, not that we needed a weapon of racist annihilation, but that the conservative mood had an underlying narrative:  We who have discovered the truth are smart, but most people are stupid.  You can tell them almost anything and they will believe it.  By taking advantage of their dumb credulity, smart conservatives can rule.  Incidentally, the same background narrative lurks in the world of Ayn Rand; self-conscious Objectivists are the intellectual elite and their success depends on dropping their scruples about misleading the easily herded crowd.

You might think of it as a form of vulgar Straussianism.  High Strauss holds that the need for virtue is the perennial truth at the heart of philosophy, but most people are not virtuous.  To avoid the wrath of these lesser souls, philosophers have been forced to speak in code.  (Yes, this is a cartoon version, but since we’re talking about the dumbing down process, that’s OK here.)  The vulgar version replaces virtue with smarts.  Most people are stupid, and if smart people treat the masses as if they were smart too they will talk over them and fail.  The path to success is speaking in code, making up lies for the gullible but signaling to those capable of discerning the inner truth that the movement is for them.

(Incidentally, this parallels in certain ways the Leninist strategy of front groups and cadres.  It may be that the Right picked up this trope from their nemesis; I recall Ayn Rand saying this explicitly, although I don’t have a citation.  Can someone help me out?)

Movement conservatism in America cultivated this two-tiered philosophy for decades before Trump came along.  Recall the fictitious stories Reagan told to goose his political career?  Conservative insiders knew they were made up, but that was fine because what difference does it make whether what you say to stupid people is true of false?  They will swallow what you give them if you appeal to their hopes and prejudices.  Do you really think the core neocons of the W Bush era, some of whom actually studied under Strauss, really believed in the Saddam-has-weapons-of-mass-destruction fairy tale?  They weren’t dumb enough to fall for it; on the contrary, they thought they were smart enough to concoct and exploit it.

Which brings us to January 2021.  Movement conservatives realized they could assemble a useful nationwide army of “election-truthers” by creating a myth about millions of fake votes, a vast conspiracy of treasonous or even satanic election officials, etc.  They were sure the stupids, or at least enough of them, would swallow it whole, so why not?

Take Josh Hawley, with degrees from Stanford and Yale.  Is he dumb enough to actually believe what he’s saying?  It’s possible—lots of dummies in those fancy schools—but I wouldn’t count on it.  I think the odds are better than 50-50 he knows exactly what the game is and thinks throwing meat to the stupids is how smart people win.

Just to be clear, for the record, I don’t think most people are stupid, but I do think most of us come to our beliefs through a social process in which the balance of evidence and logic play at most a supporting role.

An Appointment I Disapprove Of

 While many of them could be more progressive, given that Biden himself is largely a moderate making moderate nods to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in his appointments, I have largely been not too dissatisfied with appointments made so far by President-Elect Biden.  My only surprise is that a bunch of people set their pants on fire over the appointment of Neera Tanden as OMB director while barely a squeak has been heard about the appointment to NEC Chair of total Goldman Sachs flunky, Brian Deese.  Actually, I do not think there even should be an NEC, which essentially replaced the CEA as the policy shop, with it usually being run by Wall Street types who are not even professional economists.

But now Biden has appointed somebody I find really objectionable and even worrisome.  This is Victoria Nuland as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in charge of policy, a pretty important post.  She has been the State Dept previously, where she engaged in all sorts of obnoxiously and dangerous neocon activities.  I mostly think Biden has pretty good instincts on foreign policy, not a hawk and pretty knowledgeable.  But Nuland has been associated with pushing support for Sunni extremists against Assad in Syria and encouraging overly vigorously various actions in various places that I do not or have not approved of.  It may be that she is a sign of being anti-Putin, which she certainly is, in contrast to Trump, of course. But appointing her may be overdoing it. There will need to be some negotiations over strategic nuclear arms, and I know there are other areas where US and Russia have common interests, even if indeed the US needs to hold Putin's feet to the fire on many issues.  But Biden did not need to appoint somebody so over the top and hawkish as Nuland to achieve that.

Barkley Rosser

Getting the Shakespearean Part Right

 At his rally before the invasion of the Capitol, Trump said to his minions:

And after this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down--

We're going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol.

But then he ducked back into the White House to watch the whole thing on TV.  That’s how you know he’s Richard III and not Henry V.

Post-Putsch: Why There Should Be Consequences for Enablers of the Capitol Invasion

 I usually find myself agreeing with Glenn Greenwald, but not today.  GG has posted a heartfelt warning against overreaction to the attempted fur-and-horn putsch at the Capitol Building Wednesday.  He says the mob trampled on symbols of state power but otherwise did little of consequence, and vilifying them and their supporters will lead to repressive overreach, just like we saw after 9/11.  Cool it, says Glen.

Actually, I agree with one piece of this, the use of the “t” word, terrorism.  No the mob was not a terrorist brigade; it was mostly unarmed and did not commit mass or random violence to induce passive cowering from the rest of us.  There was minimal effort to locate and assault politicians; the intent was mostly to physically prevent the certification of the electoral college votes that would legally end any opposition to the replacement of Trump by Biden.

But that’s why the invasion mattered.  Repeat: it was an attempt to physically prevent the winner of an election from taking office.  This is where GG misses the point in his narrow comparisons of body counts and weapons supplies.

Yes, it was confused and amateurish, much like the president whose bluster it expressed.  But the danger of mob violence is not so much what the mob does as what the police do.  If the police (and military) go over to the side of the mob, the mob wins no matter how disorganized or ill-equipped it is.  

That’s not a threat when the mob represents the Left, but it is always a risk when the mob comes from the Right.  And in fact we did see a softness on the part of many (but not all) Capitol police officers who fraternized with the invaders and forgot (or “forgot”) the part of their mission that was about protecting not only the building, but the political leaders inside it.  It is extraordinary that senators and congresspeople were not warned about the breach until their own chambers were under attack.  The unwillingness of Trump to call out the National Guard makes it clear that the Guard was unlikely to be so accommodating, which we can take as reassuring news.  Nevertheless, we should never forget that the threat of right wing putschists is never just a product of their own arms or numbers but always comes down in the end to whether the armed protectors of the state will resist or join them.

So this is why I disagree with GG about the importance of this event: it was very important.  Its purpose was to prevent the winner of an election from taking office, and it is only because Trump’s popularity among those with badges, stripes and guns is not stronger that we could view the invasion as almost a joke and not something far worse.

Because the attempt to overturn a democratic election is so serious, its suppression justifies exceptional measures.  Of course, Trump should be denied any media platform from which he can be excluded.  Of course, other politicians who gave support to this putsch should be expelled from office.  This should take place immediately, understood as a response to this specific episode and not as a precedent for all dissent or demonstrations.

Longer term, we need to give urgent attention to the characteristics of our political and communication systems that nurtured the Trump disaster.  For starters, no private corporation should own the platforms over which most people receive and send communication, except perhaps in the limited role of common carrier.  The rules by which such platforms function should be publicly set for the purpose of enhancing real democratic discourse.

Call Republican Senators immediately!

 Tell them to find 16 colleagues, enough to constitute a credible threat of conviction if he is impeached, and make him resign.

You've Already Seen These Questions

1. Why is it that no existing society, nor society that ever existed, has arrived at universal prosperity, considering that in all times, and in all societies, excepting only the very barbarous, a few years would naturally have led to it?
2. How is it that notwithstanding the unbounded extent of capital, the progressive improvement and wonderful perfection of machinery, canals, transportation, and all other things that either facilitate labour or increase its produce; that the population instead of having its labours abridged, works more hours per capita than it did years ago?
3. Why has society never arrived at the enviable situation of universal abundant leisure, although so immediately within its grasp?

An Attempted Autogolpe

Not an attempted coup d'etat, as many are saying in the media.

I must credit Juan Cole with making aware of this useful term, which apparently comes out of Latin America.  According to Cole, a coup attempt traditionally involves military and also is directed at overthrowing a leader in power.  What happened yesterday in the Capitol did no fit either of these criteria.

But it does fit an autogolpe very well.  This is a self-coup, if you well, a situation where a leader, especially one who is about to be removed from office, acts to overthrow the established rules to remain in power, usually assuming authoritarian power in doing so.  This certainly looks like what Trump was trying to do, but failed to achieve.  So it was an attempted autogolpe.

Barkley Rosser 

These Questions are HUGE!

1. Is there any means of adding to national prosperity other than adding to the facilities of living?
2. What is liberty?
3. What is wealth if it does not add to liberty?
4. Who should determine how individuals dispose of their free time?

Thoughts on the Invasion of the US Capitol

 It’s all happening as I write, but here are a few reactions:

1. Fortunately we see Q-Anonics, Loud Boys and other right wing crazies invading the Capitol Building and not Black Lives Matter or the Left.  Think how many lives would have been lost if it had been the other way around.

2. It will be interesting to see how deeply investigators will delve into the lax security preparations for today’s senate meeting.

3. In the end, it all comes down to one question: where do the loyalties of the police and armed forces lie?  That is always the bottom line, but we can go for decades without confronting it directly.  When the left challenges state authority the issue is never in doubt, at least in the U.S.  When the challenge comes from the right we have to hold our breath.  There were video images a few moments ago of police gently escorting Trumpists out the door and down the stairs with no apparent thought to arresting them.  This indicates at least some softness toward the cause on their part.  On the other hand, I don’t expect there will be military or police resistance to the eventual securing of the building.  If the folks in uniforms were to go over to the other side, that would be the end of the political order.

This has happened in the past.  The end of Reconstruction was marked by white mobs that assaulted elected Black officials and were backed by “law enforcement”.  That was a counterrevolution that succeeded.  Around the world it has been a general rule: civil rebellions succeed if and only if the police and military are turned or at least neutralized.  It all comes down to that and always will.

4. Invading and shutting down the capitol makes sense if you think that a demonstrably fraudulent election has been imposed on the public.  If crooked election officials had doctored the results, those trying to stop the process would be heroes.  Actually, I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which people meekly assent to real evidence of stolen elections.  What makes today a travesty is that there isn’t a shred of evidence to support allegations of fraud; it is a product of cynical disinformation sponsored by people who believe honesty is an unnecessary constraint on attaining and exercising power.  Anyone who has propagated this disinformation is responsible in part for what has now happened: an insurrection is the predictable end product of widely-disseminated claims of electoral fraud.

The same goes, incidentally, for those purveying baseless claims that the coronavirus is a hoax imposed on us by Bill Gates, George Soros and their puppet Anthony Fauci.  If there really were a fake public health crisis seized on by governments to permanently regiment their citizenry, storming state capitols would be justified.  Disseminating disinformation along these lines is assuming responsibility for potential insurrectionary responses or violent attacks on public health and other officials.

The heroic defense of democracy and the fascist putsch take the same form, invading and occupying places of government and disrupting its operations.  The difference depends entirely on whether the motives derive from genuine evidence of wrongdoing or cynical, power-hungry bullshit.

Yes, More Questions

1. If the whole labour of the country was just sufficient for the support of the whole population; would there be any surplus labour or capital accumulation?
2. If the whole labour of the country could raise as much in one year as would maintain the population for two years, would the country cease working for a year, would the surplus be left to perish or would the possessors of the surplus produce use it to employ people on something not directly and immediately productive, for instance, the erection of machinery?
3. If surplus produce from the first year is invested in machinery or other productive capital in the second year would the annual output in the third year be the same as, less than, or more than that in the first year?  
4. If the whole labour of the country could raise as much in the third year as would maintain it for two years plus the addition output enabled by machinery would they cease working for a year, would the surplus be left to perish or would the possessors of the surplus produce use it to employ people on something not directly and immediately productive, for instance, in the erection of more machinery, etc.?

The End Of The Embargo Against Qatar

 Yesterday Saudi Arabia announced that it is ending the embargo/boycott of Qatar, and though reportedly the UAE leadership is not entirely happy with this, they are going along with this as are the other nations involved in this, Bahrain and Egypt. This had begun in June, 2017, reportedly with the encouragement and initial support by Trump and Jared Kushner, with them buying into it as part of an anti-Iran alliance, given that Qatar was accused of having dealings with Iran, with which it shares a major natural gas pool in the Persian Gulf. It took Trump and Kushner a few months to realize that the very important al-Ubeid air base used by the US was there, so they shifted to trying to end the boycott, which involved a set of 13 demands that Qatar was not remotely going to follow, including shutting down al-Jazeera. It looked for awhile that the quartet, or some of its members, might invade Qatar, but then Turkey sent a bunch of troops to Qatar and in various ways began supporting it.  Probably the greatest cost to Qatar of this whole mess was not being able to use the airspace of these nations.

In the immediate news reports Jared Kushner is being credited with having worked this deal out, which really is not so much a deal as simply a full cave by the Saudis, although apparently what the quartet gains is that Qatar had been bringing complaints to the WTO about all this, and these complaints are now withdrawn. I guess Kushner gets some credit for playing a role in undoing something ridiculous that he played a major role in getting put into place initially. He has also been the major player in getting the recognition deals cut between Israel and two of these, UAE and Bahrain, as well as Sudan and Morocco.

However, Juan Cole and other sources say that what really lies behind this move is the Saudis seeing the Biden administration coming in and recognizing that Biden does not at all approve of a lot of things they have been doing, including the assassination of WaPo journalist Jamal Khashoggi, some other human rights violations especially against female womens' rights activists, and the awful war in Yemen, which it must be recognized was supported to some degree by the Obama admin, but has gotten much worse since.  Supposedly the Saudis are scrambling and want to "clear some plates off the table" before the Biden admin gets in, and this also explains the Saudis quickly recognizing Biden's victory over Trump, even as some other foreign leaders held off doing so for some time.  They know they are in deep doo doo with Biden and those around him, and really do need US support.

An aspect of this is that is may be that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has for at least a moment lost some power.  Supposedly it was his father, King Salman, who has been the main mover on making this deal.  In any case, it looks like a good thing, whatever it is really behind it.

Barkley Rosser

Zooming in on the Defects of PowerPoint

 I’ve just finished several days of staring, hour after hour, at the year’s economics meetings via Zoom.  What really struck me, beyond the content of the talks, was the way Zoom exacerbates “death by bullet point”.

PowerPoint’s capabilities encourage speakers to load up their slides with lots of text and graphics, which then leads the audience to glue their eyeballs to the slides and not the speaker.  This defeats the core purpose of public speaking in the post-Gutenberg era, which is to use the audience’s engagement with the speaker as a vehicle for communicating thoughts and feelings that the written word, even accompanied by pictures, can’t express.  The worst scenario, which all of us have experienced way too often, is when a speaker crams lots of text in tiny fonts into each slide and then reads it word for word.

As a teacher, I deliberately tried to upend this tendency without abandoning PowerPoint altogether.  I constructed very simple slides with as little text as possible, using very large fonts and relying on spatial organization, like lists and things pointing to other things with arrows to give listeners a sense of the ongoing structure of my presentation.  Sometimes I would insert charts or tables, but usually with only two or three headline quantities or relationships, easily seen in brief glimpse.  I wanted students’ attention to be focused on me, not my slides.

A few of the speakers I saw this week had the same strategy, but it was defeated by Zoom.  The standard Zoom screen gives you a tiny speaker window next to a massive space for slides; the main effect of PowerPoint minimalism was to produce a screenful of whitespace.  You could barely see the speaker even if you wanted to.

Why isn’t the ratio of screen space devoted to slides versus speaker image customizable?

More Questions?

1. What would be the ultimate effect on interest rates of a perpetually increasing accumulation of capital?
2. What would be the logical social response to a situation in which the interest rate on money is effectively zero?
3. What was the principal intention and object of the early political economists?
4. What effect does the detail of figures, the jargon of political economists, or the complexity of existing institutions have on the accumulation of capital?

Updating Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble

 On Dec. 21 I posted on "Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble."  Mostly things have not changed too much.  Oil is still running around $50 per barrel, stocks are not too different from where they were then.  I have no new data on real estate.  Gold is up a bit, now over $1900 again and scraping all time highs, but that is not too much higher than it was on 12.21/20.

What has been shooting up again, quite dramatically in the last few days, have been the cryptocurrencies again, especially bitcoin that has hit a substantially higher new high over $31,000 today. Others have followed, although not as dramatically, although second largest market Ethereum has passed $1,000 for the first time ever.  In any case, this is not a particularly informative post because I have no new information on why this is happening or what is driving this.  There are the same rumors that were around before about possible official digital currencies, and so on, although not any new news on those fronts.  Indeed, I remind that the outcome of any major rollout of official digital currencies might well crash the cryptos, with some people speculating they could also crash regular monies and even banks, although I am doubtful things would go that far.  But in any case, the crypto markets are going wild again, for whatever reason.

Oh, and happy new year, you all.

Barkley Rosser

The “it” Pronoun

The pronoun wars show no sign of abating.  How to replace the use of “him” and “his” to refer to people who are not male or whose gender is unknown?  For a while I used “him and her” or “his and hers”, but it is much too clunky, especially if repeated over the course of several sentences.  Then I switched to alternating genders, first using her/hers and then when the next opportunity arose him/his and so on.  But this is unsatisfactory as well, since it doesn’t distinguish clearly between instances where you know the gender (and can use the appropriate pronoun) and those where you don’t and are just throwing one out there.  Finally I gravitated to they/theirs, despite the deep belief, inculcated through decades of indoctrination, that it is a crime to mixed up singular and plural forms.

None of these is satisfactory, yet it is important to de-gender our language.  We shouldn’t default to a locution that places one gender ahead of another, and we should even go further and not impose a gender binary either.  All of that should be expunged.  Where to go from here?

I have a proposal, and this is “it”.  Very broadly, it/its has been used to designate things that are non- or insufficiently human instead of the him/her/his/hers complex, which is mostly reserved for our own species.  So-called higher animals whose sex is known, like your pet dog or cat, could be graced with him/his or her/hers, but if you don’t have this knowledge, or if the creature is considered lower, it merits only an it/its in common with inanimate objects.  A fish, for instance, is an it.  If you see a bird at some distance and are unable to sex it, it is an it.

Drawing the line in this way is objectionable.  I have been reading a bit of popular writing on animal cognition (Frans de Waal, Jennifer Ackerman), and it’s clear that referring to such organisms in a way that lumps them together with rocks compared to higher beings like us misrepresents them.

But what if we used it/its for everything and everyone?  A rock would be an it, yes, but also a bird and even a human.  Complete and universal itification.  In one swoop it would do away with illegitimate gendering and the Descartes-ish denigration of nonhuman beings.  The only drawback would be the erasure of a linguistic distinction between animate and inanimate referents, but the current use of it/its violates this anyway.  Yes, we would be uncomfortable referring to each other itishly, but any de-gendered linguistic change takes getting used to.

What do you think?  Are we ready for “it”?

And More Questions

1. Are there limits to the accumulation of capital?
2. Under what condition is there a limit to the accumulation of capital?
3. If there are limits to the accumulation of capital, what defines those limits?

Even More Questions

1. What is capital?
2. What power does capital have when invested in machinery, lands, agricultural improvements, etc.?
3. What happens to individuals when they have experienced the accumulative power of money?

A Few More Questions

1. What objections are there to the proposition that wealth consists of reserved surplus labour?
2. How may one answer objections to the proposition that wealth consists of reserved surplus labour?
3. What is the difference between value in use and value in exchange of goods?
4. Why should calculation of the wealth of a nation exclude (or include) its usual and necessary consumption?

A Few Questions

1. What constitutes the wealth of a nation?
2. What is the source of all wealth and revenue?
3. Does the method by which one receives income -- whether wage, rent, profit or interest -- indicate the ultimate source of the value represented by it? 
4. Do stores of money, machinery, manufactured goods or produce represent reserved surplus labour?