theatlantic | Deep in the forests of Germany,
nestled neatly into the hollowed-out shells of acorns, live a smattering
of ants who have stumbled upon a fountain of youth. They are born
workers, but do not do much work. Their days are spent lollygagging
about the nest, where their siblings shower them with gifts of food.
They seem to elude the ravages of old age, retaining a durably
adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and their hue distinctively
tawny. Their scent, too, seems to shift, wafting out an alluring
perfume that endears them to others. While their sisters, who have
nearly identical genomes, perish within months of being born, these
death-defying insects live on for years and years and years.
They
are Temnothorax ants, and their elixirs of life are the tapeworms that
teem within their bellies—parasites that paradoxically prolong the life
of their host at a strange and terrible cost.
A few such life-lengthening partnerships have been documented between microbes and insects such as wasps, beetles, and mosquitoes.
But what these ants experience is more extreme than anything that’s
come before, says Susanne Foitzik, an entomologist at Johannes Gutenberg
University Mainz, in Germany, who studies the ants and their tapeworms.
Infected Temnothorax ants live at least three times longer than their
siblings, and perhaps much more, she and her colleagues report in a study published today in Royal Society Open Science.
No one is yet sure when the insects’ longevity tops out, but the answer
is probably in excess of a decade, approaching or even matching that of
ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years.
“Some
other parasites do extend life spans,” Shelley Adamo, a parasite expert
at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who was not involved in the
study, told me. “But not like this.”
Under
typical circumstances, Temnothorax ants live as most other ants do.
They reside in communities ruled by a single fertile queen attended by a
legion of workers whose professional lives take a predictable
trajectory. They first tend the queen’s eggs as nurses, then graduate
into foraging roles that take them outside the nest. Apart from the
whole freaky parasite thing, “they are pretty boring,” Foitzik told me.
Normalcy
goes out the door, however, when Temnothorax larvae ingest
tapeworm-egg-infested bird feces trucked in by foragers. The parasites
hatch and set up permanent residence in the young ants’ abdomens, where
they can access a steady stream of nutrients. In return, they offer
their host an unconventional renter’s fee: an extra-long life span that
Foitzik and her colleagues managed to record in real time.
bloomberg |Rising real-estate prices are stoking fears that homeownership, long considered a core component of the American dream, is slipping out of reach
for low- and moderate-income Americans. That may be so — but a nation
of renters is not something to fear. In fact, it’s the opposite.
The numbers paint a stark picture.
After peaking at 69% in 2004, the homeownership rate fell every year
until 2016, when it was 64.3% — its lowest level since the Census Bureau
started keeping track in 1984. The rate rebounded in Donald Trump’s
presidency, hitting 66% in 2020, but that trend is likely to be arrested
by a housing market that is desperately short on supply and seeing
month-over-month price increases greater than they were in the frenzied
market of 2006.
This process is painful, but it’s not all bad.
Slowly but surely, most Americans’ single biggest asset — their home —
is becoming more liquid. Call it the liquefaction of the U.S. housing market.
Even in the best markets, single-family homes
have historically been an extremely illiquid asset. Appraisals have to
be made on an individual basis, and mispriced homes can sit on the
market for months waiting for a potential buyer — only for that buyer’s
financing to fall through.
Liquid assets, like publicly traded stocks and
corporate bonds, earn what’s known as a liquidity premium: Their market
price is many times the dividend or coupon that investors get from
holding them. The more liquid an asset, the higher that premium goes. On
the flip side, those same high-flying stocks and bonds can see their
prices collapse when investors get spooked and withdraw their cash from
the market.
Houses have typically traded with very little
liquidity premium. That meant a relatively low purchase price compared
to what it would cost to rent — the equivalent of the dividend from
housing investment — and stable prices over time.
These
two factors made houses a good investment for moderate-income families
who often lacked the cash and the risk tolerance for market investments.
As investments went, single-family homes were cheap and slowly grew in
value in both good times and bad.
In the early 21st century, automated appraisals and mortgage underwriting began to change that.
Combined with the repackaging of subprime loans into presumably safer
CDOs, they created a far more liquid market for housing. In response,
housing prices soared — and became more sensitive to the vagaries of the
markets. When investors pulled out of CDOs, buyer financing dried up
and the whole housing market crashed.
It may have seemed at the time like a failed
experiment. But financialization had changed the housing market forever.
Houses are now more prone to be priced high relative to rents, and to
see their prices fluctuate with the market. The very features that made
home buying an affordable and stable investment are coming to an end.
WSJ | A bidding war broke out this winter at a new subdivision north of
Houston. But the prize this time was the entire subdivision, not just a
single suburban house, illustrating the rise of big investors as a
potent new force in the U.S. housing market.
D.R. Horton Inc.
DHI 1.01%
built 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, rented them out and then put
the whole community, Amber Pines at Fosters Ridge, on the block. A Who’s
Who of investors and home-rental firms flocked to the December sale.
The winning $32 million bid came from an online property-investing
platform, Fundrise LLC, which manages more than $1 billion on behalf of
about 150,000 individuals.
The country’s most prolific home builder booked roughly twice
what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class—an
encouraging debut in the business of selling entire neighborhoods to
investors.
“We certainly wouldn’t expect every single-family community we sell
to sell at a 50% gross margin,” the builder’s finance chief,
Bill Wheat,
said at a recent investor conference.
“You
now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a
house,” said
John Burns,
whose eponymous real estate consulting firm estimates that in
many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold
is bought by someone who never moves in. “That’s going to make U.S.
housing permanently more expensive,” he said.
The consulting firm
found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately
accounted for 24% of home purchases there. Investors’ slice of the
housing market grows—as it does in other boomtowns, such as Miami,
Phoenix and Las Vegas—among properties priced below $300,000 and in
decent school districts.
“Limited housing supply, low rates, a
global reach for yield, and what we’re calling the institutionalization
of real-estate investors has set the stage for another speculative
investor-driven home price bubble,” the firm concluded.
guardian | Naomi Osaka has announced her withdrawal from Roland Garros one day after she was fined $15,000 by the French Open
and warned that she could face expulsion from the tournament following
her decision not to speak with the press during the tournament.
Osaka,
who won her first match against Patricia Maria Tig and was scheduled to
face Ana Bogdan in the second round, had released a statement last
Wednesday stating her intention to skip her media obligations during
Roland Garros because of the effects of her interactions with the press
on her mental health.
In a statement on Monday signifying her
withdrawal from the event, Osaka said she was leaving the tournament so
that the focus could return to tennis after days of attention and
widespread discussion.
“This isn’t a situation
I ever imagined or intended when I posted a few days ago,” Osaka wrote
on social media. “I think now the best thing for the tournament, the
other players and my well-being is that I withdraw so that everyone can
get back to focusing on the tennis going on in Paris.
“I
never wanted to be a distraction and I accept that my timing was not
ideal and my message could have been clearer. More importantly I would
never trivialise mental health or use the term lightly.”
In her original statement, Osaka had noted her expectation that she would be fined and Gilles Moretton, the French Tennis
Federation (FFT) president, had affirmed in a press conference with the
French press last Thursday that his organisation would penalise Osaka.
However,
the organisation offered no official response until the lengthy
statement signed by the four grand slam tournaments on Sunday after
Osaka’s first-round win. Their heavy handed approach to Osaka has
received significant criticism as it meant Osaka had to choose between
either risking significant punishment or else returning to conduct press
conferences. The attention Osaka has received was only compounded by
the announcement of her fine.
On Thursday
evening Osaka’s older sister, Mari, attempted to support her sister by
providing further context of her struggles on Reddit. She stated that
Osaka had been hurt by frequent questioning about her ability on clay
courts and that she felt she was being “told that she has a bad record
on clay”. After losing in the first round of Rome, Mari Osaka said her
sister was “not OK mentally”. After receiving some criticism, Mari Osaka
deleted her post.
theatlantic | Deep in the forests of Germany, nestled neatly into the hollowed-out
shells of acorns, live a smattering of ants who have stumbled upon a
fountain of youth. They are born workers, but do not do much work. Their
days are spent lollygagging about the nest, where their siblings shower
them with gifts of food. They seem to elude the ravages of old age,
retaining a durably adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and
their hue distinctively tawny. Their scent, too, seems to shift, wafting
out an alluring perfume that endears them to others. While their
sisters, who have nearly identical genomes, perish within months of
being born, these death-defying insects live on for years and years and
years.
They are Temnothorax ants, and their elixirs of life are the
tapeworms that teem within their bellies—parasites that paradoxically
prolong the life of their host at a strange and terrible cost.
A few such life-lengthening partnerships have been documented between microbes and insects such as wasps, beetles, and mosquitoes.
But what these ants experience is more extreme than anything that’s
come before, says Susanne Foitzik, an entomologist at Johannes Gutenberg
University Mainz, in Germany, who studies the ants and their tapeworms.
Infected Temnothorax ants live at least three times longer than their
siblings, and perhaps much more, she and her colleagues report in a study published today in Royal Society Open Science.
No one is yet sure when the insects’ longevity tops out, but the answer
is probably in excess of a decade, approaching or even matching that of
ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years.
“Some other parasites do extend life spans,” Shelley Adamo, a
parasite expert at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who was not
involved in the study, told me. “But not like this.”
Under
typical circumstances, Temnothorax ants live as most other ants do.
They reside in communities ruled by a single fertile queen attended by a
legion of workers whose professional lives take a predictable
trajectory. They first tend the queen’s eggs as nurses, then graduate
into foraging roles that take them outside the nest. Apart from the
whole freaky parasite thing, “they are pretty boring,” Foitzik told me.
Normalcy
goes out the door, however, when Temnothorax larvae ingest
tapeworm-egg-infested bird feces trucked in by foragers. The parasites
hatch and set up permanent residence in the young ants’ abdomens, where
they can access a steady stream of nutrients. In return, they offer
their host an unconventional renter’s fee: an extra-long life span that
Foitzik and her colleagues managed to record in real time.
discovermagazine |If you’re hiking in the wilderness,
stay away from warm, stagnant bodies of fresh water, no matter how
thirsty you are. These inviting little ponds often play host to Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba species with a taste for human brain tissue.
N. fowleri can
spend long spans of time just hanging around as a cyst, a little
armored ball that can survive cold, heat, and dry conditions. When a
cyst comes into contact with an inviting host, it sprouts tentacle-like
pseudopods and turns into a form known as a trophozoite. Once it’s
transformed, the trophozoite heads straight for the host’s central
nervous system, following nerve fibers inward in search of the brain.
Once it’s burrowed into its host’s brain tissue — usually the olfactory bulbs — N. fowleri sprouts a “sucking apparatus” called an amoebostome and
starts chowing down on juicy brain matter. As the amoeba divides,
multiplies and moves inward, devouring brain cells as it goes, its hosts
can go from uncomfortable to incoherent to unconscious in a matter of
hours.
The symptoms start subtly, with
alterations in tastes and smells, and maybe some fever and stiffness.
But over the next few days, as N. fowleri burrows
deeper into the brain’s cognitive structures, victims start feeling
confused, have trouble paying attention, and begin to hallucinate. Next
come seizures and unconsciousness, as the brain loses all control. Two
weeks later, the victim’s most likely perishes — although one man in Taiwan managed to stick it out for a grueling 25 days before his nervous system finally gave out.
Although N. fowleri infections
are rare in the extreme — worldwide historical totals number only in
the hundreds — they’re almost always fatal, and tricky to catch and
treat before they spiral out of control. Even so, you’d be wise to avoid
warm pools of still water, lest you end up with an uninvited guest on
the brain.
theatlantic | To find the world’s most sinister examples of mind control, don’t look
to science fiction. Instead, go to a tropical country like Brazil, and
venture deep into the jungle. Find a leaf that’s hanging almost exactly
25 centimeters above the forest floor, no more and no less. Now look
underneath it. If you’re in luck, you might find an ant clinging to the
leaf’s central vein, jaws clamped tight for dear life. But this ant’s
life is already over. And its body belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus.
When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s
body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course
of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend
a nearby plant stem. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters—a
zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to
grow. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a
leaf. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing
into a bulbous capsule full of spores. And because the ant typically
climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal
spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn.
The fungus’s skill at colonizing ants is surpassed only by its skill at
colonizing popular culture. It’s the organism behind the monsters of the
video game “The Last of Us” and the zombies of the book The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s also an obsession of one David Hughes,
an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has been studying
it for years. He wants to know exactly how this puppet master controls
its puppets—and his latest experiments suggest that it’s even more ghoulish than it first appears.
counterpunch | We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate
consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data
conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants,
such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a
certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.
Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some
kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with
‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This
is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside
their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is
repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.
Failed Green Revolution
Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial
institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and
proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri
infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.
Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s
been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture
and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically
engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified
organisms).
“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look
at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super
profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks,
tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic
engineering, and took patents.”
Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the
pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576
accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:
“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their
creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed
Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the
varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and
have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a
superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved
varieties’ bred for chemicals.”
It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms
of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly
productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological
footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts
on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.
jonathanturley | We previously discussed
the controversial position of Alison Collins, Vice President of the San
Francisco school board, in her campaign against meritocracy and effort
to shut down the gifted programs at Lowell High School. The Asian
community was particularly opposed to Collins’ efforts since Asian
students composed 29 percent of the students but 51 percent of the
Lowell student body. Now Collins is under fire for prior tweets
attacking Asians as promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and of using
“white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”
These do not appear recent tweets but their content is obviously insulting for any Asian American. The Yahoo News story included
such tweets as accusing “many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps” —
teachers, students, and parents — of promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS”
and of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get
ahead.’” It also include a demand to know “[w]here are the vocal Asians
speaking up against Trump?” and statements on how Asians are deluding
themselves by not speaking out against former president Donald
Trump: “Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?”
Collins continued. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled?
beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still
considered “the help.”
While the use of the censored version of the “n word” has led to calls to terminate academics,
I do not believe that such objections are fair in this or the prior
cases. Indeed, this controversy should not take away from the campaign
against meritocracy and the effort to eliminate programs for advanced or gifted students in the public school system. As I have previously discussed, I long been a supporter of public schools. These advanced programs are needed to maintain broad, diverse, and vibrant school systems for cities like San Francisco.
Race politics seems a focus on every level in the school system, even in the regulation of student elections.
Likewise, the controversy in San Francisco follows another controversy
in Los Angeles where United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Cecily
Myart-Cruz has also criticized “Middle Eastern” parents
in joining “white parents” in seeking school re-openings. The UTLA was
criticized after Maryam Qudrat, a mother of Middle Eastern descent, was
asked by the UTLA to identify her race after criticizing the union’s
opposition to reopening schools despite overwhelming science that it is
safe. This effort to racially classify critics of the teachers followed
Myart-Cruz attacking critics by referring to their race
CTH | In modern politics not a single member of the House of
Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to paper to write
out a legislative construct. This simply doesn’t happen.
Closer Look → Lobbying Congress •1986: $61 million spent, avg $113,700 per lawmaker •2016: $3.1 billion spent, avg $5.8 million per lawmaker pic.twitter.com/UgbBfsPZyq
— Fox News Research (@FoxNewsResearch) July 22, 2017
Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body. Here’s how it works right now.
Outside groups, often called “special interest groups”, are entities
that represent their interests in legislative constructs. These groups
are often representing foreign governments, Wall Street multinational
corporations, banks, financial groups or businesses; or smaller groups
of people with a similar connection who come together and form a larger
group under an umbrella of interest specific to their affiliation.
Sometimes the groups are social interest groups; activists, climate
groups, environmental interests etc. The social interest groups are
usually non-profit constructs who depend on the expenditures of
government to sustain their cause or need.
The for-profit groups (mostly business) have a purpose in Washington
DC to shape policy, legislation and laws favorable to their interests.
They have fully staffed offices just like any business would – only
their ‘business‘ is getting legislation for their unique interests.
These groups are filled with highly-paid lawyers who represent the
interests of the entity and actually write laws and legislation briefs.
In the modern era this is actually the origination of the laws that
we eventually see passed by congress. Within the walls of these
buildings within Washington DC is where the ‘sausage’ is actually made.
Again, no elected official is usually part of this law origination process.
Almost all legislation created is not ‘high profile’, they are
obscure changes to current laws, regulations or policies that no-one
pays attention to. The passage of the general bills within legislation
is not covered in media. Ninety-nine percent of legislative activity
happens without anyone outside the system even paying any attention to
it.
nytimes | Apollo grew out of the ashes of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment
bank that collapsed in 1990 amid a trading investigation that sent the
since-pardoned Michael Milken to prison.
Although Mr.
Black started Apollo with his younger partners — Mr. Harris is 56 and
Mr. Rowan 58 — he has been long been the face and voice of the firm.
In
building Apollo into a global financial powerhouse, Mr. Black has made
himself and his co-founders immensely rich: His personal fortune is
estimated at more than $8 billion, and he owns a massive private art
collection — including a version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” — and is
the chairman of the Museum of Modern Art.
But
when Apollo held its most recent earnings call in late October, there
were already signs his dealings with Mr. Epstein were causing ripples,
both in the firm and among investors. In an unusual move, Mr. Black read
a brief statement about the Epstein matter before handing over the
meeting to Mr. Harris and Mr. Rowan.
Apollo
has long specialized in buying up distressed companies and retooling
them, but it also boasts large credit, infrastructure and real estate
businesses. Mr. Rowan was the driving force behind Apollo’s thriving
insurance business and its insurance subsidiary, Athene Holding, which
has fueled the Wall Street’s firm earnings in recent years.
At
one time, both Mr. Rowan and Mr. Harris were seen as the heirs apparent
to Mr. Black. But with Mr. Rowan’s decision to pull back from
day-to-day affairs, many on Wall Street assumed the job would fall to
Mr. Harris, who has the run the nuts and bolts of Apollo’s vast buyout
operation.
Mr. Harris, who is an owner
of the Philadelphia 76rs basketball team and the New Jersey Devils
hockey team, said he would “fully support” Mr. Rowan as chief executive.
“I will focus on expanding our global search for investor returns,
which is at the core of our success,” he said in a statement.
As
the only three members of Apollo’s executive committee, the founders
hold considerable sway over the company. As of now, the decision to name
Mr. Rowan as Mr. Black’s successor does not need approval of the
company’s board. And all three men — who have much of their net worth
tied up in the company — have a vested interest in the stability of the
firm.
WaPo | Over
the past day, a lot of people have asked me how I feel. They are
usually referring to my covid-19 diagnosis and my symptoms. I feel like I
have a mild cold. But even more than that, I am angry.
I
am angry that after I spent months carefully isolating myself, a single
chaotic day likely got me sick. I am angry that several of our nation’s
leaders were unwilling to deal with the small annoyance of a mask for a
few hours. I am angry that the attack on the Capitol and my subsequent
illness have the same cause: my Republican colleagues’ inability to
accept facts.
When
I left for Washington last week, it was my first trip there in several
months. I had a list of things to accomplish, including getting my
picture taken for the card I use when voting on the House floor. For the
past two years, I appeared on that card completely bald as a result of
the chemotherapy I underwent to eliminate the cancer in my right lung.
It was because of that preexisting condition that I relied so heavily on
the proxy voting the House agreed to last year, when we first began to
understand the danger of covid-19.
I
was nervous about spending a week among so many people who regularly
flout social distancing and mask guidelines, but I could not have
imagined the horror of what happened on Jan. 6.
To
isolate as much as possible, I planned to spend much of my day in my
apartment, shuttling to the House floor to vote. But the building shares
an alley with the Republican National Committee, where, we’d later
learn, law enforcement found a pipe bomb. I was evacuated from that
location early in the afternoon.
The
next best option would have been my office in the Cannon House Office
Building, where just three of my staffers worked at their desks to
ensure safe distancing. Before I arrived, security evacuated that
building as well, forcing us to linger in the hallways and cafeteria
spaces of the House complex. As I’m sure you can imagine, pushing the
occupants of an entire building into a few public spaces doesn’t make
for great social distancing. Twice, I admonished groups of congressional
staff to put on their masks. Some of these staffers gave me looks of
derision, but slowly complied.
The professional managerial class lives in an Atlassian/Tableau fantasy world (formerly Powerpoint and Excel) Their ability to ‘model’
and then ‘pitch’ (and fund) a decision (read, allocation of Other
People’s Money), using an elaborate smokescreen of elementary finance
and decision science that masks a few
dumbed down operating assumptions (or worse, ‘benchmarks and kpi's’) carries a far
higher paycheck and prestige than the hard work,
expertise and experience required to discover real world inputs.
In fact, real world experience is actively harmful in PMC
world. After all, it tends to result in ‘FUDs’ (Fear, Uncertainty,
Doubt), and therefore no greenlight and no remunerative follow on
workstreams (see ‘Bu!!sh!t Jobs)
Having a degree does not make one a member of the PMC, it is being in an institutional or professional setting where you are subject to pressure about your work product and process, despite the appearance of some degree of autonomy by virtue of elite status. It most certainly is not just about credentials or pay. And you don’t have to be senior either.
Increasingly,
if you want to get and hang on to a PMC job, that job will
involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way. Industries
such as finance have seized and held onto larger and larger proportions
of the economy. The same disproportionate growth can be seen in financialised healthcare and finacialised education.
In other words, being a member of the PMC critically includes that
you are sufficiently not in control of your work process or product that
if you object to widespread practices (either in the industry or at
your place of employment) that you find morally offensive,
you can expect to suffer serious career or income costs. Most people
believe they can’t afford that and so go along with the program.
1)The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) attained class consciousness.
2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop.
3) The press replaced reporting with advocacy.
4) Election legitimacy is determined by extra-Constitutional actors.
5) “Fascism” became an empty signifier, not an analytical tool.
Let us look at each of these claims.
1) The PMC attained class consciousness. As Thomas Frank has shown (Listen, Liberal!),
the PMC has replaced the working class as the Democrat Party base[1].
During the period 2016-2020, the PMC, collectively, experienced Trump’s
election as literal, actual trauma (as pain, as an energy suck, as
constant stress, as depression, etc. Parents wept to tell their
children, and so forth. That the burden of such trauma is — with respect
to the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by, say, soldiers. abuse
victims, or the homeless — quite slight may lead some — well, me — to
mock it (“How was brunch?”), but the trauma is deeply felt and real).
Importantly, as Steve Randy Waldman has urged, the class position — and
hence the class consciousness — of the PMC is marked by “predatory precarity“;
the predation comes from what a professional must do to maintain their
class position in a financialized economy driven by rent-seeking; the
precarity comes from the fact that their class position is maintained,
not by the ownership of capital, or the inheritance of a title, but by
expensive “positional goods” like credentials. Trump’s right-wing
populism, with its distrust of experts — the same meritorious experts
whose Esq.s were on every foreclosure notice or dunning letter, and whose M.D.s
were on every surprise medical bill — struck directly at both exposed
nerves. Not only might they not be consulted on how best to rule, their
very credentials might turn out to be worthless. Hence the rage, the
fear, the hate, certainly universally expressed in the press, but also
in such organizations as Indivisible, the Women’s March, etc. The PMC as
a class came to consciousness screaming Make it stop!
2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop.Make it stop! was, however, followed hard upon by I didn’t do it! Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,
describes how Robbie Mook deployed RussiaGate to delegitimize the newly
elected President in a meeting with the rest of the defeated Clinton
camp the day after Election Day 2016. RussiaGate became the Goebbelsian
propaganda operation that it was — if there had been anything to it,
Pelosi would have impeached Trump for it, Mueller Report or no[2] —
through an unholy alliance of the Democrat Party apparatus, the
intelligence community, and the press. All were variously motivated —
“There in stately splendor, far removed from the squalid village below,
they fight their petty battles over power and money” (Bob and Ray) — but
the effect on the PMC was extraordinary: To this very day, any
opposing or dissenting force to the liberal Democrat orthodoxy of the
day can be dismissed with a one-liner about Putin! I’ve never seen
anything like it.[3] Both (1) and (2) combined to drive turnout,
voluntering, donations, and everything else. (That the Democrat base is
too slim to rule on its own is another issue entirely.)
theanalysis | But what I’m getting at is a progressive people’s movement and the
progressives that have been elected to Congress, what should they be
demanding? What do real solutions look like?
Michael Hudson: What they should be demanding is something that cannot be done within
the existing two-party system. First of all, the way to keep down
housing prices and to get the cities and states out of their deficit is
to tax unearned income. Tax the land, have a real estate tax that’ll
collect all this rent that is being paid right now to the banks as
mortgage interest. Either you pay the banks the contractual interest
that they’re due on all of these loans, and you go broke. Or you realize
the banks have become averse to economic welfare. You have to let the
financial system go and replace it with banking and credit as a public
utility.
That’s what makes China so competitive. Why is China able to outstrip
American labor? The Chinese have almost; I’d say, an equal standard of
living from everything that I’ve seen there. Well, the reason is that
China is doing exactly what the United States did to become an
industrial power in the late 19th century. China has public utilities,
public enterprises providing basic needs, and basic public services at a
subsidized rate or freely, such as education, it’s free. Foreign labor
doesn’t have education debt like the United States. Education is free.
Health care is public. It’s provided freely. There’s no huge limit.
Paul Jay: Let me say, I think that’s not quite as rosy as it appears. My
understanding is that while health care is supposed to be free and
public, that you actually have to wind up having to pay doctors some
cash, or you really can’t get in to see them.
Michael Hudson: Yes, that is fair. I do acknowledge that fact. But the most important
public utility to answer the question that you brought up, the
important thing is that banking and finance in China is a public
utility. The government is the creditor. When there’s a pandemic like
this and companies cannot afford to pay the debts or have to lay off
labor, the government, as a banker, can say, OK, we’re just not going to
collect the debt and force you to go under and force you to lay off
your labor force.
It’s easy to cancel debts when you, the public, and the government
are the creditor. Because you’re canceling debts owed to yourself, and
that’s one of the main reasons why banking should be a public utility.
nakedcapitalism | The Financial Times comment section confirmed this take and criticized the pink paper’s account,
which mentioned but didn’t tease out the significance of Ma criticizing
the government for being leery of unsecured personal lending:
At the end of October, Mr Ma criticised China’s
state-owned banks at a financial summit in Shanghai. He suggested the
big lenders had a “pawnshop mentality” and that Ant was playing an
important role in extending credit to innovative but collateral-poor
companies and individuals.
From the Financial Times’ peanut gallery:
Hater of Simpletons
For those who didn’t know what happened : check the new
regulation which limits Ant’s leverage and enhances consumer protection,
which also limits Ant’s valuation as a “tech” company. That was the
main reason Jack fired at regulators in his speech [at the end of
October] – and to be honest, there was no way he didn’t know the
regulation long before the listing date and the speech (gov spent months
on a policy, if not longer and would consult industry leaders)! If the
IPO were not halted, investors would have suffered from major losses,
not to mention the high leverage (60x+) and ABS put Ant’s customers at
risk. Jack fired the speech to evade regulation and made sure HE made
enough money from the listing. Not investors, not Ant users. Being
sarcastic is easy. Try to get clear of what REALLY happened.
Now to the substance of the dispute, which led to the halt of the IPO
and will require Ant to substantially restructure its business. Ant
originates personal and small business loans to parties with little in
the way of assets. These loans command higher interest rates than more
conventional loans and from what we infer, “higher’ can mean “pretty
high”.
As we have written, China hasn’t been shy about using leverage to
boost growth, even though as we and others have written, over time, the
incremental lending has produced less and less in the way of GDP lift.
China has also had multiple mini-financial crises involving its “wealth
management products.” These are typically uninsured investments that
provide a fixed interest rate for a set period of time, typically five
years. They have often provided funding for state-level real estate
investments. Nevertheless, even if you allow for Michael Hudson’s view
that land should be taxed aggressively to limit real estate rentierism,
economists have found that borrowing to make productive investments in
businesses, equipment, and buildings adds to growth, while increases in
personal borrowing are a brake.
Another reason for China to take a dim view of personal borrowing is
that the government prioritizes wage growth and improving living
standards as its basis for legitimacy. There’s no reason, as in the US,
to use consumer borrowing to mask stagnant worker wages. And the Chinese
may even have recognized that overly financialized economies have lower
rates of growth than ones at a more modest level of financial
“deepening”. The IMF found that Poland was at the optimum level, but
argued that more finance might not create a drag if the sector was
well-regulated.
Mind you, we aren’t saying that China is a paragon of regulatory
virtue. They still allow for stunning amounts of margin lending against
stocks. And they’ve also sat pat as ghost cities, too often shoddily
built, continue to rise, a textbook case of trading sardines.1 But they appear to want to avoid having a finance-driven economy, and also appear to have learned from some of our mistakes.
Some of the writing was on the wall earlier. While Ant
was gearing up to launch its IPO, regulators had begun taking aim at the
company’s fast-growing microloan business, which provides short-term
credit to hundreds of millions of individuals and scores of small
businesses.
On Sept. 14, China’s banking and insurance regulator issued a private
notice to some commercial banks warning them about the risks of making
loans in partnership with third-party institutions, according to a copy
of the notice seen by The Wall Street Journal. It said banks should not
be outsourcing their loan underwriting and risk controls.
When Ant partners with banks to make loans, the lenders provide the
funding and bear the risk of defaults, while Ant collects fees for
facilitating the transactions.
Two days later, the regulator published a guideline that placed caps
on the volume of asset-backed securities that could be issued by
microlenders. Two subsidiaries of Ant have bundled many loans into
securities and sold them to raise funds for lending operations.
In other words, Chinese officials tried halting Ant’s practice of
originating risky individual/small business loans and selling them to
banks, both on the bank and Ant ends of the pipeline. That apparently
didn’t lead to a change of course at Ant or its allied banks or lead to
any change in appetite for its IPO.
americanbanker | Regardless of the product, usage rates of short-term loans and other
alternative financial products are incredibly high among active duty
members of the military — despite a concerted effort by the U.S. armed
forces to promote fiscal responsibility and deter their active duty
members from obtaining short-term lending products. At Javelin Strategy
& Research’s blog, we’ve found 44% of active duty military members
received a payday loan last year, 68% obtained a tax refund loan, 53%
used a non-bank check-cashing service and 57% used a pawn shop — those
are all extraordinarily high use rates. For context, less than 10% of
all consumers obtained each of those same alternative financial products
and services last year.
Why is this happening? At least part of this phenomenon can be
attributed to age as those in the military tend to be young and Gen Y
consumers are generally higher adopters of these services because they
are earlier in their financial lives — earning less income and in
possession of less traditional forms of credit.
But those
conditions don’t tell the whole story. With the explosion of digital
financial services, a lack of accessibility doesn’t explain these
differentials. Is there something more? Why are these products so
attractive to a segment of the population with a very regular paycheck?
It could be a function of unintended consequences.
strategic-culture | People living in the western world are in the greatest fight for the
future of pluralist and republican forms of governance since the rise
and fall of fascism 75 years ago. As then, society had to be built up
from a war. Today’s war has been an economic war of the oligarchs
against the republic, and it increasingly appears that the coronavirus
pandemic is being used, on the political end, as a massive coup against
pluralist society. We are being confronted with this ‘great reset’,
alluding to post-war construction. But for a whole generation people
have already been living under an ever-increasing austerity regimen.
This is a regimen that can only be explained as some toxic combination
of the systemic inevitabilities of a consumer-driven society on the
foundation of planned obsolescence, and the never-ending greed and lust
for power which defines whole sections of the sociopathic oligarchy.
Recently we saw UK PM Boris Johnson stand in front of a ‘Build Back Better’ sign, speaking to the need for a ‘great reset’.
‘Build Back Better’ happens to be Joe Biden’s campaign slogan, which
raises many other questions for another time. But, to what extent are
the handlers who manage ‘Joe Biden’, and those managing ‘Boris Johnson’
working the same script?
The more pertinent question is to ask: in whose interest is this ‘great reset’ being carried out?
Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers upon
the theory and practice of austerity. Certainly it cannot be left to
those who have built their careers as puppets of a morally decaying
oligarchy.
What Johnson calls the ‘Great Reset’, Biden calls the ‘Biden Plan for
a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice’. Certainly the
coming economy cannot be left to Boris Johnson or Joe Biden.
How is it that now Boris Johnson speaks publicly of a ‘great reset’,
whereas just months ago when those outside the ruling media paradigm
used this phrase, it was censured by corporate Atlanticist media as
being conspiratorial in nature? This is an excellent question posed by
Neil Clark.
And so we have by now all read numerous articles in the official
press talking about how economic life after coronavirus will never be
the same as it was before. Atlanticist press has even run numerous
opinion articles talking about how this may cut against globalization – a
fair point, and one which many thinking people by and large agree with.
Yet they have set aside any substantive discussion about what exists
in lieu of globalization, and what the economy looks like in various
parts of the world if it is not globalized. We have consistently spoken
of multipolarity, a term that in decades past was utilized frequently in
western vectors, in the sphere of geopolitics and international
relations. Now there is some strange ban on the term, and so we are now
bereft of a language with which to have an honest discussion about the
post-globalization paradigm.
brucewilds | Both giving and receiving bribes is usually a felony with significant legal ramifications. Influence
peddling, the illegal practice of using one's influence in
government or connections with persons in authority to obtain favors or
preferential treatment falls into this category. One thing is
clear, whenever we are talking about the involvement of huge sums of
money, foreign players, officials holding high public office, or family
members of politicians a few eyebrows should get raised. With this in
mind, the Biden problem extends well past Hunter but also into how other
family members have profited from Joe's time as Vice President such as
his brother's involvement in a huge government contract in Iraq.
The
issue of Hunter Biden receiving money from Russia, Ukraine, and China
surfaced during the first
Presidential debate and Biden claimed it was a story already discredited
by authorities. This narrative was destroyed when the Washington Times
acknowledged the Treasury Department records confirm Hunter Biden
received a
wire transfer for $3.5 million from the Mayor of Moscow’s
wife. It is difficult to find anyone that holds Hunter in high esteem
and the fact theUnited States suspects the woman sending him
this money built much of her wealth through corruption does little to
improve his standing. For those of us cynical of all the so-called
public servants that seem
to line their pockets and hold the attitude they are above the law this
is a big red flag.
If the veil of secrecy surrounding
Hunter's career is lifted we will most likely find Hunter's dad did
share in the spoils bestowed upon not
only his son but others in the Biden family. I contend Joe Biden's cozy
relationship with corruption is why former President Obama did not rush
to endorse
Biden when he announced he planned to run. To be clear, we are talking about, millions, and hundreds of millions of dollars or more.For
us cynics, we see this as what may be only the tip of the spear when it
comes to public officials throwing the American people under the bus
for fun and profit. As a voter, this dovetails with my concern about
Biden's relationship and attitude towards China which I consider a major
issue.
NYPost | Rather than set up shop in New York City, the financial capital of the
world, Rosemont Seneca leased space in Washington, DC. They occupied an
all-brick building on Wisconsin Avenue, the main thoroughfare of
exclusive Georgetown. Their offices would be less than a mile from John
and Teresa Kerry’s 23-room Georgetown mansion, and just two miles from
both Joe Biden’s office in the White House and his residence at the
Naval Observatory.
Over the next seven years, as both Joe Biden and John Kerry
negotiated sensitive and high-stakes deals with foreign governments,
Rosemont entities secured a series of exclusive deals often with those
same foreign governments.
Some of the deals they secured may remain hidden. These Rosemont
entities are, after all, within a private equity firm and as such are
not required to report or disclose their financial dealings publicly.
Some of their transactions are nevertheless traceable by
investigating world capital markets. A troubling pattern emerges from
this research, showing how profitable deals were struck with foreign
governments on the heels of crucial diplomatic missions carried out by
their powerful fathers. Often those foreign entities gained favorable
policy actions from the United States government just as the sons were
securing favorable financial deals from those same entities.
Nowhere is that more true than in their commercial dealings with Chinese government-backed enterprises.
Rosemont Seneca joined forces in doing business in China with another
politically connected consultancy called the Thornton Group. The
Massachusetts-based firm is headed by James Bulger, the nephew of the
notorious mob hitman James “Whitey” Bulger. Whitey was the leader of the
Winter Hill Gang, part of the South Boston mafia. Under indictment for
19 murders, he disappeared. He was later arrested, tried, and convicted.
James Bulger’s father, Whitey’s younger brother, Billy Bulger, serves
on the board of directors of the Thornton Group. He was the longtime
leader of the Massachusetts state Senate and, with their long overlap by
state and by party, a political ally of Massachusetts Senator John
Kerry.
Less than a year after opening Rosemont Seneca’s doors, Hunter Biden
and Devon Archer were in China, having secured access at the highest
levels. Thornton Group’s account of the meeting on their
Chinese-language website was telling: Chinese executives “extended their
warm welcome” to the “Thornton Group, with its US partner Rosemont
Seneca chairman Hunter Biden (second son of the now Vice President Joe
Biden).”
The purpose of the meetings was to “explore the possibility of
commercial cooperation and opportunity.” Curiously, details about the
meeting do not appear on their English-language website.
Also, according to the Thornton Group, the three Americans met with
the largest and most powerful government fund leaders in China — even
though Rosemont was both new and small.
The timing of this meeting was also curious. It occurred just hours
before Hunter Biden’s father, the vice president, met with Chinese
President Hu in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit.
ineteconomics | Sarah Chayes: When I was writing my 2015 book, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,
I realized we are on the same spectrum as those other countries. I just
did not yet realize exactly how relevant that analysis was to the U.S.,
and how swiftly the calamities would come.
On Corruption in America begins with the 2016 decision in McDonnell v U.S.,
in which the corruption conviction of a former Virginia governor was
overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. What stunned me was the
divergence between ordinary people’s understanding of corruption —
basically, if it quacks like a duck… — and the unanimous view
of elites across the political divide that corruption is something of
minor consequence, beneath notice. The opinion, accepted by all eight
justices, including the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg, warned that America
was in more danger from the fight against corruption than from
corruption itself.
I knew we were in for very serious trouble.
LP: What kind of trouble, exactly?
SC: I had been looking at countries with systemic corruption and no
civic means of redress. These kinds of conditions led to violent
explosions, ideological insurgencies, a massive movement that erupted
across the Arab world, peaceful civic protests that in a couple of cases
spiraled into world-shaking civil wars, mass migrations out of those
regions, and what have you.
In the places I’ve studied, there tended to be not so much a veer
toward the extreme, but a jolt. That’s the kind of trouble I saw ahead
for the U.S. I think we already experienced it to some extent in 2016,
and I suspect it’s not over.
LP: Your book looks at networks of people who exploitpolitical
and economic systems to increase their wealth by working across private
and public sectors. Help us understand this in a historical context.
What is new or distinct with corruption in America today? What are some
of its features?
SC: I looked at the Gilded Age in particular — understood broadly,
from about 1870-1935 — and here’s the shocker: almost nothing is
different today. Then, as now, intertwined, even intermarried, networks
of billionaire-equivalents seized the main levers of power and bent them
to their own objectives.
They wove themselves into incredibly resilient webs, which included
business magnates, top government officials (or sometimes people serving
in the two capacities at once), and even outright criminals. Often,
they traded places in these various sectors, working in business for a
while, then government, then back in business, and so on. They bent and
distorted public institutions and laws, or eviscerated them. They
physically crushed resistance. They brilliantly divided the egalitarian
coalition against itself, across class and especially racial lines. They
veiled themselves in secrecy. They bought people off.
Then, as now, their chief revenue streams were public procurement,
finance, energy, and high-end real estate. Pharma/processed foods and
the tech sector might be today’s most significant additions.
LP: You note that both political parties are intertwined with
corrupt networks. How does this manifest in the current election cycle?
Some hope a Biden presidency would be a blow to corruption. What’s your
take?
SC: This is one of the most difficult aspects of this book — for me,
and doubtless for readers. Americans so crave a good-guy-bad-guy story,
now more than ever. We’re desperate for some sense of redemption. In the
broad “blue” camp, what people want to hear is unadulterated
Trump-loathing, and almost nothing else. But in the Biden-Harris ticket,
I’m afraid I see a bit of a fantasy: that we can just wake up from this
nightmare and it’s 2015, and none of this ever happened. But this book
asks readers to see how 2015 and the prior two decades or so delivered
the nightmare. And it highlights the role of many Democrats in creating
the conditions. That is, Trump is not the lone villain in these pages,
and all other sins are not wiped away before the sole objective of
removing him from the office he is unfit to hold.
The next problem here, of course, is false equivalency. I do not mean
and am not saying that all sides are equally corrupt. There is a small
coalition of uberwealthy Americans that, since the late 1970s, has been
systematically working to dismantle the institutions and practices that
promote citizens’ well-being. Few if any of them are Democrats. But, on
the “blue” side of the house, we have witnessed mass infection with what
I call the “Midas disease” (see below) and consequently, an
opportunistic validation of the radical moves made by that coalition of
the rich.
Biden and many of those around him are among those validators. Among
Democrats, we’ve seen the glorification of the “financial industry,” the
avid participation not just in pay-to-play politics but in the
influence-peddling economy that delivered us Joe Biden’s son Hunter
serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. There was the Clinton Foundation before that.
We’ve also witnessed the wanton sabotage of regulatory safeguards
that protected Americans from the worst abuses of profit-seeking
corporations. All this has ratified the program of the largely
Republican cabal I just mentioned. That is, what could have been
isolated after the Reagan Administration as a radical project that
violated every American principle of government to benefit the governed
has instead been turned into bipartisan orthodoxy. No wonder half the
American electorate doesn’t vote.
Conversational English in 1586
-
*Simon Roper*: In this video, I explore a 1586 work by Jacques Bellot, and
what it can tell us about 'street English' in the early modern period.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
