The Left Can't Do A Trucker Protest Because It Lacks The Right's Decentralized Capacity For Violence

ianwelsh  |  The left cannot do what the truckers do because if they did, they would be shut down with extreme violence — if they were even allowed to get going. Remember, the Ottawa police chief let the truckers set up, knowing in advance what they were going to do.

Note also, that the right uses decentralized action a lot. Their shooters are created by their ideology, but act individually. The truckers may have organization, but they are individuals. Each truck has to be seized individually. There is some central organization, and when its visible it’s taken out (the shut down of the GoFundMe) but mostly it’s buried in the financial and third-party weeds. Ezra Levant of Rebel news, for example, hired a lawyer to fight parking tickets for the truckers. He’s not directly involved so far as we know yet, but he is indirectly involved.

Then there’s Ontario’s Prime Minister, Doug Ford. Doug could have this stuff broken up easily, and if it truly does need the military, he’s the person with the authority to call them in (the Feds arguably can’t without passing a new law). Doug’s daughter is with the protesters.

FDR alleged (but only allegedly) once said, “You’ve convinced me. I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.” Doug almost certainly agrees with the truckers, but he knows that polling is against him.

“Make me do it.”

Killing people for the market is economic orthodoxy. Impoverishing people so the rich can get richer is economic orthodoxy. Taking care of people, in the US, Canada, and Britain is against the ruling ideology — it is actually not legitimate. (It is in China and Japan, as people there are viewed as productive assets, not as assets to be mined.)

For unions to do what the truckers do they would have to start by decentralizing. No significant  headquarters, few assets to be seized, and leadership that doesn’t matter because anyone can lead. If the “president” is locked up, it doesn’t matter because someone else steps up, and regular members know what to do anyway.

Plus, there needs to an implicit threat. “If you take us out by force, we will keep showing up, and you can’t lock us all up.” The “truckers” (most truckers disagree with them, including the Teamsters) belong to a movement that shows up at school board meetings, that pickets hospitals & legislatures and threatens nurses, and that is generally perceived as dangerous. Politicians don’t feel entirely safe using force and law against them, though this is (or was) far more true in the US than in Canada. The left has spent generations telling themselves that violence is always bad and that even the threat of it should never ever even be considered because Gandhi, Gandhi, Gandhi.

All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others. All protests are equal, but some protests are more equal. Some ideologies are far more equal than others.

Of Course The Origin Of The Protest Was Economic (As Was Its Ending...,)

bbc  |  If the Ottawa protest has caused maximum community disturbance, then the Windsor protest caused maximum economic disruption by shutting down one of the country's major trade arteries, the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor with Detroit, Michigan.

More than $323m (£238m) in goods crosses that bridge every day, and for nearly a week, not a dollar has made it to the US or back.

Almost half of that is from the trade of car parts, says Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association.

He does not mince words when it comes to the protest.

"In Windsor we have at its core, several dozen people who are macroeconomically illiterate and absolutely disrespectful of their own community, that they would imperil the economy of the region to make a point," he said.

"Never has a tantrum cost so many people so much."

After the clearance operation, police remained behind. The bridge will reopen on Sunday or Monday.

But Volpe said the harm to the auto-parts industry will last much longer than that, because it will take three to four days to get the supply chain fully functional. The total cost of lost production and shipments he estimates at about C$1b ($790m, £580m).

He also said the damage to Canada's reputation with its US trading partner is devastating, especially as American politicians push for protectionist policies.

In a statement, Windsor police say there will be "zero tolerance" for any illegal activity. But how they will stop further blockades from springing up, while still keeping the bridge open, remains to be seen.

Sergeant Betteridge said he hopes the occupants feel they were heard and realise that further disruption is not required.

"The protesters came wanting to get a message across, and I think they did get a message across," he said.

"If anyone is thinking of breaking the law, they've seen what has happened here."

 

Canadian Vax Mandate Would Damage Owner-Operators Ability To Earn A Living

The origin of the truckers protest was economic – stemming from the  mandatory 14-day quarantine for unvaccinated drivers after crossing the border. As owner operators, this would have restricted their ability to make a livelihood. The protest then morphed into something else.

canada  |   Today, the Minister of Health, the Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, the Minister of Transport, the Honourable Omar Alghabra, and the Minister of Public Safety, the Honourable Marco Mendicino, issued the following statement:

"On November 19, 2021, we announced that as of January 15, 2022, certain categories of travellers who are currently exempt from entry requirements, will only be allowed to enter the country if they are fully vaccinated with one of the vaccines approved for entry into Canada.

These groups include several essential service providers, including truck drivers. Let us be clear: This has not changed. The information shared yesterday was provided in error. Our teams have been in touch with industry representatives to ensure they have the correct information.

A Canadian truck driver who is not fully vaccinated can't be denied entry into Canada—Canadian citizens, persons registered as Indians under the Indian Act and permanent residents may enter Canada by right.

As announced in November and as we've communicated with the industry recently, starting January 15, unvaccinated Canadian truck drivers entering Canada will need to meet requirements for pre-entry, arrival and Day 8 testing, as well as quarantine requirements.

The final decision regarding entry and quarantine is made by a government representative at the port of entry, based on the information presented to them at the time.

Any individual who is symptomatic upon arrival to Canada will be directed to a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) official and will be directed to isolate for 10 days from the time they enter Canada .

As of January 15, 2022, unvaccinated or partially vaccinated foreign national truck drivers, coming to Canada from the US by land, will be directed back to the United States.

To qualify as a fully vaccinated traveller and to enter Canada, foreign national truck drivers must:

• have received at least two doses of a vaccine accepted for travel, a mix of two accepted vaccines
  • or at least one dose of the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine
• have received their second dose at least 14 full days before they enter Canada
  • For example: if a driver received their second dose anytime on Saturday, January 1, then Sunday, January 16 would be the first day that they would meet the 14-day condition.
• Have submitted all required COVID-19 information into ArriveCAN.

Where You Think American Truckers Got The Idea From In 1973?

NYTimes |   The 23‐day truckers’ strike has had “catastrophic” repercussions on Chile's already ailing economy, the Government said today.

The first detailed report on the ‘economic consequences of the walkout said that agriculture was seriously threatened, industry had slowed and supplies of commodities had reached “a crucial point.”

“This is a political strike aimed at overthrowing the Government, with the help of imperialism,” said Gonzalo Martner, Minister of National Planning and one of the chief policy makers for President Salvador Allende Gossens's socialist Government.

Left‐wing newspapers have accused the United States of financing the truckers’ strike and the anti‐Government campaign in the opposition news media in an attempt to carry out an “economic coup d'etat.”

Meanwhile, the Government continued behind‐the‐scenes efforts to reach an agreement with the National Confederation of Truck Owners and bus and taxi associations, who demand guarantees that the transport industry will not be taken over by the state.

There is no official estimate of the losses caused by the walkout but reliable sources put them at about $100‐million —half of the $200‐million that last October's month ‐long strikes were officially said to have cost.

People have suffered more from the current strike because the country had not built up its supplies after the October stoppage. However, the damage is not so great because the movement is not general by any means. Business and professional associations have threatened to join the truckers, as they did last year, but have not yet done so.

Production in general is expected to decline by about 10 per cent this year—if the strike is settled soon.

The official report on the walkout, published by the National Office of Planning, said that half of the country's more than 40,000 trucks were off the road. The striking truckers maintain the industry is totally paralyzed.

America's Civil War: Provincial Lesser-Rich vs. Urban Mega-Rich

tabletmag | But what of the states and the federal government? These two tiers of the U.S. constitutional order are merely the battlegrounds on which the intra-elite feuds of the American metro areas are fought.

In states like Texas, in which Republicans control the state government while the big cities are controlled by the Democratic hourglass coalition, there is a constant game of cat-and-mouse between progressive city councils that enact left-wing policies and right-wing legislatures passing legislation to overrule them. The Texas state legislature has used state law to annul ordinances of the far-left Austin City Council ranging from plastic bag bans, to enabling an explosion of homeless encampments in public spaces, to declaring Austin a “sanctuary city” whose police officers would be ordered to refuse to collaborate with federal immigration authorities.

The state usually wins, because under our constitutional system the policies of cities, counties, and local governments under most state constitutions can be overruled in many areas by the state government. In this way, metro area conservatives, having lost city councils to progressive Democrats, can use allies in state government to defeat their enemies downtown.

But the downtown Democratic coalition has allies of its own in the federal government. Beginning in the 1960s, Democrats—by then having become the urban party they are today—discovered that by means of federal “grants-in-aid,” they could circumvent state legislatures and go directly to Congress. According to one estimate, in 2018 federal aid to state and local governments, taking the form of grants to specific programs in areas from K-12 education to environmental policy to transportation and infrastructure, amounted to $697 billion, doled out via 1,386 separate programs that bind localities to the federal government.

As a result of all of these targeted federal spending programs, about one-third of state spending actually comes from the federal government.

This in turn means that a substantial number of state and local government employees are in effect paid by the federal government, either to administer grants or to ensure compliance with the many complicated federal regulations attached to the grants.

Many of the “culture war issues” that divide left and right are provoked by the metro area left’s attempt to use federal regulations to impose policies that could not be passed by the city council or the state government. The threat that the federal government would cut off aid to colleges and universities was used to intimidate them into compliance with controversial leftist sexual harassment policies denying due process to the accused under the Obama administration. Also in the Obama years, the federal government used the threat of cutoffs of federal aid and civil rights lawsuits to bully state governments and local school districts into letting biological boys and men compete in female sports teams and use female showers, locker rooms, and restrooms. In the case of the latter controversy, the federal government’s pressure on state legislatures and local school districts was reinforced by extortion from “woke” national and multinational corporations, which fund Democrats.

When federal grants-in-aid and corporate blackmail are understood as weapons of the downtown Democrats, the power of Republican red state legislatures to override blue city ordinances looks less impressive. While targeted grants-in-aid may benefit only a few state citizens, it is the noisy few who will fill up the phone lines to state legislators if the federal government threatens to cut them off as part of a progressive blackmail campaign. Democratic legislators have also found ways of tying more popular forms of federal aid—for transportation, housing, and schools—to more arcane priorities in cultural areas, forcing localities to choose between embracing Democratic ideas of race, gender, and sexual orientation or risk losing federal funding for schools and highways.

Even more intimidating is extortion by left-leaning corporations. Particularly in poorer, more working-class Republican states, the state economic development strategy often involves luring major national or multinational corporate investment. The socially (though not economically) progressive Democrats and liberal Republicans who run corporate America can insist that the states competing for their money not only shower them with tax breaks but also write New York and Bay Area social values into state law, or suffer an investment boycott.

 

One Little Town, Three Thousand People, Two Starkly Different Realities...,

AP |  The newspaper hit the front porches of the wind-scarred prairie town on a Thursday afternoon: Coronavirus numbers were spiking in the farming communities of western Minnesota.

“Covid-19 cases straining rural clinics, hospitals, staff,” read the front-page headline. Vaccinate to protect yourselves, health officials urged.

But ask around Benson, stroll its three-block business district, and some would tell a different story: The Swift County Monitor-News, the tiny newspaper that’s reported the news here since 1886, is not telling the truth. The vaccine is untested, they say, dangerous. And some will go further: People, they’ll tell you, are being killed by COVID-19 vaccinations.

One little town. Three thousand people. Two starkly different realities.

It’s another measure of how, in an America increasingly split by warring visions of itself, division doesn’t just play out on cable television, or in mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

It has seeped into the American fabric, all the way to Benson’s 12th Street, where two neighbors -- each in his own well-kept, century-old home -- can live in different worlds. 

In one house is Reed Anfinson, publisher, editor, photographer and reporter for the Monitor-News. Most weeks, he writes every story on the paper’s front page. He wrote that story on clinics struggling with COVID-19.

He’s not the most popular man in the county. Lots of people disagree with his politics. He deals with the occasional veiled threat. Sometimes, he grudgingly worries about his safety.

While his editorials lean left, he works hard to report the news straight. But in an America of competing visions, some here say he has taken sides. 

Nowhere in the Monitor-News, for example, will you find reports that local people are dying because they’ve been inoculated.

“There are no alternative facts,” Anfinson says. “There is just the truth.”

But whose truth?

His neighbor, Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully. He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.

He hasn’t seen the death certificates and hasn’t contacted health authorities, but he’s sure the vaccine deaths occurred: “I just know that I’m doing their funerals.”

He’s also certain that information “will never make it into the newspaper.”

Wolter’s frustration boils over during a late breakfast in a town cafe. Seated with a reporter, he starts talking as if Anfinson is there.

“You’re lying to people,” he says. “You flat-out lie about things.”

 

 

 

Talk About "Race Relations" Deflects Mass Consciousness From The Political Economy

taibbi |  Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.

DiAngelo’s not the first person to do this. There was a woman named Peggy McIntosh who going back to the eighties had the “knapsack of privilege,” or some shit like that. I know people who have had careers at racial sensitivity trainings, and the people that I know, in my world — the people who came out of the movement actually came out of anti-Klan politics, or rather left politics in the seventies, and they started doing this stuff. It makes sense in the same way that people who were graduate students in the late sixties and early seventies who were left theory-inclined people got into the Frankfurt School. That became the cornerstone of their academic careers.

Well, that’s what’s happened in the anti-racism or the racial sensitivity training world. And one of the things that’s happened over time is that the material incentives — and it’s funny, pardon this aside, but it’s funny how many political-economy-oriented leftists we encounter who apply critical political economic thinking to every domain in the world — outside the movement that they’re operating in. So the material incentives evolved, and changed over time. And some of my friends who have done this work have said to me that they used to do it for community groups, used to do it for unions and so forth and so on. Then, as the material incentives change, they want to build and do more for corporations, or for local governments who were under consent decrees.

So this becomes part of the thing. You’re under a consent decree for actual discrimination. One of the remedies that’s likely to be imposed as part of the decree is that you submit to this training. And we see it all the time now. Even the insurgencies within NGOs, right? Where the staff or whatever is going batshit crazy about how the leadership of the organization is all racist, sexist, whatever. And one of the first calls is to bring in some minor-league version of Robin DiAngelo to do the racial sensitivity training. So in that sense, it’s taken hold as part of what I’ve often described as the broader political economy of race relations.

How About Schools Teach Every Student To Read, Write, And Calculate At Grade Level?

WaPo  |  This week at the Oklahoma State Department of Education building, I was schooled in how the stealthy, well-orchestrated movement against teaching honestly about America’s racist history operates. It is fast and furious and determined to steamroll over truth in education.

But Monday morning, one Black woman and a Black high school student tried to hold the line. Though they were on the losing side of that steamroll — this is Oklahoma, after all — their courage and resistance in the face of white supremacy deserve to be celebrated.

The occasion was consideration of item 8(b) on the Oklahoma Board of Education’s meeting agenda: emergency rules for implementing a bill passed in May by the Republican-controlled state legislature limiting what students in the state can be taught on race and gender. Notice of the item was publicly posted only last Friday, giving educators and advocates next to no time to organize a response. The actual rules, too, were made available just minutes before the meeting. They included chillingly harsh penalties, such as teacher suspensions and district defunding, for instruction that makes any individual feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Carlisha Williams Bradley arrived knowing she would cast one of the most consequential votes of her professional life. The only Black member of the board, she wondered whether she would be removed from her position for pushing back. But the education advocate and former executive director of Tulsa Legacy Charter School spoke truth: that the right-wing’s current bête noire, “critical race theory” — which the legislature claimed to be responding to — means merely the examination of laws and legislation that uphold racism and oppression. Oklahoma’s new education law and harsh punishment, she said, would serve only to generate fear in teaching an accurate history of the United States.

“We are robbing students of the opportunity to have a high-quality education,” Williams Bradley said.

Future Good Jobs: Not About Technology As Much As Corrupt Law And Tax Policy

technologyreview  |  A major question is not whether there will be enough jobs but whether there will be enough good jobs—jobs that provide middle-class earnings, safe working conditions, legal protections, social protections, and benefits (e.g., unemployment and disability benefits, health benefits, family benefits, pensions). The slow growth of pretax incomes for the bottom 50% of earners has been the main driver of increasing income inequality over the past half-century. Access to good jobs—as well as to education and health care, so people have the knowledge and good health required to work—is key to lifting these incomes and making technology-­enabled growth inclusive.

Several types of policies could make good new jobs more likely to be created in the United States. These include taxes on labor and capital that affect business investment decisions; R&D policies that can direct technological change and influence both the pace and extent of new technologies’ adoption by business; training policies that enable workers to gain new skills; direct labor market interventions that provide benefits to temporary and contract workers; and measures that strengthen workers’ voice in business decisions.

Rethink tax policies 

Tax policies influence businesses’ decisions to invest in new production technologies. In the United States and other advanced economies, labor is taxed at a much higher rate than the physical capital and knowledge capital required to produce goods, encouraging investments that use capital and save labor. A reduction in payroll and other employment-related taxes would moderate this bias. So would an increase in taxes on capital, including corporate income. Recently, the US corporate tax rate was cut dramatically. Proponents argued that the cut would increase business investment and that this in turn would increase employment and wages. As technology becomes more labor-saving, however, business investment in physical and knowledge capital becomes less likely to create good jobs, and the new US tax law does nothing to offset that effect. 

Another issue is that as capital has become more mobile across national borders, many multinational companies have been able to make their profits “stateless” for tax purposes by shifting them to locations where they have little or no real economic activity and pay little or no tax. Stateless corporate income erodes the tax base and reduces the capacity of individual countries to raise revenues for infrastructure and social protection programs. It also exacerbates the tax disadvantage of labor, which is far less mobile than capital. In their recent book The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman discuss the consequences of stateless capital income for income inequality and suggest national remedies as stopgap measures in the absence of an international agreement to tax such income. In the long run, given the magnitude of cross-border capital flows, such an agreement is essential

In the US, taxes on capital income should also be increased by raising the rate on capital gains (which are now taxed at a lower rate than personal income) and by eliminating the carried-interest loophole. Both the preferential capital gains rate and the carried-interest feature of current tax law have encouraged technology investments favoring capital and profits over labor and wages. They have also fueled the “financialization” of the US economy and increased income inequality.

Reductions in payroll taxes and other direct taxes on labor, even if offset in part by higher taxes on capital, would leave less government revenue available to fund health care, education, and benefits for workers—all key components of good jobs. A national carbon tax should be used to offset this revenue loss. Lower taxes on labor to promote employment, and higher taxes on carbon to discourage carbon use, are a wise recipe for a future of good jobs and a sustainable environment.

 

The Constitution Was Engineered To Prevent Political Corruption And Has Utterly Failed...,

nakedcapitalism |  A final example from everybody’s favorite obstructionist Democrat, Joe Lieberman Joe Manchin. From Ryan Grim:

On Monday, Joe Manchin met with a group of wealthy donors to coordinate a strategy to defend the filibuster. The biggest threat to it, he argued, was Republicans’ refusal to support a January 6th commission, because it made anybody who claimed bipartisanship is still possible look like a buffoon, with people saying to him, “How’s that bipartisan working for you now, Joe?”

The obvious solution, then, he argued, is to find a handful of Republicans who will switch their votes and support a commission. A key target, he said, is Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt. His suggestion was extraordinary for how explicit it made the link between legislative behavior and the pursuit of post-career riches.

“Roy Blunt is a great, just a good friend of mine, a great guy,” Manchin said in audio The Intercept obtained. “Roy is retiring. If some of you all who might be working with Roy in his next life could tell him, that’d be nice and it’d help our country. That would be very good to get him to change his vote. And we’re going to have another vote on this thing. That’ll give me one more shot at it.”

Forget it, Jake. It’s K Street.

Looking back at Article I, Section 8, there’s a loophole you could drive a trump: It really ought to read “accept any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” (I thought it was simpler to generalize it, rather than attempt to parse out all the kinds of private entities that might seek to curry favor with the government.) I doubt that would stamp out gift-giving entirely, but it would sure put a crimp in the culture. The same should be written into the bylaws of professional associations (which I assume would cover institutions like CalPERS, a fine example of the culture of gift-giving; see NC here at “junket“).

If the Framers had access to a Time Machine, and could fast-forward to the present day, they would see a culture, and a political culture, that had become — at least with respect to corruption — everything they sought to avoid, and tried to engineer the Constitution to prevent.

The Effects Of Platform Social Media On Politics And Identity Politics

newleftreview |   The reputation economy undergirded by platform capitalism has played an important role in the growth and mutation of the politics of recognition since the financial crisis. This is not simply to blame ‘the internet’ for identity politics, but to highlight how a new type of rationality has penetrated the social and cultural sphere, turning the distribution of esteem into a type of inter-capitalist competition. Controversies about the supposed threat to the liberal public sphere emanating from universities and the left often ignore a more structural transformation driven by Silicon Valley.

Cultural-political arguments in the Anglosphere frequently turn upon the question of free speech, and the need to rescue it from ‘identitarians’. In the uk, the Johnson government is intent on legislating to force universities to uphold ‘free-speech’ norms. While these allegations are often made in bad faith and on slim evidence—not to mention the accompanying crackdown on any free expression of Islamist views—the task should be to provide a more accurate diagnosis of the decline of liberal norms, not to deny that anything has changed. This requires paying close attention to the capitalist business model and the interfaces on which civil society and the public sphere increasingly depend. Arguments about censorship and ‘no-platforming’ of speakers are often driven by the quest for reputational advantage—on the part of institutions, individuals and social movements—and a need to avoid reputational damage. This is how the politics of recognition is now structured.

As Gramscian scholars have long argued, a capitalist business model does not only determine relations of production, but is mirrored in the mode of political and cultural activity that accompanies it—potentially providing a foothold for critique and resistance. Debates around Fordism and post-Fordism posed questions of what cultural and political analogues they facilitated, and of what new modes of organization and collectivism might emerge. For Jeremy Gilbert, similar questions need to be asked about the type of political-party mobilizations that might or might not be available through the template of the digital platform.footnote¹⁹ New technologies and economic relations also reconfigure the processes of political and cultural life, beyond their own immediate application.

This perspective tends to emphasize positive opportunities for new political strategies, but the negative outcomes also need to be identified. Platforms represent a watershed in the moral and cultural contests of modernity. They not only transform relations of production, but re-format how status and esteem are socially distributed. They are refashioning struggles for recognition no less decisively than the birth of print media did. At the same time, their logic is such that their principal effect is to generalize a feeling of misrecognition—heightening the urgency with which people seek recognition, but never satisfying this need. One effect of this process is the rise of groups who feel relatively deprived, to the point of political insurrection. In terms of Fraser’s perspectival dualism, one of the main questions raised by contemporary politics is how and why many people who are both economically privileged and culturally included can end up feeling like they are neither of those things.

Two paths of critique have opened up in this context, an internalist and an externalist one. The internalist path follows the example of pragmatist sociology in urging political movements to work with the grain of the speculative reputation economy, so as to sabotage centres of power. On a small scale, this might simply mean the mobilization of memes and trolls to build the capital value of a political insurgent or to undermine that of an incumbent power. This type of reputation warfare was notoriously used by the Trump campaign but is widely deployed on the left. Organizations like Greenpeace have worked to attack brand value through graphically disrupting the art galleries and museums that receive oil-industry sponsorship, for instance. Feher advocates a kind of ‘investee activism’, which posits the principal class conflict within neoliberal capitalism as a financial one, between investor and investee. In this perspective, resistance should take aim at the market value of company stocks and operate via debtor strikes that threaten the interests of finance capital and banks. Optimistically, Feher calls for the left to mobilize its own quasi-financial vision of a good society for investment: ‘Creditworthiness is worth vying for, lest we leave it to investors to determine who deserves to be appreciated and for what motives’.footnote²⁰ The very volatility of the moral-economic marketplace offers an opportunity to compete politically over the future.

The externalist critique focuses on the platform itself and its inherent injustices, both for its exploited workers and its users. Srnicek’s approach shows how Marxian political economy can identify the underlying structural conditions of this extractive business form and the variations that it can take. A materialist assessment and critique of the platform business model is a necessary starting point for rethinking the position of organized labour within the gig economy, in which employees are legally reconfigured as ‘contractors’. It is also the starting point for the real-utopian analysis and activism envisaged by Erik Olin Wright, which seeks to establish platform cooperatives and other forms of digital civic infrastructure.footnote²¹ Resistance to Amazon and Uber could involve inventing alternative means of mediating civic life that would not be dedicated to the extraction of rents. And yet, as Seymour’s critique of the ‘social industry’ reminds us, there are other aspects of platform technologies—their addictive, gamified qualities, which exploit and perpetuate our anxieties—whose very function is to suck the life out of social existence.

The challenge for social movements is how to update Fraser’s perspectival dualism for an age in which the platform is becoming a dominant distributor of both reward and mutated forms of recognition. Few movements can afford to abstain entirely from the reputation economy. A lesson from Black Lives Matter is that social media’s accumulation of reputational capital can be harnessed towards longer-standing goals of social and economic justice, as long as it remains a tactic or an instrument, and not a goal in its own right. Campaigns may trigger or seize reputational bubbles that spread at great speed—#MeToo is an example—and potentially burst soon after, making a political virtue of the ability to shift movements into other spaces, including the street. The quest for recognition is more exacting and slower than that for reputation, and appreciating this distinction is a first step to seeing beyond the cultural limits of the platform, towards the broader political and economic obstacles that currently stand in the way of full and equal participation.

Public Colleges And Universities In The Heartland Are Abolishing Faculty Tenure

bleedingheartland |  With this preamble, it is not difficult to predict what will happen should Senate File 41 or House File 496 move forward and eliminate tenure from Iowa’s public universities. (Editor’s note: The House bill cleared the first “funnel” deadline and is eligible for debate in the lower chamber.) Whoever we can recruit either will be taking the position as a temporary fix until a tenure track comes along somewhere else, or is someone who has no chance of a tenure track position anywhere.

Either way, it will be impossible to develop competitive and long-term research groups. The ability to attract external funds and to sustain PhD programs will quickly crumble, and most of the accomplished tenured faculty in our institutions will leave. As Matt Chapman reported in 2019, when another tenure ban was being considered, “after similar legislation passed in 1943, three educators left the state and received a Nobel prize while tenured at other universities.”

Without tenure, our public universities will become giant teaching community colleges with no research. Upper-level courses will be taught by mostly unqualified instructors.

We will still be able to provide degrees and have fancy commencement ceremonies (if that is what you care about), but conferring degrees with very diminished value in the job market. The STEM departments as we know them will disappear. In practice, Iowa will not keep a single research university, as none of its private colleges can take up that role. The same fate will follow with the prestigious University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Our state will become a technological desert, where only companies requiring unskilled labor will have an incentive to come.

Is it conceivable to have a university system without tenure? In principle, everything is conceivable, but realistically, it is not. This system has been in place for centuries now. Everything revolves around tenure. Many funding opportunities are only available for tenure (track) positions. Changing it would require a revamping of epic proportions for the entire nation. 

google.sites |   All eyes in higher education are on Kansas, as the Board of Regents has unilaterally suspended tenure protections and long-established procedures of shared governance, transparency, and due process in order to ease the termination of faculty and staff. This extreme policy circumvents professional standards and violates our commitments as a member institution of the American Association of Universities (AAU). Procedures already exist to make decisions according to financial exigency as part of shared governance. The regents now allow administrators to bypass the established process and eliminate faculty’s structural role in it. The leadership at our fellow Regents Universities in Kansas quickly recognized that this move is at odds with our profession, and have stated that they will not implement it. Only at KU has our Chancellor not committed to shared governance and our professional integrity by refusing to exercise the policy.

 

KBOR’s policy blatantly violates two of the three core Academic Principles of the AAU– those pertaining to Shared Governance and Academic Freedom. Such actions place KU at grave risk of expulsion from this prestigious professional organization, which would inevitably impede the recruitment and retention of faculty and the securing of research funds, ultimately eroding the value of all degrees from the University of Kansas.

 

The AAU principles reflect widely held professional standards, laid out in foundational statements from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure holds that financial exigency must be “demonstrably bona fide” in order to justify termination, and must be considered by a faculty committee as well as the governing board. The AAUP standard does not provide for arbitrary administrative power over such decisions. The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities calls for “joint planning and effort” among its constituents, in which faculty are to hold primary responsibility over matters of faculty status, including dismissal. In order to have a voice in institutional planning, faculty must be fully briefed on the specific budgetary matters in play. The regents’ policy allows administrators to make dismissals without formally declaring financial exigency. This is clearly out of step with the AAUP standard that university executives work “within the concept of tenure,” and “necessarily utilize the judgments of faculty” when addressing institutional challenges.

These standards speak to the role of the faculty, but to bypass them affects the entire campus. The new policy gives a blank check to the chancellor to make sweeping changes. The regents have asked us to trust the chancellor in a time of crisis, but our financial issues predate the pandemic. This recent experience suggests that accountability is in order. To annul shared governance and transparency instead degrades the working conditions of the entire university and the learning conditions for all of our students.

Anarchocapitalism: Deep In The Heart Of Texas

ineteconomics |  In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity system. After a few years, the electrical free market, managed by a non-profit called ERCOT, was fully-established. Some seventy or so providers eventually sprung up. While a few cities – including Austin – kept their public power, they were nevertheless tied to the state system.

The market system could, and did, work out most of the time. Prices rose and fell, and customers who didn’t sign long-term contracts faced some risk. One provider, called Griddy, had a special model: for $9.99 a month you could get your power at whatever the wholesale price was on any given day. That was cheap! Most of the time.

The problem with “most of the time” is that people need electric power all of the time. And Texas’s leaders knew as of 2011, at least, when the state went through a short, severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather. But they did nothing. To do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed – most of the time. In 2020, even voluntary inspections were suspended, due to Covid-19.

Enter the deep freeze of 2021. Demand went up. Supply went down. Natural gas froze up at the wells, in the pipes, and at the generating plants. Unweatherized windmills also went off-line, a small part of the story. Since Texas is disconnected from the rest of the country, no reserves could be imported, and given the cold everywhere, there would have been none available anyway. There came a point, on Sunday, February 14 or the next day, when demand so outstripped supply that the entire Texas grid came within minutes of a collapse that, we are told, would have taken months to repair.

As this happened, the price mechanism failed completely. Wholesale prices rose a hundred-fold – but retail prices, under contract, did not, except for the unlucky customers of Griddy, who got socked with bills for thousands of dollars each day. ERCOT was therefore forced to cut power, which might have been tolerable, had it happened on a rolling basis across neighborhoods throughout the state. But this was impossible: you can’t cut power to hospitals, fire stations, and other critical facilities, or for that matter to high-rise downtown apartments reliant on elevators. So lights stayed on in some areas, and they stayed off – for days on end – in others. Selective socialism, one might call it.

When the lights go off and the heat goes down, water freezes and that was the next phase of the calamity. For when water freezes, pipes burst, and when pipes burst the water supply cannot keep up with the demand. So across Texas, water pressure is falling, as I type these words. Hospitals without water cannot generate steam, and therefore heat; and some of them are being evacuated right now. Meanwhile, ice is bearing down on the power lines.

Legislators Anticipate 10-20 Year Long Domestic War On Terror

WaPo  | An apparent bipartisan majority of the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday endorsed the idea of new laws to address domestic terrorism in the wake of last month’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, as experts warned such internal threats would plague the country for decades to come.

Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary of homeland security for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, warned lawmakers that there is a “high likelihood” that another domestic terrorist attack would occur in the coming months and that the problem would persist “for the next 10 to 20 years.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told lawmakers that Jan. 6 had been a “watershed moment for the white supremacist movement,” and that its adherents viewed the Capitol breach as a “victory.”

Their comments came during the committee’s first hearing in its investigation into the riot that has moved House Democrats and 10 Republicans to impeach the now-former president for an unprecedented second time. The panel’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), indicated that he expected its probe would result in concrete legislation to punish and dissuade such attacks, and better monitor and regulate the environments in which extremist ideologies proliferate.

Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control

“We have to do something,” Thompson said during the hearing. “I’m sure somewhere there will be agreement on specific legislation.”

But although both Democrats and Republicans on the panel showed enthusiasm for select ventures, it is not yet clear where leaders might prioritize their efforts — or if, in the end, they will be able to find enough common ground to avoid political stalemate.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the committee’s former chairman, joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers calling for legislation to set specific federal penalties for domestic terrorism cases. Such legislation would aim to bring the prosecution of such crimes into parity with laws targeting terrorism that originates overseas — something proponents said would recognize that the threats are equally insidious.

“What happened Jan. 6 just cries out” for such a response, McCaul said. “I think it sends a strong message about where Congress is, that we’re going to treat domestic terrorism on an equal plane as international terrorism.”

Social Credit: An Aristocracy Of Producers Serving And Accredited By A Democracy Of Consumers

wikipedia |  Social credit is an interdisciplinary and distributive philosophy developed by C. H. Douglas. It encompasses economics, political science, history, and accounting. Its policies are designed, according to Douglas, to disperse economic and political power to individuals. Douglas wrote, "Systems were made for men, and not men for systems, and the interest of man which is self-development, is above all systems, whether theological, political or economic."^[1] Douglas said that Social Crediters want to build a new civilization based upon "absolute economic security" for the individual, where "they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid."^[2][3] In his words, "what we really demand of existence is not that we shall be put into somebody else's Utopia, but we shall be put in a position to construct a Utopia of our own."^[4]

It was while he was reorganising the work at Farnborough, during World War I, that Douglas noticed that the weekly total costs of goods produced was greater than the sums paid to individuals for wages, salaries and dividends. This seemed to contradict the theory of classic Ricardian economics, that all costs are distributed simultaneously as purchasing power. Troubled by the seeming difference between the way money flowed and the objectives of industry ("delivery of goods and services", in his opinion), Douglas decided to apply engineering methods to the economic system.

Douglas collected data from more than a hundred large British businesses and found that in nearly every case, except that of companies becoming bankrupt, the sums paid out in salaries, wages and dividends were always less than the total costs of goods and services produced each week: consumers did not have enough income to buy back what they had made. He published his observations and conclusions in an article in the magazine The English Review, where he suggested: "That we are living under a system of accountancy which renders the delivery of the nation's goods and services to itself a technical impossibility."^[5] He later formalized this observation in his A+B theorem. Douglas proposed to eliminate this difference between total prices and total incomes by augmenting consumers' purchasing power through a National Dividend and a Compensated Price Mechanism.

According to Douglas, the true purpose of production is consumption, and production must serve the genuine, freely expressed interests of consumers. In order to accomplish this objective, he believed that each citizen should have a beneficial, not direct, inheritance in the communal capital conferred by complete access to consumer goods assured by the National Dividend and Compensated Price.^[6]:4:108 Douglas thought that consumers, fully provided with adequate purchasing power, will establish the policy of production through exercise of their monetary vote.^[6]:89–91 In this view, the term economic democracy does not mean worker control of industry, but democratic control of credit.^[6]:4–9 Removing the policy of production from banking institutions, government, and industry, social credit envisages an "aristocracy of producers, serving and accredited by a democracy of consumers".^[6]:95

The policy proposals of social credit attracted widespread interest in the decades between the world wars of the twentieth century because of their relevance to economic conditions of the time. Douglas called attention to the excess of production capacity over consumer purchasing power, an observation that was also made by John Maynard Keynes in his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, although he rejected the A+B theorem. ^[7] While Douglas shared some of Keynes' criticisms of classical economics, his unique remedies were disputed and even rejected by most economists and bankers of the time. Remnants of social credit still exist within social credit parties throughout the world, but not in the purest form originally advanced by Douglas.

Biden Administration Will Camouflage Corruption With A Diversity Figleaf

caitlinjohnstone |  There has never been a better time to be a woman, minority or member of the LGBT community who works in the DC establishment and thinks the poor should be made into pet food.

The New York Times has published an article titled "Could Limiting Corporate Candidates Hurt Biden’s Diversity Push?", for the benefit of all those normal everyday readers who've been lying awake at night wondering if limiting corporate candidates might hurt Biden's diversity push.

The article's authors warn against the nonexistent, completely imaginary threat of the next presidential administration rejecting corporatists for cabinet positions to appease the Democratic Party's progressive wing, claiming that doing so would be "narrowing the candidate pool" in a way that hurts Biden's stated aim of creating an administration that is as diverse as America. Because apparently executive positions in the corporate and financial sector are the only place you can find ethnic minorities in America.

“Groups from the far left throw out edicts, but these don’t reflect the realities of the American experience or inequality, the racial wealth gap, and may prove counterproductive to diversify the administration and to implement policies that work for all Americans,” NYT is told by a member of the influential DC lobbying firm Mehlman Castagnetti.

The New York Times is warning of the pressing danger of the Biden administration conceding too much to "the far left" at a time when progressive politicians have reportedly already been ruled out as candidates for cabinet positions due to concerns of appearing to be too far left, and when members of the Biden camp are already waving off demands from progressives using the phrase "we don't negotiate with terrorists".

Vox has also put out an article celebrating diversity without regard to policies or behavior titled "President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is one of the most diverse ever", subtitled "Biden wants his administration to 'look like America.' His transition team is a start."

"Thus far, 46 percent of Biden’s transition staff are people of color and 41 percent of senior staff are people of color," Vox reports. "More than half of the transition staff — 52 percent — are women, and 53 percent of senior staff are women."

 

What Politics Will You Profess In The Era Of Diminishing Returns?

theamericanconservative  |  Jeff Rubin, author of The Expendables: How the Middle Class got Screwed by Globalization, has an answer to the above question that is easily deduced from the subtitle of his book. The socio-economic arrangements produced by globalization have made labor the most flexible and plentiful resource in the economic process. The pressure on the middle class, and all that falls below it, has been so persistent and powerful, that now “only 37 percent of Americans believe their children will be better off financially than they themselves are. Only 24 percent in Canada or Australia feel the same. And in France, that figure dips to only 9 percent.” And “[i]n the mid-1980s it would have taken a typical middle-income family with two children less than seven years of income to save up to buy a home; it now takes more than ten years. At the same time, housing expenditures that accounted for a quarter of most middle-class household incomes in the 1990s now account for a third.”

The story of globalization is engraved in the “shuttered factories across North America, the boarded-up main streets, the empty union halls.” Rubin does admit that there are benefits accrued from globalization, billions have been lifted up out of poverty in what was previously known as the third world, wealth has been created, certain efficiencies have been achieved. The question for someone in the western world is how much more of a price he’s willing to pay to keep the whole thing going on, especially as we have entered a phase of diminishing returns for almost all involved.

As Joel Kotkin has written, “[e]ven in Asia, there are signs of social collapse. According to a recent survey by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, half of all Korean households have experienced some form of family crisis, many involving debt, job loss, or issues relating to child or elder care.” And “[i]n “classless” China, a massive class of migrant workers—over 280 million—inhabit a netherworld of substandard housing, unsteady work, and miserable environmental conditions, all after leaving their offspring behind in villages. These new serfs vastly outnumber the Westernized, highly educated Chinese whom most Westerners encounter.” “Rather than replicating the middle-class growth of post–World War II America and Europe, notes researcher Nan Chen, ‘China appears to have skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but disproportionately distributed wealth like the contemporary United States.’”

Although Rubin concedes to the globalist side higher GDP growth, even that does not seem to be so true for the western world in the last couple decades. Per Nicholas Eberstadt, in “Our Miserable 21st Century,” “[b]etween late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5 percent per annum.” “With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years 2000–2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20 percent higher than it is today.”

Stagnation seems to be a more apt characterization of the situation we are in. Fredrik Erixon in his superb The Innovation Illusion, argues that “[p]roductivity growth is going south, and has been doing so for several decades.” “Between 1995 and 2009, Europe’s labor productivity grew by just 1 percent annually.” Noting that “[t]he four factors that have made Western capitalism dull and hidebound are gray capital, corporate managerialism, globalization, and complex regulation.”

 

 

What Role Does The Establishment Play In "Protecting" Citizens From Themselves?

mises |   America’s political environment has become so polarized and hostile that you have many elected officials in positions of influence who openly despise large swaths of the American population. For example, Arizona’s secretary of state—the woman in charge of election integrity in the state—described Trump’s base as “neo-Nazis” in 2017. Given her public statements, why would any Trump supporters have any faith in a governing body she influences to count votes? Meanwhile, the secretary of state in Michigan was a former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing hate group.

It would, of course, be wrong to suggest that the elites of the American left are alone in their hatred of their political enemies. While the Left has tended to be more violent in recent years, there are many Republican voters who consider the political left immoral, un-American, and a threat to their families. The difference is that, outside of a few levers of federal power held by the Republican Party, the American right does not have nearly the same institutional support that the Left does currently.

It appears that 2020 may be the year that finally proves that the façade of democracy is not enough to maintain a unified political body. The election process does not inevitably lead to compromise and tolerance, but rather ends in those in power and those who are politically vanquished. When the losers of elections do not view their loss as a genuine reflection of democratic will, but rather an illegitimate coup, it is difficult to maintain governance over a population. Joe Biden appointing John Kasich–type Republicans will do little to soothe and reassure those who view a Biden presidency as little different than an occupational force.

This is why Ludwig von Mises viewed political decentralization and secession as a necessary component of liberal democracy. The proper objective of the democratic process was the peaceful transfer of power reflecting changes in the political will—political self-determination—rather than some form of civil worship of the will of the majority. When political differences become irreconcilable, true political decentralization allows for the breaking of political unions.

Will that end up being the ultimate result of the position of Trump's legal team? Who knows. Trump and a few lawyers will certainly not be enough to overturn the official results or to successfully spur a Trump secession movement. What will be interesting is how the institution of the Republican Party will respond to the escalating rhetoric of the president.

Under President Obama, the Republican Party remained civil and submissive while its Tea Party base discussed ideas like nullification and a convention of states. The sterility of the traditional GOP is likely a major reason why Donald Trump was able to take over the party. How much of the modern GOP will continue to follow the forty-fifth president, and how many will end up being perfectly content with being partners with Joe Biden?

What we can be sure of is that it will be much harder for Biden to win over many of the 70+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump earlier this month.

Why Aren't Red States Grateful For Elite Coastal/Financial Strip Mining Of Our Economies?

These are segments from Rising featuring exemplary stretches of elite, straight-hate for the benighted peasants out here where I live. What jumps out of this cloud of misdirection is the framing of “Red“ state Trump supporters as welfare parasites, extracting our essentially unearned stipends from the productive largesse of the coastal cognitive elites. We addle-brained deplorables are ungrateful for vulture capitalists, hedge funds, military industrial technological complex that has strip mined wealth from us on the regular for generations.

Because these talking heads represent our cognitive elites, Russiagate is is not a hoax. BLM and the woke DNC minions are going to effect real criminal justice and law enforcement reform. Their accusations of treason, red baiting, and smears with one unsourced claim after another - never correcting the record when they were shown to be wrong - are the new normal. The mainstream narrative has told you authoritatively that Russia has more effect on our elections than Israel, Saudi Arabia, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and our own military industrial technological complex. 

Didn't you witness the way that they swept the Biden Crime Family information under the rug like it didn't even exist?

In my humble opinion, there is no way the PMC will allow the depth of its subversive control over everything including our elections to be revealed.  At this point, I suspect that Trump is negotiating for his post-presidential life - and that of his family. He is trying to drive a hard bargain. He will push the potential of a reveal up to the point where they will give him what he needs and a little of what he wants. 

Trump is looking to secure his family's continued ability to do business and be financially successful. In exchange, he will cease to seek a second term and will not tell too much about certain details or people in his upcoming book deal. That's it. 

Trump has learned the hard way that the deep state is too well entrenched to be defeated; that he cannot use the system that screwed him (and us) to unscrew us.  If the deep state has the power to fix a US presidential election and have the media pre-set on their side for the aftermath - then it is a fool's errand to think that one could use the very same system to set things right legally. 

I absolutely love the way Trump has trolled these pompous, oxygen-thieving parasites. He has done yoeman's work toward the valuable goal of getting us to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. That was a necessary first step toward a warrior taking the stage and begining the armed journey toward a fight to the death.

Trump is not this warrior.

There would have to be investigations and arrests of perpetrators. Careers will be ruined. Glad handing money making networks will be disrupted on a huge scale. In fact, the entire democrat party, especially as run by an old school machine politician like Biden, is a massive money making cartel. That cartel will take a big hit. The PMC will fight more viciously than ever now to prevent any of this from happening. 

The anti-Trump rhetoric will increase to hyperbolic levels exceeding even what we have seen over the past four years. True believers/ideologues will be in a frenzy. There will be continuous riots in the streets. probably targeted assassinations of Trump supporters and conservative politicians. Some of that will be spontaneous and some will be directed and funded by the anti-Trump "resistance". Blue governors will defy policy directives out of Washington DC.

There will be a whole new round of sabotage from the PMC that will surpass the Panicdemic, Russia collusion, lying about troop levels deployed to war zones, leaking to the press, fake news, impeachment and all of that nonsense.

The warrior will have to be autocratic, even 100% dictatorial, in his leadership style.

I don't see Trump as willing or able to do that job.