Tag: politics

GOP Candidates

Ronnie Feldspar
In 2011, the former Tennessee senator boldly vowed that he would stop anyone from declaring Sharia law over the Dollywood theme park, in Pigeon Forge. It wasn’t a popular position at the time, but, in the intervening years, no one has declared Sharia law over Dollywood. (No one has even thought about it.) Feldspar is also known for successfully defending all 12 Tennessee Olive Garden locations against ISIS.

Leland Vanderbilt-Koch
Vanderbilt-Koch’s is a true American success story. As an aspiring entrepreneur, he managed to scrimp and save and inherit the $3.7B needed to start his own small business. Today that business is worth almost $3.8B. Vanderbilt-Koch will “run America like a corporation, or perhaps even a very large duchy.” He enjoys eating “McDonald’s hot dog” and shaking hands with peasants of all varieties.

US Human Rights Record

this is trolling on the level of the putin editorial in the NYT. it’s effective because they have a point:

in 2014, the US, a self-proclaimed human rights defender, saw no improvements in its existent human rights issues, but reported numerous new problems. While its own human rights situation was increasingly grave, the US violated human rights in other countries in a more brazen manner, and was given more “red cards” in the international human rights field.

Trade-Agreement Troubles

But these days signing such agreements is risky for countries. ISDS lawsuits used to be rare, but they’re becoming a growth industry. Nearly 100 have been filed in the past 2 years, as against some 500 in the 25 years before that. Investor protection, previously a sideshow in corporate law, is now a regular part of law-school curricula. “We’ve also seen an expansion in the types of claims that have been brought”. ISDS was originally meant to protect investors against seizure of their assets by foreign governments. Now ISDS lawsuits go after things like cancelled licenses, unapproved permits, and unwelcome regulations.

Revisiting retirement

we’ve run out of options for economic stimulus. it is time to raise the retirement age, commensurate with huge increases in life expectancy since social security was enacted.

We investigate the options for policymakers given this shortage of traditional ammunition, including: (i) reducing the risk of recession; (ii) reverting to quantitative easing; (iii) moving away from inflation targeting; (iv) using fiscal policy to replace monetary policy; (v) using fiscal and monetary policy together in a bid to introduce so-called “helicopter money”; and (vi) pushing interest rates higher through structural reforms designed to lower excess savings, most obviously via increases in retirement age. We conclude that only the final option is likely to lead to economic success. Politically, however, it seems implausible. As a result, we are faced with a serious shortage of effective policy lifeboats.

JFK on Meth

Khrushchev is supposed to be on his way over. The meeting may last for a long time. See to it that my back won’t give me any trouble when I have to get up or move around.”

Jacobson did so, administering “a heavy dose of methamphetamine,” but it turned out that Kennedy was incorrect about the arrival time of the Soviet leader, who showed up just as the drugs were wearing off. Kennedy demanded another injection, and Jacobson, despite his misgivings about giving another one so soon, did as he was asked

Riots don’t achieve anything

all your commentary about riots is bullshit and confused and tendentious and fuck off. Politically motivated riots are a form of altruistic punishment. Altruistic punishment is behavior that imposes costs on third parties with no benefit to the punisher, often even at great cost to the punisher. To the idiot economist, it is a lose/lose situation, such a puzzle. For the record, I’m a fan of the phenomenon

A different cluetrain

  1. We’re living in an era of increasing automation. And it’s trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society).
  2. A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centers and if there aren’t enough of them profits accrue to whoever can invent some more (even if the products or the items they’re guaranteed against are essentially imaginary: futures, derivatives, CDOs, student loans).
  3. Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.
  4. The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective. (This emerges organically from the needs of the organization’s employees.)
  5. Governments are organizations.
  6. We observe the increasing militarization of police forces and the privileging of intelligence agencies all around the world. And in the media, a permanent drumbeat of fear, doubt and paranoia directed at “terrorists” (a paper tiger threat that kills fewer than 0.1% of the number who die in road traffic accidents).
  7. Money can buy you cooperation from people in government, even when it’s not supposed to.
  8. The internet disintermediates supply chains.
  9. Political legitimacy in a democracy is a finite resource, so supplies are constrained.
  10. The purpose of democracy is to provide a formal mechanism for transfer of power without violence, when the faction in power has lost legitimacy.
  11. Our mechanisms for democratic power transfer date to the 18th century. They are inherently slower to respond to change than the internet and our contemporary news media.
  12. A side-effect of (7) is the financialization of government services (2).
  13. Security services are obeying the iron law of bureaucracy (4) when they metastasize, citing terrorism (6) as a justification for their expansion.
  14. The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there’s a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.
  15. The term “failed state” carries a freight of implicit baggage: failed at what, exactly? The unspoken implication is, “failed to conform to the requirements of global capital” (not democracy—see (3)) by failing to adequately facilitate (2).
  16. I submit that a real failed state is one that does not serve the best interests of its citizens (insofar as those best interests do not lead to direct conflict with other states).
  17. In future, inter-state pressure may be brought to bear on states that fail to meet the criteria in (15) even when they are not failed states by the standard of point (16). See also: Greece.
  18. As human beings, our role in this picture is as units of Labour (unless we’re eye-wateringly rich, and thereby rare).
  19. So, going by (17) and (18), we’re on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.

Have a nice century!