Category: Philosophy

The Solution to this Problem is Democratic Legitimacy

No Comments

Didier Reynders, the European Union’s justice minister is arguing that challenges to EU law on the basis of national law threaten to break up the organization.

That nations in the EU are taking these steps is no surprise.  The EU has no democratic legitimacy.

It has been, since its origins as the European Coal and Steel Community, a profoundly undemocratic institution.

The European Parliament is about as ineffective as the Roman Senate under Caligula,* and posesses far less power than said august Roman institution.

Ordinary voters still have a voice in their local government and in their local judiciary, while they have none (by explicit design) in the EU.

As such challenging EU dictum through the local courts is a logical, and likely popular, strategy, particularly in the face of German hegemony within the The European Commission:

The EU’s justice commissioner has vowed to fight back against a proliferation of legal challenges and rulings by member states that have attacked the supremacy of EU law, warning that they could destroy the union itself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Didier Reynders said that this increased questioning of the primacy of EU law — and the right of the European Court of Justice to have the final word — created a “spillover effect” that had emboldened others to follow suit.

In a sign of the perceived threat, the European Commission this month launched legal proceedings against Germany in response to an explosive ruling by its constitutional court last year that the ECJ had acted beyond its competence in a case related to European Central Bank bond-buying.

This ruling is actually an artifact of German hegemony.  Bashing the lazy and profligate south has been a winning electoral strategy in Germany since the adoption of the Euro as a currency.

The next big legal challenge Brussels is bracing for is a decision by the Polish constitutional tribunal, which could come on July 13, on whether certain elements of the EU’s treaties are compatible with the constitution. The case, brought by Poland’s nationalist government, is regarded by legal experts as the most serious challenge yet to the EU’s legal order.

If the EU, and the Eurocrats, fail to realize that without political legitimacy through meaningful democratic processes these problems will only get worse.

Democracy is inconvenient, and a pain in the ass sometimes, but absent a muscular application of this concept to EU governance, the EU may cease to exist.

*The real history of Caligula appointing his favorite horse, Incitatus, to the Roman Senate is actually saner than is commonly represented. He threatened to appoint the horse to the Senate in order to demonstrate just how dysfunctional the body was.

It was a prank intended to humiliate the Senate.

Never Walking the Walk

No Comments

One of the reasons that liberals and progressives are given no respect is because when the rubber hits the road, and they need to abide by their own morality, they refuse to do so.

Case in point, the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Massachusetts, where administrators are going scorched earth over a unionization effort by teachers.

In case you don’t recognize the name, “Paulo Freire,” he was a Marxist educator, who wrote extensively on how the current model of education did not meet the needs of the poor and downtrodden.

Not exactly the sort of philosophy that is compatible with going Walmart on your staff:

In 1968, Paulo Freire, a famous Brazilian philosopher, authored the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a Marxist argument for using education to empower the downtrodden. In 2013, a charter school named in his honor was founded: the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School (PFSJCS), located in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Now, in a display of the universe’s sense of humor, teachers at PFSJCS say that the school’s leadership is engaging in union busting.

In March 2020, the school’s professional staff of about 26 people — mostly teachers, along with a few other employees such as guidance counselors — unionized with UAW Local 2322 in Massachusetts. Zack Novak, one of the teachers who helped lead the union drive, said that several years of experience working in unionized public schools had led him to expect certain standards of treatment that he didn’t see at PFSJCS. ​“At charter schools in general, the climate is much different. I noticed people being treated unfairly by the administration,” Novak said. ​“The only way to get ahead was if the powers that be liked you. That’s not an equitable environment for teaching staff.”

Novak sent out an email notifying everyone at the school that the staff had unionized in March of last year. The same day, he says, he was pulled into a meeting with administrators, which he interpreted as an assertion of their power. At the end of the school year, he said, he was offered a new contract to come back — but that contract was rescinded before the next school year began, for no apparent reason. He believes that his involvement in organizing the union was the motivating factor.

In July 2020, the school hired Gil Traverso as its new executive director, to replace a retiring predecessor. Since then, union members say, labor relations have been awful. According to Carol Huben, a PFSJCS teacher, the first ominous sign was ​“a really strong pattern of not responding to union communications.” Next, she said, teachers were warned or disciplined after posting innocuous pro-union messages in their Zoom backgrounds at bargaining meetings.

Then, Huben said, came the most serious blow to the union: a dozen teachers whose contracts were up last year were ordered to reapply for their own jobs — and none of them were rehired. The union said in a press release that ​“no explanation was offered for their non renewal of contracts.” Huben also said that management is warning newly hired teachers to beware of the union. The union has filed complaints over more than 20 incidents since Traverso’s hiring, teachers said.

Primates in general, and humans in particular, are hard wired for fairness, and when they see, “Liberalism for thee and not for me,” it disinclines them from considering the idea of people working for the collective good.

It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

There Was a Primary in New York Last Night

No Comments

The Democratic primary for mayor was conducted by ranked choice voting (also called instant runoff voting), so the the results won’t be certain for a few days,

It appears that the 2nd worst candidate has won, with Eric Adams getting about ⅓ of the first round vote.

Adams is a machine politician, and (among other things) expressed support for the restoring the NYPD’s racist stop and frisk policies.

The worst candidate was Andrew Yang, the former Presidential candidate, who (among other things) based his candidacy on harassing the homeless, crypto-currency, and self-driving cars.

Eric Adams, who ran for mayor of New York City on a message intensely focused on issues of public safety, emerged on Tuesday with a substantial lead in the Democratic primary, but fell well short of outright victory in a race that will now usher in a new period of uncertainty.

With 82 percent of the results in, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was the first choice of 31.6 percent of those who voted in person on Tuesday or during the early voting period, as New Yorkers chose a leader to steer the city’s reopening and economic recovery.

The initial outcome capped an intensely acrimonious campaign defined by debates over public safety and the economy, political experience and personal ethics, as the candidates presented sharply divergent visions for how they would lead New York into its post-pandemic future.

Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, was in second with 22.3 percent; Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, was in third with 19.7 percent. Either would become the city’s first female mayor.

Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, was a distant fourth, and was the first candidate to concede on Tuesday night, a striking development after he had spent months as the dominant candidate in the race.

Yang was never the dominant candidate in the race.  He was just well funded, and presented a shiny bauble for the press to cover.

There was also the (not quite decided) race for Manhattan District Attorney, which is a classic first past the post where Alvin Bragg is leading Tali Farhadian Weinstein by about 3½% with 84% reporting.

I hope that Weinstein loses.  In addition to spending millions of her own dollars, ran ads which could be credibly reported as racist, being tied at the hip to Wall Street, and was one of the very rich people who were revealed to have paid next to no taxes.

Given that the Manhattan DA is at the center of many investigations agaings Donald Trump, Weinstein is ……… Problematic, to put it mildly.

Finally, in upstate New York, a black Socialist woman has defeated the incumbent in the primary in Buffalo:

India B. Walton knew her bid to unseat the entrenched 16-year mayor of Buffalo was a long shot.

………

A self-described democratic socialist, Ms. Walton, 38, has never held political office, and she was challenging Mayor Byron Brown, 62, who was seeking a fifth term, had served as chair of the state Democratic Party and was once was mentioned as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Few people thought she could win. Mr. Brown mostly tried to ignore her campaign.

But on Tuesday, Ms. Walton defeated Mr. Brown in the city’s Democratic primary, making it almost certain that she will become not only the first woman elected mayor in New York State’s second-largest city, but also the first socialist at the helm of a large American city in decades.

Her upset on Wednesday shocked Buffalo and the nation’s Democratic establishment as most of the political world was more intensely focused on the initial results of the still-undecided mayoral primary in New York City. Her win underscored the energy of the party’s left wing as yet another longtime incumbent in the state fell to a progressive challenger, echoing the congressional wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.

If Ms. Walton wins in the general election in November — a likely result in a city that leans heavily Democratic — she would join the growing ranks of Black female mayors elected to lead other major U.S. cities, including Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Kim Janey in Boston and London Breed in San Francisco.

………

Ms. Walton, whose campaign was backed by the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, said she preferred not to get caught up in the semantics of labels — describing her ideology as focused on “putting people first.”

The last time a socialist was the mayor of a large American city was 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor. And it was more than a century ago when a socialist won a mayoral race in New York: In 1911, George R. Lunn, of the Socialist Party of America, was elected mayor of Schenectady, according to Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant.

While rare, socialist mayors are not unheard-of: Bernie Sanders took office in 1981 as mayor of Burlington, Vt., a city one-sixth the size of Buffalo, before being elected to Congress nearly a decade later.

Ms. Walton ran an unabashedly progressive campaign in a Democratic city of about 250,000 people — about 37 percent of them Black — that had elected mostly white men as mayors for nearly two centuries. (Mr. Brown became the city’s first Black mayor in 2006.)

She said she supported implementing rent control protections. She pledged to declare Buffalo a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. And she vowed to reform the city’s Police Department, arguing in favor of an independent civilian oversight board and changing the way police officers respond to mental health calls.

“Our police budget is as high as it’s ever been, and crime is also up, so something is not working,” she said.

People suggesting that campaigning on reform of the police, take note.  It’s a winner, at least in a Democratic primary.

Law enforcement in the US is broken, as is painfully obvious from this picture.

………

Mr. Brown’s actions suggested that he did not take Ms. Walton’s challenge seriously. He refused to debate her — “Maybe he believed pretending I didn’t exist was going to make the race go away,” Ms. Walton said — and he did not campaign vigorously, failing to fund-raise as aggressively as he had in previous primaries or spend on ad buys until late in the race.

“I think it was almost a perfect storm that was working against the mayor in this case, but it was brought about by his nonchalance in this race,” said Len Lenihan, the former Erie County Democratic chairman.

Rule 1 of politics:  People will not vote for someone who never asks for their vote.

………

Under Mr. Brown, Buffalo, in western New York, has undergone a resurgence in recent years with the construction of major projects in the downtown area. But the city’s poverty rate is more than twice the national average, and its unemployment rate, while improving, has not fully recovered to prepandemic levels.

Indeed, there was a sense among some residents who voted for Ms. Walton that low-income communities were not reaping the benefits of downtown development.

………

Upstate New York has large swaths of rural and conservative areas, but many of its cities are reliable Democratic strongholds with large minority communities that left-wing activists see as fertile ground to replicate the upsets they have staged downstate. So far, democratic socialists have picked up seats in the House, the State Legislature and the New York City Council, but Ms. Walton’s win would mark the first time a D.S.A.-backed candidate won a citywide election in New York.

This is a good start

Ms. Walton’s win was also buttressed by extensive support from the Working Families Party, which had previously endorsed Mr. Brown. The party helped her campaign set up an online fund-raising operation, a large field program with hundreds of volunteers and a text message and phone bank operation that made 19,000 calls on the night before the election — in a contest where fewer than 25,000 voters cast ballots.

This is an explicit “F%$# You” to “Ratface Andy” Cuomo, who has done his best to kill the WFP trough riders on legislation.

………

Ms. Walton is an organizer for activist groups that supported the state’s bail reforms and legalizing recreational marijuana. Last summer, she gained exposure marching against police brutality in the protests following George Floyd’s death.

She ultimately decided to run, she said, because Mr. Brown had failed to implement meaningful reforms at the Buffalo Police Department and because of what she saw as his poor response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Again, BLM is a winning cause, unless you are a Democrat cowering fear to Republican racists and corrupt police unions.

Her first step should be to reassure various developers who have incentive deals that the city of Buffalo will abide by their contracts, but that the recipients of taxpayer largess need to abide by the terms of their contract as well.

It is interesting how New York State seems to be the epicenter of Socialist political victories in the US.

Consider the Source

No Comments

The second most contemptible Democratic think tank in Washington, DC, Third Way, has an analysis of why Democrats performed poorly in the 2020 elections, and it comes down to the fact that Democrats stand for nothing.

When one considers the source, a group who has fought for years to ensure that the Democratic Party stand for nothing, this is telling:

In the months since the Democrats’ underwhelming performance in last year’s election, we’ve more or less been able to figure out why the party did so poorly despite a historically unpopular opponent and the two world-historical crises he presided over.

………

Surprise, surprise: a new 2020 postelection autopsy comes to many of these same conclusions — conclusions that observers on the Left have been stressing for months, pulling their hair out as the Democratic Party’s CIA caucus sought to publicly put the blame on the party’s handful of socialists, and popular, commonsense ideas like Medicare for All. But what genuinely is a surprise is who authored this particular autopsy: Third Way, the corporate- — especially Wall Street– — funded think tank that exists to shape Democratic policy for the benefit of tycoons like the Kochs.

………

Finally, there was the decision to cancel in-person canvassing, at the same time that the GOP launched a furious door-knocking and voter registration effort. “Many of those included in this analysis said in hindsight Democrats could have been on doors safely in more places — and Democrats would have won several close races if they had gone back on the doors either sooner or in a more robust way than they did,” states the report. This point was made repeatedly on the record by a host of the party’s leading lights after the election and was almost certainly responsible for not just the drop in support among Latinos but for the Republicans’ crucial triumphs at the state level.

Silly rabbit, the consultants don’t get their vig with door to door canvassing, and their payday is WAY more important than winning elections.

This is yet another confirmation of the Harry S Truman quote, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”

Eat the Rich

No Comments

Am I the only one not surprised that rich people behaved like complete turds throughout the pandemic?

In study after study, the rich are shown to be less charitable, less empathic, and more likely to cheat, so bad behavior is the rule, not the exception:

Heather checked her phone when a text arrived from her mom saying her wealthy cousin from Los Angeles had just flown to Puerto Rico; it was his annual weeklong fishing trip with the boys and the pandemic wasn’t stopping them. He jetted off to stay in a private house with a chef, housekeeper, and fishing guides.

It was the peak of the pandemic in California, when 1 in 5 people in LA County were testing positive for COVID-19 in January, and Heather, who is a nurse and asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy, was working a busy shift. “I had double the amount of patients I was legally allowed and they were all on death’s doorstep,” she said.

………

As the pandemic revealed stark inequalities in American society, it also changed how many people view money and privilege. Sen. Ted Cruz was caught flying to Cancun while Texas buckled under both COVID and a power crisis during a deadly winter storm. Kim Kardashian hosted an island birthday romp for friends and family in Tahiti while the pandemic raged. They were just two of many wealthy people who were seen carelessly using their vast resources for their own pleasure rather than to help as millions struggled with the impacts of COVID: unemployment, displacement, poverty, and hunger. Meanwhile, essential workers like Heather stayed put to provide necessary services, sometimes for low wages.

………

Jacquelyn Delgado, a 53-year-old graduate student, said years of living in Mamaroneck, New York, an affluent area, prepared her for how the wealthy would respond in a crisis. “Rich people gonna rich people,” she told BuzzFeed News.

(Emphasis mine)

………

“I fully expected the wealthy to do what they always do,” said Delgado. “And it was the Trump era, so ‘Screw you, I got mine’ was just lived out loud.”

………

She’s not alone in seeing wealth impact her friendships. Sheeny Ng, a college student from Los Angeles, said a group of her high school friends started posting videos on Snapchat of their trip to Hawaii to celebrate a 21st birthday party before any of them had been vaccinated. “The wealthier ones are able to travel and not care whether it would impact low-income and marginalized communities that don’t have access to healthcare resources,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Wealth and money are so powerful, yet toxic,” she said.

………

Nikki, a 32-year-old teacher who lost her job because of the pandemic, watched in frustration as her siblings-in-law flew to Hawaii on the same day Los Angeles implemented a stay-at-home order. “They remind me of Daisy and Tom in Gatsby, not caring about the destruction they might leave in their wake,” said Nikki, who lives in San Diego and asked not to be identified by her full name. “I think the pandemic really actually unmasked us all,” she said. Nikki hasn’t allowed them to see her newborn baby due to safety concerns from their reckless travel.

(Emphasis mine)


………

Watching people host parties maskless, eat indoors, and go to clubs while hundreds of thousands of people were dying and receiving little support from their government pushed Holly Bruneau, a 34-year-old from Minneapolis who works in nonprofits, deeper into progressive politics.

“I’ve always been a tree-hugging liberal, now I’m a pissed-off socialist,” she said.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Ms. Bruneau.

The Calvinist conflation of wealth and virtue has permeated the culture of the United States, and it’s an unalloyed evil.

F%$# the Pilgrims and their Plymouth Colony.

I Kind of Like the Frantically Mating Arthropods

No Comments

I am referring to the Brood X Cicadas, of course.

Unlike the last time around, the volume is such that it does not penetrate the walls of my house, we moved a few miles north in the interim, and I find their calls kind of flutey.

When we were down in Northwest Baltimore, they were loud enough to be physically painful at times.

Charlie, on the other hand, finds it relentlessly desperate and filled with dread and .

I explained to him that desperation and existential angst (my term, not his) are why creatures procreate in the first place:  Having a progeny creates a legacy, and meaning.

It’s awfully deeply philosophy for a bunch of frantically f%$#ing bugs, at least for me.

I’m an engineer, I don’t look for solutions to major problems of existence, I just try to get, “Close Enough.”

New York Times Editors Come Out for State Owned Means of Production

No Comments

Not joking, they just wrote an editorial suggesting that not only should Covid-19 vaccine IP protections be suspended, but that the US government should set up its own state owned vaccine plants.

They have gone full Pinko:

The United States is well on its way to protecting Americans from the coronavirus. It’s time to help the rest of the world. By marshaling this nation’s vast resources to produce and distribute enough vaccines to meet global demand, the United States would act in keeping with the nation’s best traditions and highest aspirations while advancing its geopolitical and economic interests. It is a moment of both obligation and opportunity.

………

Covax, the World Health Organization’s initiative to pool vaccine resources, remains profoundly underfunded and has failed to meet even its modest target of vaccinating one-fifth of the population in the Global South. Without a major course correction, the rest of the world will have to wait until 2023 or later for large-scale vaccination initiatives like the one underway in the United States. The consequences of this disparity are expected to be severe. Hundreds of thousands more people will get sick and die from a disease that is now preventable with a vaccine. The global economy will contract by trillions of dollars, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, and tens of millions of people will plummet into extreme poverty as the virus continues to fester and evolve in the world’s more vulnerable reaches. 

………

President Biden can start by announcing that the United States intends to help and by appointing a vaccine czar to oversee the expansion of vaccine production. The federal government has ample legal power to compel the participation of the pharmaceutical companies, including the sharing of critical information and technologies. Congress has appropriated $16 billion to scale up production, most of which remains unspent.

Increasing manufacturing capacity has proved tricky. The global demand for vaccines may be high now, but once the coronavirus pandemic recedes, it will plummet back to normal levels. Increased public ownership, for its part, would ensure that vaccine-production capacity is ready for future pandemics, which are inevitable — potentially including new coronavirus variants for which routine boosters may be required.

To this end, the administration should consider taking a page from the Department of Energy playbook: Create publicly owned manufacturing facilities and contract with private companies to run them. (Several of the D.O.E.’s federally owned laboratories are run by private companies like General Electric and Bechtel.)

(emphasis mine)

I would note that the suggestion of federally owned manufacturing facilities is a good thing, and any future research or development contracts should require that these sites have a royalty free license.

But subcontracting to private companies to run them?  Too much of an opportunity for the sort of rat-f%$#ery that has pharma paying generic competitors not to produce.

Drugs factories are not like nuclear weapons factories:  Anyone can build one.

Have the government run these facilities.

Good Point

No Comments

It is in fact true that Republican arguments against expanded unemployment insurance are straight out of Karl Marx.

Republicans are arguing that they need the fear of starvation and destitution to get jobs filled, just as Marx argued that capitalists needed the fear of starvation to exploit the proletariat. 

There is symmetry:

Many Republican-controlled states are freaking out about the working class. Business owners, particularly of restaurants, are complaining they can’t find anyone to fill job openings, and conservative legislatures are leaping into action. At time of writing, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah have announced they will begin refusing the federal $300 supplement to unemployment benefits in the next few weeks, and more may follow. Utah has to “roll those back, to get more people into the workforce to get those jobs, to get back to employment,” said Governor Spencer Cox.

It is amusing to consider this development in light of the ongoing conservative panic attack over President Biden’s supposed “American Marxism” agenda, in the words of prominent right-wing radio host Mark Levin. Ironically, what Republicans are doing to the unemployed actually is explained by classic Marxism.

Let me explain. In his magnum opus Capital, Marx argued that a capitalist system will more-or-less automatically produce a population of surplus workers. Businesses become more productive through greater capital investment, which will require more workers in some areas but far fewer in others, and hence this process will always tend to to create an “industrial reserve army” of surplus labor — that is, the unemployed.

This reserve army is very important for classical capitalism. It “becomes … the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production.” The reason is that businesses are constantly changing the way they operate, and so always need a large supply of idle workers to fling into new projects on a moment’s notice:

The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. [Capital]

This really does not surprise me.  The entire Neoliberal movement grew from Trotskyites.

That Republican thinking mirrors that of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin does not surprise me not one whit.

So Much for the Unfettered Free Market

No Comments

 It turns out that former FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s promises of a brave new world of competition and performance increases and price drops when ISPs were released from burdensome regulation.

Instead, prices continued to rise unabated, and there was no meaningful improvement in performance.

Not a surprise.  The broadband industry is about extracting monopoly rents, and deregulation increases their ability to extract the aforementioned rents:

The average US home-Internet bill increased 19 percent during the first three years of the Trump administration, disproving former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s claim that deregulation lowered prices, according to a new report by advocacy group Free Press. For tens of millions of families that aren’t wealthy, “these increases are felt deeply, forcing difficult decisions about which services to forgo so they can maintain critical Internet access services,” Free Press wrote.

The 19 percent Trump-era increase is adjusted for inflation to match the value of 2020 dollars, with the monthly cost rising from $39.35 in 2016 to $47.01 in 2019. Without the inflation adjustment, the average household Internet price rose from $36.48 in 2016 to $46.38 in 2019, an increase of 27 percent.

The nominal increase in each of the three years was between 7.27 percent and 9.94 percent, while inflation each year ranged from 1.81 percent to 2.44 percent.

“That means the nominal increase in broadband bills was more than four times the rate of inflation during those three years,” Free Press said. The report is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Expenditures Survey data, which does not yet include 2020.

………

“[B]roadband prices consistently increase faster than the rate of inflation while the providers’ own costs do not. This makes this increasingly critical infrastructure service both more expensive in real terms to users and more profitable for the ISPs,” the report said.

Capital investment by Internet providers has dropped, “with substantial declines at large companies like AT&T (where 2020 investment was 52 percent below the 2016 total for the company on an inflation-adjusted basis) and Comcast (where 2020 cable segment investment was 22 percent below 2016’s level on an inflation-adjusted basis),” the report said.

In a press release, Free Press said that ISPs “grew their profits to record levels before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing their prices during an unprecedented economic downturn,” and that “low-priced entry-level options for high-speed Internet service are disappearing, raising the adoption barrier for low-income families.”

The entire narrative that has driven the overpriced and under-performing connectivity situation is a lie.

Fragility Has Its Costs

No Comments

It looks like manufacturers in general and the automobile industry in particular, are taking a few steps back from just-in-time manufacturing.  It appears that they have discovered that the system where they accumulate little or no inventory may save a few bucks, but when it breaks, it gets ugly fast:

Toyota Motor Corp. is stockpiling up to four months of some parts. Volkswagen AG is building six factories so it can get its own batteries. And, in shades of Henry Ford, Tesla Inc. is trying to lock up access to raw materials.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.

“The just-in-time model is designed for supply-chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co.’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

………

The basic idea of just in time is avoiding waste. By having suppliers deliver parts to the assembly line a few hours or days before they go into a vehicle, auto makers don’t pay for what they don’t use. They save on warehouses and the people to manage them.

But as supply chains get more global and car makers increasingly rely on single suppliers, the system has grown brittle. The crises are more frequent.

………

A freak snowstorm in Texas in mid-February shut down a refinery that feeds production of 85% of resins produced in the U.S. Those resins go into components from car bumpers to steering wheels. They’re some of the least expensive raw materials in a car, but they go into seat foam, and dealers can’t sell a car without seats.

At the end of March, Toyota shut down production at several U.S. plants due to the shortage, according to a schedule seen by The Wall Street Journal, hitting production of some of its bestsellers, including the RAV4 sport-utility vehicle. 

Obviously, excessive inventory can be as much of a problem as not enough, but when you have inventory levels that are measured in hours, as opposed to weeks, when something goes wrong, you are completely f%$#ed.

Just Give them Money

1 Comment

Essential Musical Accompaniment

It’s “Teacher Appreciation Week”, and the I agree with Anne Helen Petersen, if you have chosen to do any of the standard teacher appreciations, doughnuts, Starbucks, socks (!), or other various gifts, you are doing it wrong.

Just give them money, and while your are at it, fund the public schools:

All across the United States parents and caregivers are receiving and forgetting instructions on what they’re supposed to be preparing for their preschool and elementary school kids’ teachers. That’s because next week is officially “Teacher Appreciation Week,” an official holiday orchestrated by a combination of Classroom Parents and PTAs that, over the course of the last four decades, has exploded into an intricate, overly-complicated, largely hollow performance of gratitude.

Am I meant to eat twenty breakfast items???

— Emily (@themerriest) April 29, 2021


This year, Teacher Appreciation is particularly overdetermined, because most teachers have had an ass of a year — attempting, based on their location and particulars of their situation, to balance potential COVID exposure, extreme hygiene theater, in-person learning, distance learning, hybrid learning, vitriolic attacks from parents on their unions, and generalized demoralization. Depending on the state and strength of union, many elementary and high school teachers may be struggling to make ends meet; almost everywhere, ECE teachers receive truly garbage pay. That was true before the pandemic, and as with so many jobs deemed “essential,” the garbage pay feels even more insulting. 

………

Temporarily setting aside the fact that this is the sort of labor that almost always falls upon mothers, and serves as yet another way in which working moms, less financially stable moms, single moms, and/or less mobile moms can “fail” at public performances of proper motherhood…and also setting aside the many parents are already paying up to a third of their income on daycare and preschool…and also setting aside the fact that those failures often filter down and serve as sources of shame for children…and also setting aside the fact that making participation in these weeks “optional” is at once bullshit and gaslighting, these gifts don’t actually make the teacher feel supported. 

………

………These gifts can simultaneously “mean well” and serve to protect parents from larger, tougher, more challenging understandings of what support can and should look like.

So what does that support look like? The easiest route, at least in this moment, is money, filtered for actual use in the form of an actually useful giftcard. Depending on your background, you may or may not have internalized the idea that giving money as a means of thanks is tacky or untoward. That is bullshit posturing and you should forget it. A giftcard to Target will actual support a teacher in a way that a desk full of breakfast items cannot.

But that solution is also fairly shallow. There are several ways that you, as a parent or a caregiver or just an adult in the world, can support the teachers in your life in far more meaningful ways. In public, you can show up and back them and their unions at rallies. You can defend them when people start talking shit about them and their unions in Facebook Parent Groups. You can write them with specific and non-performative and non-passive-aggressive ways that they have impacted your child’s life, and be very clear that you don’t expect a response. 

In private, you can vote for politicians and support policies — especially education levies — that move to robustly fund public education. You can vocally support national plans that conceive of childcare and preschool as essential infrastructure: a market failure that demands public investment in order to 1) be affordable & and accessible to all families and 2) pay a living wage.

Preach it!

We under-invest in education, and we allow charlatans to extract tax dollars through charter schools.

Show them the money.

Deep Thought

No Comments

Only Psychopaths and True Believers Are Willing to Put Up with the Bullshit in Politics, Because There Are More Psychopaths Than True Believers, So the Psychopaths Make the Rules.

It was a throw away line by me at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, in a more general discussion of dysfunctional politics, but it was well received, so I thought that I would share it here.

This is a Very Good Thing

No Comments

Did you know that investors are pissed off because Biden’s infrastructure plans do not include any public-private partnerships? (PPPs)

They want to see public private partnerships, where the private participants are guaranteed a profit, and then borrow money at inflated rates from Private Equity, and ding the taxpayers for decades for user fees for doing basically nothing at all.

I feel pretty good about this:

Finance executives are lamenting being frozen out of plans to bolster America’s dilapidated infrastructure, as the Biden administration pushes a tax-and-spend approach to building projects.

President Joe Biden’s “American jobs plan”, unveiled last month, calls for $2tn of investment in highways, electrical grids and other basic infrastructure.

At the same time, the White House put forward corporate tax reforms that it said would generate enough money to pay for the investment spree within 15 years.

That has disappointed some investors and asset managers who once expected public-private partnerships would be a lucrative financing opportunity.

“I would love to put money into infrastructure projects,” said Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer of Calstrs, the retirement system that pays the pensions of California teachers.

The $290bn fund has held sporadic talks with the US Treasury about investing in infrastructure projects since the Obama administration, Ailman said. “A lot of long-term investors . . . look at infrastructure as being a source of stable long-term returns,” he said.

They are upset that they won’t have the opportunity to loot the taxpayers to buy another yacht. F%$# them with Cheney’s Dick.

………

While Biden’s infrastructure proposal revives some of the unfulfilled ambitions of his predecessor, it does not envisage a role for the private investors who had once expected to be in the driving seat.

“This is a very traditional ‘the government is spending on infrastructure’ plan,” said a lobbyist who regularly represents private equity firms in Congress.

Just kill yourself, you bloody parasite, it will be the best thing you ever do for society. 

Some of the executives say that PPPs can, “Impose commercial discipline and generate savings elsewhere,” only they never have, and they have to pay much higher interest rates on what they borrow than the government does, which means that they can’t.

Instead they are efforts to get money today at the cost of tomorrow, as Richie Daley’s incredibly corrupt parking meter deal in Chicago shows.

There never are any savings, just guaranteed profits with some of the vigorish skimmed off the top and returned to the politicians as bribes and campaign donations.

https://twitter.com/DanielaGabor/status/1381665203524415488

see full thwitter thread 

This:

No Comments

Matt Stoller Makes a very good point, “Keep McKinsey Away from Biden’s Infrastructure Push.”

They are corrupt, and will make a dogs breakfast of everything that they touch: 

If there’s one striking feature of the Biden administration so far, it’s the rejection of Barack Obama’s policy framework by his own party. It is now the consensus that Obama’s lack of ambition led to Trump’s election. For instance, party leader Senator Chuck Schumer recently called the Obama stimulus a “mistake” and “a small measly proposal” on CNN, as a way of selling Biden’s much larger proposals.

Biden’s goal, and that of the Democratic Party that controls both houses, is to break from recent politics, and be “more like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and the Congress of 1933, and less like Barack Obama and the Congress of 2009.” Biden wants to spend a lot, to go big, instead of the go small vision of Obama.

………

It’s a bold vision. One important question is whether it’s actually possible to spend that amount of money on so many things without immense amounts of corruption or waste. The difference between FDR and Obama, after all, was not just spending amounts. Obama didn’t spend enough, but he did spend a lot. FDR, however, actually built things, whereas Obama’s stimulus money for, say, California’s high-speed rail, evaporated into a cloud of consultants. (A particularly mean joke was that FDR won WWII in less time than it took Obama to build Obamacare web sites that didn’t work.) 

This might be the best business meme of 2019 so far. pic.twitter.com/hTXul3Muy3

— ArtkoCapital (@ArtkoCapital) March 5, 2019

The McKinsey Way

There is an important difference between Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Biden went to the University of Delaware and then Syracuse for law, and Obama went to Columbia University and then Harvard Law School, both of which are Ivy League institutions.

Obama spent his formative years at colleges where McKinsey was actively recruiting, and his fellow students, and likely many of his friends, were eager at the chance to get their start there.

As such, Obama placed a lot of trust in those consultants, because they were his people, a part of the “Clan of the Ivys,” and we got less than stellar results when the consultants were called in on California rail, or Obamacare.

This is what normally happens when you bring in McKinsey:

Skipped an aside about mismanaging Puerto Rico.

………

So what has McKinsey been doing, if it hasn’t been running Puerto Rico? The answer is, McKinsey has been looking out for McKinsey. It has ensured that Puerto Rico will spend the mind-bogglingly large sum of $1.5 billion on professional services, meaning lawyers, bankers, and consultants (including McKinsey), which is five times what Detroit paid in services for its bankruptcy. I don’t know how much the firm will make, but according to the GSA schedule, just one recent college graduate working at McKinsey costs around $3 million a year. Beyond the straight fee extraction, the conflicts of interest are comical; McKinsey’s internal hedge fund actually owns Puerto Rican bonds.

Far from an anomaly, such a situation for McKinsey is common. McKinsey helped ruin the U.S. spying apparatus with a bloated, failed contract. They helped run Trump’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; ICE even hired McKinsey to write its own contract. McKinsey structured France’s terrible coronavirus response, and that of New York state. McKinsey is so brazen that it was caught by the GSA Inspector General for cheating the government out of $65 million. It didn’t seem to matter. In 2019, McKinsey worked for more than 15 federal agencies and departments, and 25 states.

Unfortunately, the government has continued down this path for many decades, removing government capabilities, and even capability for government oversight, and turning it over the private sector. 

That was my experience working for over 2 years on a project run under a “Lead Systems Integrator” model that was so dysfunctional that future LSI contracts were banned by Congress.

………

Roosevelt’s first major infrastructure battle was over Muscle Shoals in Alabama, the great hydroelectric resource. The Morgan interests and the electric utility magnates wanted that resource privatized for their use. Roosevelt said no, and had the government directly build the Tennessee Valley Authority, a publicly owned and operated electric utility for much of Appalachia. TVA was part of a package of reforms to constrain and control Wall Street, to end what FDR called the ‘informal economic government of the United States.’

Over the rest of the New Deal, FDR transformed the physical plant of the country, and spent a lot of money on infrastructure. But Roosevelt first made sure Wall Street had little say over how public money or public resources were spent. Public institutions got bigger and more competent, and the financiers and monopolists lost power. One key result is that the government could do big things. During World War II, military procurement officers had immense capacity and power, imposing tight control over contractors, and ensuring that there were at least a dozen competitors for each major weapon system. They could peer into the books of contractors, and even claw back excessive profits.

America used this governing capacity for decades, constructing the national highway system, winning the space race, deploying the polio vaccine, landing on the moon and building the internet, and running the project Sematech in the 1980s to address foreign threats to semiconductors.

In the 1990s, however, Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative killed the public capacity Roosevelt had constructed. Clinton encouraged the big prime defense contractors to merge, shrinking them from over 100 to just 5 firms. Clinton’s procurement initiative, led by Steve Kelman, invented a whole new vocabulary for ways to let contractors steal. The details get complex, but the gist was a ‘light touch’ approach to negotiating by the government. Procurement officers stopped making hard-nosed demands for better prices, and were stripped of the ability to look at the books of the contractors to make sure there weren’t excess profits.

It actually started under Reagan, and then SecDef Dick Cheney massively expanded this at the Pentagon under GHW Bush, but Clinton took the idea, and ran with it in a way that no administration has before or since. (I will leave the determination of their motives as an exercise to my reader(s)).

We need to return core competencies to government, or will continue to be unable to efficiently do the business of government.

Quote of the Day

3 Comments

This is an important distinction, because it means we’re not up against some intrinsic aspect of our being here. We’re up against a small minority of manipulative sociopaths and psychopaths and a system which rewards a lack of empathy.

—Caitlin’s Johnstone explaining how she sees the current state of affairs as a function of a relatively small minority of assholes, and not the while human race.

This is actually one of the more optimistic statements that Ms. Johnstone has made, and I hope that she’s right.

Certainly, human survival has for most of our existence depended on empathy and cooperation, hunter gatherer societies, upwards of 95% of our history could not function without this.

The current state of affairs, we can call it Neoliberalism, certainly does seem to cater to the absolute worst in us and of us.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

What explains the clampdown mania among liberals? The most obvious answer is because they need an excuse. Consider the history: the right has enjoyed tremendous success over the last few decades, and it is true that conservatives’ capacity for hallucinatory fake-populist appeals has helped them to succeed. But that success has also happened because the Democrats, determined to make themselves the party of the affluent and the highly educated, have allowed the right to get away with it.

—Thomas Frank in The Guardian

He’s right. 

The modern Democratic Party, particularly under Clinton and Obama, was hostile to organized labor, and favored finance and international labor arbitrage over the well-being of the average working American.

A Very Important Point

No Comments

The single worst political mistake in Mitch McConnell’s tenure as leader was blocking the $2000 checks that Trump wanted. McConnell lost not only the policy battle, but the Senate. https://t.co/Xqj1Ruwhgr

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 6, 2021

Roll Tape!

The politics here are simple, and VERY important: When people see direct benefits from government, they support government, and when people do not see the benefits of government action, things like tax credits to employers, and Obamacare, which took years to cut in, they see government as a failure.

All of the “clever” actions taken by members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to make sure that the benefits are as indirect and invisible as possible, which was a central conceit of the Obama administration, only serve to create a political backlash against good policies.

The same goes for means testing, which is far more likely to reject someone “deserving” of the aid than someone who is not, because the latter, having more resources, are better equipped to navigate the maze of petty bureaucrats holding “Bullsh%$ Jobs.”

About F%$#ing Time

No Comments

It appears that at least some economists are willing to learn, and they have that the headline unemployment rate is artificially low because it does not take into account discouraged workers. 

This has been true basically forever, but economists, who favor low wages for everyone but economists, and people who sit on their tenure committees have only now begun to realize this:

When Brianna Kipnis was laid off from a fitness start-up last June, she thought it would be nice to take a month off before returning to the jobs market. She cancelled the lease on her New York City apartment and moved in with her parents in neighbouring New Jersey.

………

The hopelessness felt by Kipnis and many others is one of the reasons that US policymakers, from the Federal Reserve to the Biden administration, have lost faith in the unemployment rate as an indicator of the strength of the jobs market.

The rapid decline in the US jobless rate has so far exceeded the forecasts of private sector economists and Fed officials alike. The latest reading, for February, will be published on Friday.

But the headline figure has obscured far less encouraging trends in America’s labour market, and is now considered an incomplete and unreliable guide to the trajectory of the US recovery.

“Published unemployment rates during Covid have dramatically understated the deterioration in the labour market,” Jay Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said during a speech last month, noting that a more realistic unemployment rate was closer to 10 per cent.

Powell is not an economist, which is the second time that this has happened since (I think) William McChesney Martin left the post in 1970, (G. William Miller was in for about a year in the late 1970s, and his time in office was ……… problematic) and I would argue that he has been the best Fed Chair since then. 

You know what you call 1000 economists at the bottom of the ocean?  “A good start”

Tweet of the Day

No Comments

The Texas blackouts perfectly illustrate how post-70s deregulation has simply been a project of destroying state capacity, infrastructure, and coordinating industrial institutions—and replacing them with absolutely nothing

— Isaac Wilks 🎤🐢 (@wilks_isaac) February 17, 2021

This is as succinct a description of Neoliberalism as I’ve seen in a long time.