2020-09-28

COVID-19 notes:

Canada:

                        

cumulative cases

Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation

The main objective of this article is to critically appraise the coronavirus mortality estimation presented to Congress. Informational texts from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are compared with coronavirus mortality calculations in Congressional testimony. Results of this critical appraisal reveal information bias and selection bias in coronavirus mortality overestimation, most likely caused by misclassifying an influenza infection fatality rate as a case fatality rate.

 

But: Epidemiologist Rod Jackson: Why Covid is at least 10 times more deadly than the flu

Estimates of the proportion of people who die from Covid-19 have been controversial, with some even dismissing it as similar to a bad flu. There are three main problems accounting for this controversy. In this article, I describe each of these problems and some of the ways that epidemiologists such as me me try to deal with them.

 

COVID-19 patients who get enough vitamin D are 52% less likely to die of the infection, study finds

 

Can we, like, stop praising Sweden now?

 

‘A bit unnerving’: COVID-19 survivors worried about future consequences

 

Cardiology and COVID-19

 

SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in development

 

 

Regular Related Fare:

Coronavirus Economic Distress Hitting Indebted Professionals

The Wall Street Journal describes tonight how the line between two tiers of the Covid economy isn’t as tidy as many might think. It isn’t just hourly workers in service businesses like restaurants and hotels who are seeing smaller or even no paycheck. High income professionals are also in distress due to having relatively high level of borrowings which makes them vulnerable to declines in income.

We warned early on, as did a Bloomberg story in June, that layoffs would increase higher up the job ladder as it became more evident that Covid-19 damage was not just severe but long-lived. From the Bloomberg account (note the chart is interactive, so go to the original story if you’d like to play with it):

The pandemic isn’t finished with the U.S. labor market, threatening a second wave of job cuts—this time among white-collar workers.

Close to 6 million jobs are potentially on the line, according to Bloomberg Economics. That includes higher-paid supervisors in sectors where frontline workers were hit first, such as restaurants and hotels. It also includes the knock on-effects to connected industries such as professional services, finance and real estate.

And the Bloomberg analysis found that these “second wave” losses would have a disproportionate impact:

While not as high in number as the initial wave of layoffs, the second round will still pack a sizable economic punch, as it will include middle-class Americans who drive discretionary spending, a major growth engine.

Laid-Off Workers Cut Spending, Hunt for Jobs as Extra Unemployment Benefits Run Out

 

Coronavirus and US Job Postings Through September 18: Data from Indeed.com

Ernie Tedeschi: Data from Homebase and UI claims have so far been consistent with +700K payroll jobs in September seasonally-adjusted

 

Upside-Down Markets: Profits, Inflation and Equity Valuation in Fiscal Policy Regimes (hat tip: Ahmed, via Ian)

An upside-down market is a market in which good news functions as bad news and bad news functions as good news. The force that turns markets upside-down is policy. News, good or bad, triggers a countervailing policy response with effects that outweigh the original implications of the news itself.

… Right now, there's a bullish asymmetry in the potential for an upside-down dynamic to take hold. If things get worse, the economy will probably get more fiscal stimulus—potentially an unlimited amount, pending the outcome of the upcoming election. But if things get better, the Fed is not going to immediately tighten. Instead, the Fed is going to wait until it sees persistent demand-driven inflation above 2%—an outcome that could be difficult to achieve, particularly if inflation is measured on a core PCE basis. Of course, the investment community has already sniffed out this bullish asymmetry; it's one of the main reasons why the market has been able to set aside the ongoing uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic and trade its way back to all-time highs.

 

 

Regular Fare:

Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists

The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.

… Though a vast amount, the $2 trillion in suspicious transactions identified within this set of documents is just a drop in a far larger flood of dirty money gushing through banks around the world.  The FinCEN Files represent less than 0.02% of the more than 12 million suspicious activity reports that financial institutions filed with FinCEN between 2011 and 2017.

 

CBO at it again, projecting higher Treasury yields;

their forecasting model may need to be tweaked; seems they didn’t get the memo about persistently lower growth and underwhelming inflation

 

 

Couple of interesting charts from Tedeschi:

 

 

Bubble Fare:

US small-cap firms are running record leverage

The Astonishing Lack of Value in Value

The Coming Age of Screwtiny

 

Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars

Somehow, the name “econophysics” can be misleading, as it is an interdisciplinary axis of research that was put forward by physicists like Per Bak or Didier Sornette. The study of complex systems has implications in almost every branch of science (e.g. seismology, cosmology, climatology, biology, anthropology, sociology, economics), and what is striking is the fact that so many systems exhibit very similar patterns also known as self-organized criticality. If humans are part of nature, then it seems legit to assume that their complex interactions obey to natural laws.

Thinking outside the box has always been essential, including for scientists or traders. While most economists postulate how the economy is supposed to work, and then built beautiful but meaningless theoretical frameworks on top of that, physicists like Bak argue that the right intellectual approach is to understand how nature works first, before trying to build any predictive model.

The LPPLS model is all about that. When a financial market is overwhelmingly dominated by a narrative, with all participants sharing the same opinion, then it tends toward a form of swarm intelligence, a singularity. But such a state is highly unstable and the system because vulnerable as there is no support since all investors have capitulated.

Researchers like Sornette have shown that such moments are characterized by typical patterns like an acceleration of fluctuations, as the fight between bulls and bears is getting fiercer.

Of course, the action of the Fed will be decisive for the evolution of the market until the end of the year (or at least until November 3).

But the thing is, it is a bubble. And like all bubbles in human history, it will pop. And there will be no happy ending. No need to be a rock-star physicist to understand that.

 

 

(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The one chance we have: The pandemic gave the world a golden opportunity to fix the climate crisis. We’re about to waste it.

Avoiding a Climate Lockdown

The world is approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions. Avoiding this scenario will require a green economic transformation – and thus a radical overhaul of corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems.

 

What If Preventing Collapse Isn’t Profitable?

 

A Green New Deal without growth?

 

‘Math Doesn’t Yet Add Up’ for Utility Decarbonization Goals: Deloitte

There are big gaps between U.S. utilities’ net-zero targets and their plans for retiring coal and gas plants

 

Break-even year: a concept for understanding intergenerational trade-offs in climate change mitigation policy

 

Copenhagen: World's First Carbon-Neutral Smart City by 2025

 

UofT Prof Jessica Green: Less Talk, More Walk: Why Climate Change Demands Activism in the Academy

 

Discussion Paper: Big Oil Reality Check — Assessing Oil And Gas Climate Plans

 

Introducing “The Slick,” a New State-Based Reporting Project on Oil, Climate and Politics

Considering climate change’s existential threat, the dearth of regional reporting on the corporate forces driving global warming is striking.

 

ESG Quote of the Week:

Katharine Hayhoe: “It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects but “we’re not dead yet.”

EXTRA FARE:

 

Quote of the Week:

Manson: Here’s a factoid to ruin your Sunday morning breakfast: the human mind did not evolve to be good at understanding truth — the human mind evolved to be good at understanding what is most useful for the human mind. And spoiler alert: what is useful is usually not true. It turns out that we are not very objective in our beliefs. It turns out that our perceptions and reasoning are heavily influenced by cognitive biases.

 

 

COVID Fare that for some reason I don’t want to publish internally:

In Which We Debunk A Covidiot Pamphlet. In which Moon of Alabama dismantles Off-Guardian B.S.

 

Incompetence ‘R’ Us

’ll try one more time, if only to show you that me heart’s in the right place. Yes, lockdowns work, and so do facemasks. But that doesn’t mean all lockdowns or facemasks or requirements for either work all the time. The UK was very late with its first lockdown, and let in a million people through their airports without testing them. After they did lock down, another 100,000 came in, no testing.

And now people there say lockdowns don’t work. Have you seen this report, or that report? Sorry, but I don’t have to. A virus spreads by jumping from host to potential host. Keep them apart and it can’t spread. I don’t need a “scientific” probe to figure that one out. The principle of a lockdown works, but that’s still only half the story.

The facemask thing is a little more complex perhaps. But it’s complicated only because various governments have neglected to do the one thing they should have: make sure they have the best facemask ready for everyone, the one mask that is proven to be effective, preferably mass-produced in their country/state/territory. But have you seen N95 facilities being erected where you are?

Now the entire world is walking around with masks that they all can see offer little protection, and mostly where they have little effect. Moreover, I see lots of people here in Athens who washed them with their underwear and wear them again the next day, because they’ve been told they have to cover their face with something anything. But that’s not how this works. What little protection those blueish masks that are everywhere offer, is gone once you wash them. What’s left is merely symbolic.

And as for the well-meaning crowd that make their own masks, stop trying, those things don’t do a thing and they make you look stupid. There are actually norms and data and whatnot for this, and putting your panties on your face does not comply with any science whatsoever. It’s just scaring people, and we have enough of that, thank you. Non-woven masks work best, that mean anything to you?

The droplets that the virus hitchhikes on to get from one host to another are way too small to be stopped by granny getting creative with her bathroom curtains. But it’s not you, it’s your government which should have had an N95 mask production facility in place months ago.

They should also have mass-produced vitamin D, and zinc, because these cheap elements would have decreased the new cases, and the severity of them, by probably half. But no western government that I know of has even mentioned the role of these cheap supplements in the COVID story.

How odd is that? It appears to be in line with the hydroxychloroquine story, which went from “It will kill you!” when Trump first mentioned it in public, to “It’s not effective” in Fauci’s terminology. But medical doctors I’m talking to still maintain it works, and perhaps more importantly, continue to treat their infected patients with it.

Sort of the same thing goes for the western Big Pharma attempts to get a vaccine, there were 239 of those trials last time I counted. But there’s never been a vaccine for any of the many coronaviruses, and not for lack of trying. Unless you count the Russian Sputnik V, developed in a fundamentally different way from the western ones, but that wouldn’t make Big Pharma any profits, so we all choose to just ignore and discard it.

It’s “funny” to see how all those politicians like the power to tell people what to do, lock them down etc., but when their measures don’t work, and that’s the case all over Europe, they blame their people and never themselves. I haven’t seen even one say, I’m sorry, I failed, I step down. Instead they all talk about doing more of what didn’t work. More lockdowns. Hey, you failed, move over!

In countries like Britain and Holland, they’re so busy trying not to explain how and why they still didn’t have enough PCR testing capacity 9 months into the pandemic, that they completely fail to see that PCR is the wrong testing method to use on a grand scale. Holland has “identified” 5 rapid testing options and needs until November for their “experts” to find the best one.

Meanwhile they have a “rapid test test” facility where doctors and nurses apply the tests, which should cost perhaps €1 a piece max, but which set you back a very reasonable €225. Good lord. The incompetence is not going to stop here and now, it’s engrained in the political and societal brains and structures.

And it’s not just the politicians, the “experts” also refuse to see and acknowledge that they are utter failures. They, too, blame the people. But just like they should have all secured access to 100 N95 masks for every individual, and Vit. D and zinc, and HCQ if people still get sick, they should have made rapid tests available for everyone to use at home, twice a week or so, if only just to ease the pressure. But health care has been institutionalized, so that will only happen when things get terribly out of hand.

All these failures have cost a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, and do a huge amount of damage economically and mentally. The idea of second lockdowns is insane, given that no N95 masks, no Vit. D, no zinc, no HCQ were ever made available. But the lockdowns will come regardless. Because the politicians and experts can and will blame it all on you.

In an event like this, people’s worlds get much smaller, and they only know what their “local” media tell them, and those media are in line with the respective political systems. In crisis times, you as a journalist don’t attack the leading party, no matter how badly they fail, because they will deflect any criticism right back onto you, and say it’s your critical reports that made people behave badly.

It’s circular logic at its finest. And since all these fine people in all these fine countries got it all wrong in the same way, they can use each other for cover. France can point their finger at Spain, and they at Italy, and all hail the King of Sweden. …

 

Socio-political Fare:

Swamp Thang

… then there’s the miasma hanging over the Swamp, a toxic mist of lies, misdirection, dis-info, propaganda, bad faith, and sedition, illuminated by pulsing blue gaslight that affords a toxic blanket of protection to the denizens of the Swamp. Now a storm is brewing. …

The climate is changing, all right, but not in the way that some think it is. The political climate is changing, and what has been a pestilential subtropical sink on the Potomac is overdue for that cleansing we’ve heard about. …

Case in point: Joe Biden. Many will wonder in the days to come whether the sole and otherwise inexplicable reason for his elevation to candidate-for-president was a ruse to avoid prosecution — his own and others. The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just “point man” overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine’s entire political ecosystem — as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine’s politics was any of our business in the first place.

The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natgas company, Burisma. And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold US aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma’s sketchy affairs. Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier. …

All of which is to say that the Democratic Party has other things to worry about besides who will replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. That may be hard to believe but it’s how things are now after four years of implacable, seditious perfidy from the party.…

 

Speaking of which: RBG, another example of the cult of personality, like the Obamas, or, say, Mother Teresa; its not that she didn’t do good things for women’s rights; but she was hardly the paragon of virtue that some who fall prone to hero-worship seem to believe; see, for example:

Matt Stoller’s tweet thread: I'm confused by RBG, as I don't really understand how she understood the point of law or what she meant by being committed to liberalism or equality. The best I can come up with is that she was a Clinton Democrat, a Watergate Baby style judge appointed Carter then Clinton.

 

Betrayal, Infuriating Betrayal.

 

(as an aside: I truly hate Trump. And yet the Democrats have made me hate them more.)

 

'Permanent Coup' excerpt: How Biden pushed to quash investigation of company paying son $80k/month

 

Lee Camp: What’s the Difference Between ‘Villain’ Assange & ‘Intrepid’ Woodward?

 

Ben Norton: Leaked docs expose massive Syria propaganda operation waged by Western govt contractors and media

Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders, planted stories in media outlets from BBC to Al Jazeera, and ran a cadre of journalists. A trove of leaked documents exposes the propaganda network.

 

Throw Sand In The Gears Of The Machine

Humanity will continue along its self-destructive trajectory until the masses use the power of their numbers to force real change. Humanity will not use the power of its numbers to force real change as long as it’s being successfully propagandized not to do so. The oligarchic propaganda machine is therefore the primary barrier to our transition from our self-destructive patterns into a healthy collaborative relationship with each other and with our ecosystem.

So throw sand in the gears of the machine. If enough of us throw enough sand, we can cause the whole thing to break down.

Kill public trust in the mass media by exposing their lies at every opportunity, from whatever platform you can gain access to. Anywhere you can find an audience, whether it’s an audience of one or ten thousand, kill public trust in the establishment propaganda engine.

Amplify solid voices, arguments, narratives and facts that those in power don’t want amplified….

Humanity will either awaken from its propaganda-induced trance or it won’t. ... When you have a species that is being pushed along a self-destructive trajectory by plutocratic propaganda built in service of plutocratic agendas, all you can do is show them they’re being lied to and give them the opportunity to transcend the lies.

 

 

Sadly, more RIP Fare:

The Death of Andre Vltchek, A Passionate Warrior for Truth

In this age of arm-chair reporters, he stood out for his boldness and indefatigable courage. He told it straight.

An example of Andre’s anti-war views: In The Small Canadian City of Regina, Resistance Is Brewing

And, on youtube: André Vltchek: NATO, Canada & Western Imperialism

Better yet is his article here: Love, Western Nihilism and Revolutionary Optimism

 

Satirical Fare:

Trump Announces He Will Only Leave Office If A Challenger Beats Him In Ritual Combat

 

Hiker Wandering Through Oregon Forest Enjoying Vibrant Reds And Golds Of Fall

 

Tweets of the Week:

Democrats’ Supreme Court hypocrisy: 2020 Dems should listen to their 2016 selves

 

 

Fun Tweet of the Week:

 

 

Bonus Site of the Week:

WTF Happened in 1971?

Why the Year 1971 Changed Everything

2020-09-21

COVID-19 notes:

Fisman: For those arguing that Ontario’s surge represents more testing: no. We can look at cases per pop, tests per pop, and cases per test.  We have a surge driven by the 10-29 age group (have had for a month now), now bleeding into older adult age groups:

Comeau’s site has lots of cool dashboards: here’s link for Ontario’s key indicators

 

COVID – why terminology really, really matters

… moving on from that nonsense, there is some extremely good news buried in here. It goes as follows. At the start of the epidemic, the only people being tested were those who were being admitted to hospital, who were seriously ill. Many of them died. Which is why, in France, there was this very sharp, initial case fatality rate of 35%. In the UK the initial case fatality rate was I think 14%. Last time I looked at the UK figures, the case fatality was 5%, and falling fast. This fall has occurred, and will occur everywhere in the World, because as you increase your testing, you pick up more and more people with less severe symptoms. People who are far less likely to die. The more you test, the more the case fatality rate falls.

It falls even more dramatically when you start to test people who have no symptoms at all. In fact, as you broaden your testing net, something else very important happens. You gradually move from looking at the case fatality rate to the infection fatality rate.

… It is falling, falling, everywhere. Where does it end up, this hybrid case/infection fatality rate? Remember, we are still only testing a fraction of the population, so we are missing the majority of people who have been infected, mainly those who do not have symptoms. Which means that these rates must fall further, as they always do in any pandemic.

The best place to estimate where we may finally end up with COVID, is with the country that has tested the most people, per head of population. This is Iceland. To quote the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine: ‘In Iceland, where the most testing per capita has occurred, the IFR lies somewhere between 0.03% and 0.28%.’ Sitting in the middle of 0.03% and 0.28% is 0.16%. As you can see, Iceland, having tested more people than anywhere else, has the lowest IFR of all. This is not a coincidence. This is an inevitable result of testing more people.

…

Stop panicking – it’s over

Whilst everyone is panicking about the ever-increasing number of cases, we should be celebrating them. They are demonstrating, very clearly, that COVID is far, far, less deadly then was feared.

… I know it is going to be virtually impossible to walk the world back from having made such a ridiculous, stupid, mistake. There are so many reputations at stake. The entire egg production of the world will be required to supply enough yolk to cover appropriate faces. Of course, it will be denied, absolutely, vehemently, angrily, that anyone got anything wrong. It will be denied that a simple error, a mix up between case fatality and infection fatality led to this. It will even more forcefully stated that COVID remains a deadly killer disease and that all Governments around the world have done exactly the right thing. The actions were right, the models were correct. We all did the RIGHT thing. Only those who are stupid, or incompetent cannot see it.

 

To Beat the Coronavirus, Build a Better Fence. With cool maps & graphics at NYT. By Tomás Pueyo, who wrote The Hammer and The Dance

 

The lasting misery of coronavirus long-haulers

Months after infection with SARS-CoV-2, some people are still battling crushing fatigue, lung damage and other symptoms of ‘long COVID’.

Regular Related Fare:

World Bank Warns Recovery Could Take "5 Years" but OECD Raises Global Economic Outlook, Boxing-In 'Easy-Money'-Promoting Policy-Makers

 

FOMC Signals Rates Unchanged Through At Least 2023 Despite GDP Forecast Upgrade

 

Economists Warn Of "Fiscal Fatigue" As US Faces Economic "Wasteland" Without Stimulus

Ian Shepherdson: "What they are doing now, (or rather what they [i.e. the govt] are not doing now), is raising the risk that large bits of the economy will be a wasteland by the time a [Covid-19] vaccine comes through," he said. "That doesn't mean it can never recover, but it does mean that the recovery will be longer and harder and more painful and there'll be a lot more misery in the meantime. It seems very counterproductive to me."

Yelp data shows 60% of business closures due to the coronavirus pandemic are now permanent

 

Down-to-Earth Aspects of the US Economy in Near-Real Time

US Industrial Production Big Disappointment In August As "V" Evaporates

But, good news is surge in intermodal shipping demand:

US Railroad Traffic Posts First Annual Jump Since The Start Of 2020

& Container rate records are shattered as US imports surge

& Consultant says shippers using U.S. West Coast ports can’t book rail on BNSF and UP

 

 

Regular Fare:

Global Debt Is Exploding At A Shocking Rate

The primary reason why the global financial system is on the verge of daily collapse, and is only held together with monetary superglue and central bank prayers thanks to now constant intervention of central banks, is because of debt.

BOE Steps Up Negative Rates Work as Economic Threats Mount

 

Tankus: What We Learned-And What We Didn't- From the September 2020 Powell Press Conference. Overall, a Disappointing Experience

So, what did we learn?

Number one: The Federal Reserve has repudiated it’s earlier policy stances … This is important because it is a concrete illustration that the Fed has shifted to a more “dovish” policy and away from its historic tendency to generate unemployment to preempt rising inflation

…

Number Three: The Federal Reserve is still claiming it will hit its targets- “in the longer run”. … What is remarkable about these forecasts is that they clearly establish that the Federal Reserve expects to fail for the “foreseeable” future. By their own forecast admission, they are unable (or as I’ll discuss later, perhaps unwilling) to hit their targets. This suggests that they need new tools or another independent administrative agency, likely a fiscal one, needs to be created to hit these macroeconomic targets. Remarkably, the chairman said that this forecast assumed an additional fiscal package from congress, so if congress doesn’t come through (and at this point that seems likely), economic outcomes will be much worse than what they’ve forecasted.

 

A Staggering 84% Of All S&P500 Assets Are Now Intangible

 

Bubble Fare:

Technically Speaking: Is Everything “Priced In?”

Lots Of Risks To The Bullish Outlook

The market has fully priced in whatever economic recovery we are likely to see near-term.

1.        There is clear evidence of weakening economic data and slower earnings growth.

2.        Investors are counting on a “vaccine” to restore the economy to its previous strength fully.

3.        The markets have entirely discounted the potential for an election “event.”

4.        Market participants have discounted the need the additional stimulus to sustain economic growth and recovery.

5.        The Fed is on the sidelines for now. Without additional Treasury issuance, the Fed has less ability to provide additional liquidity to the market.

6.        While the economy is indeed recovering, along with employment, it will still likely fall well short of pre-pandemic levels stifling future earnings growth and revenues.

7.        Investors are paying exceedingly high valuations based on a full earnings recovery, which is unlikely to be the case.

…

The reason we suggest selling any rally is because, until the pattern changes, the market  exhibiting all traits of a “topping process.”

·        Weak participation

·        Failure at long-term resistance

·        Extreme bullish speculation

·        Negative divergences in relative strength

 

The 5-Ingredients For Another Market Event Remains

The ingredients: Leverage, Valuations, Psychology, Ownership, Momentum

 

(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The tipping points at the heart of the climate crisis

 

Ending The War Against The Climate Movement

Trump hasn’t just made it easier for fossil fuel companies to increase emissions — he has also changed rules to make it harder for climate activists to fight back.

 

Democrats’ Climate Change Lies.

The Republicans lie about the harm they do to the planet, and the Democrats lie and pretend they’re not doing the very same things.

It is easy to blame Donald Trump, who among other things famously withdrew from the 2015 Paris climate accords. Although it must be pointed out that the agreement is an honor system-based declaration of intent and not a requirement to take action. Signatory nations chose goals for themselves while also allowing temperature increases that are deadly for people living in the global south. The agreement specifically states that industrialized nations don’t have to pay compensation for the damage they do to the rest of the world. Trump’s stunt gives the impression that Democrats are serious about fighting climate change, but the facts prove otherwise.

Barack Obama recently took to twitter with photos of orange California skies and implored voters to act. “Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it -- because it does.” He didn’t say who voters should support. One assumes he meant the Democrats, but they have turned their backs on their own timid, mealy-mouthed proclamations of concern.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) removed language from its platform which called for ending government subsidies to fossil fuel companies. That betrayal was just as well, because the Democrats’ record on the environment is nothing like the image they project on social media.

…

Neither of the two capitalist parties is in any position to stop the planet from heating up. That is because both do the bidding of the corporations causing the record breaking temperatures to occur. One party lies about the damage it is causing and promotes easily dismissed quackery to defend itself. As usual, the Democrats sneer and pretend to act differently when at every opportunity they do the very same things that are killing the planet.

 

The rich and the rest

‘The dark side of meritocracy’ in America today

the time-honoured question remains: does the US economy exist to serve the people, or does the citizenry exist to serve the economy? The Covid-19 crisis has put this puzzle into especially stark relief.

… A succession of administrations have frayed the social safety net and dismantled regulatory controls. Corporate money has bought unprecedented influence in electoral campaigns and reaped unprecedented political power in return. In The Triumph of Doubt: Dark money and the science of deception, the epidemiologist David Michaels details many of the victories these corporate interests have won. Michaels, the former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the Barack Obama administration, spent years weighing the survival of workers and citizens against the short-term profits of corporations. In his book, he documents not only a shocking disregard for human welfare on the part of big business, but also a co-ordinated effort to compromise the culture of knowledge itself.

… The pseudo-scientific and political opposition to acknowledgment of climate breakdown … funded by some of the largest corporations, wealthiest families, and most conservative foundations in the United States, has convinced a substantial and politically potent portion of Americans that government regulations of any kind are an attack on the free-market “liberty” of corporations, families and individuals.

… Koch-funded groups have subverted language with Orwellian flair: Americans for Prosperity promotes regressive tax policies and wage suppression; the Heartland Institute promotes the despoliation of the American landscape by sowing doubt about climate and environmental hazards.

 

Related: How Charles Koch Is Buying Credibility With Academic Investments

 

Quotes of the Week:

Noam Chomsky: “At the time of writing, concern for the COVID-19 crisis is virtually all-consuming. That’s understandable. It is severe and is severely disrupting lives. But it will pass, though at horrendous cost, and there will be recovery. There will not be recovery from the melting of the arctic ice sheets and the other consequences of global warming. Not everyone is ignoring the advancing existential crisis. The sociopaths dedicated to accelerating the disaster continue to pursue their efforts, relentlessly. As before, Trump and his courtiers take pride in leading the race to destruction.”

 

Pics of the Week:

EXTRA FARE:

 

Socio-political Fare:

 

We lost because we weren’t big enough. Where now for Anglo-American socialism?

Trump didn’t win in 2016 because of any significant surge in support for White supremacy or the Republicans, but because millions of Democrat-leaning voters would not vote for Hillary Clinton. It’s these people that Biden must excite.

At the same time, if he is to overcome Trump’s resources and his own limitations, he will need money from the financial and business interests that traditionally bankroll Democratic campaigns. Harris’ nomination is as much about securing their support as enthusing Black and women voters. Presumably this will free Biden somewhat to woo those older, white, mainly working-class voters who were attracted to Trump by his economic populism but often expressed enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders.

…

Biden himself, in his rare moments of lucidity, sometimes gives the impression of being a figure that we really haven’t seen before in either country: a fully paid-up member of the neoliberal political class who actually realises that the historical moment has changed, demanding a radical divergence from the policy norms of the past quarter-century. There’s no reason why a cynical and pragmatic politician couldn’t draw that conclusion for themselves without any ideological conversion, and it’s a remarkable testimony to the power of ideology that so few seem to have done so, in the face of the obvious historical reality on either side of the Atlantic.

…

Anglo-American liberalism likes to tell itself a story. According to that story, the years since the 1950s have encompassed a great era of progress. Despite the inconvenient intercession of events like the Iraq war, or conservative attempts to suppress LGBTQ equality, the past few decades are generally seen in a positive light: a steady march from the darkness of post-war social conformity, into the light of a diverse and tolerant twenty-first century culture.

None of this is simply untrue. Many people now inhabit societies that tolerate a diversity of lifestyles, beliefs, identities and customs that has no historic precedent in the history of human civilisation. For some of us, opportunities for self-expression and self-fulfilment have expanded almost beyond the most utopian dreams of earlier generations. But these opportunities have not been widely shared. In fact they have been denied to growing numbers of the poorest people, with ever-more appalling flagrancy, as the institutions of post-war social-democracy have retreated.

That is why the greatest uprising against racial injustice of recent times has come just three and a half years after the first Black President of the USA left office. The same history that made possible the emergence and consolidation of a Black middle class, that made a Black head of state seem possible in America, did nothing to weaken the tendency for municipal police forces to treat Black communities like subjugated people under military occupation. In fact that history only made the situation worse.

Several things are simultaneously true. Today, if you have a degree and a professional salary, then your chances of being held back because of your gender, your sexual orientation or the colour of your skin have never been lower. That doesn’t mean you won’t be held back at all, or that you won’t continue to suffer indignity and harassment in many quarters. At the same time, if you don’t enjoy those economic advantages, then the freedoms apparently granted to you by this brave new liberal world are of very little use: and this is more true every year, as inequality intensifies, as real wages stagnate, as the power of unions and local urban communities continues its 40-year decline.

The twentieth-century labour movement and the institutions of the welfare state were notoriously racist and misogynistic, at their worst. But they also afforded a degree of basic economic protection for the poorest workers that has been systematically stripped away since the 1970s. For poor white workers, especially straight men, the decline in the value accorded to their cultural status as straight white men has coincided with a decline in their economic and political power. In some, this provokes intense resentment of an increasingly cosmopolitan political elite that drives support for a far-Right agenda. It’s these resentments that push so many voters – alienated from the culture of the cosmopolitan elite – into the arms of the nationalist Right. …

 

Taibbi: The Post-Objectivity Era

We live in a time of incredible political division. Many of us have had the experience of talking to someone whose idea of reality seems to be completely different from our own. It’s become difficult to have an argument in the traditional sense. People with differing opinions are often no longer even working from the same commonly-accepted set of facts. It’s a problem that has a lot to do with changes in how we receive and digest information, especially through the news media. … the press has gone from selling a vision of reality they perceive to be acceptable to a broad mean, to selling division.

 

Other (KDJ-inspired) Fare:

Stop the Coup

the stubborn simplicity of the Democratic Party’s coup narrative. Their elites have worked themselves and their base into a frothing lather of existential fright. In article after article, liberal intellectuals and activists have been talking for months about how Trump could steal the election or refuse to leave the White House even if he loses. But if the Right dares to point out that Democrats are actually changing the rules of the electoral process and actually speaking publicly about refusing to concede even if they lose, well, this only proves that the Right is going to steal the election and refuse to concede if they lose!

… As Anton and even Kilgore observe, Hillary Clinton and company have already put Biden and Harris on notice—along with the rest of us—that the Democrat ticket must refuse to concede, no matter how lopsided the loss. Is this report from the Daily Beast wrong? “Inside the coalition, there is dispute over whether Biden should even concede if he wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College…. The Transition Integrity Project noted that there would be immense pressure on Biden to fight it out.” You get that? Even if Trump wins the Electoral College and therefore the presidency, like every other President in American history, the Left is preparing to—to what, exactly?

 

Apparently Biden WANTS To Lose The Election

I suspect Democrats lose because not just because they are incompetent but because they don’t actually care. Losing is fine, they’ll still be OK. Pelosi will still be rich as Croesus, Biden will be fine, Harris will fine. Winning is nice enough, but they don’t need to win. They don’t even have a power drive, they’re people with sinecures protecting them savagely, but since they don’t need to win to keep their comfortable lives, only keep control of the party, they are only savage to those who threaten their control of the party (the left), not to the right.

Biden may win, but if so, it will be because he backs into victory. To lose against Trump, after Trump has overseen the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and been incompetent enough to lose at least 150 thousand more lives to Covid than necessary, will, however, be its own sort of awe-inspiring achievement, trumping even Hillary’s loss in 2016.

I Heart Hate Obama Fare: 

The Plot Against Libya: An Obama-Biden-Clinton Criminal Conspiracy

This is Libya, the real Libya. The Libya that has been constructed from the ashes of the US-NATO war that deposed Muammar Gaddafi and the government of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The Libya now fractured into warring factions, each backed by a variety of international actors whose interest in the country is anything but humanitarian.

But this Libya was built not by Donald Trump and his gang of degenerate fascist ghouls. No, it was the great humanitarian Barack Obama, along with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and their harmonious peace circle of liberal interventionists who wrought this devastation. With bright-eyed speeches about freedom and self-determination, the First Black President, along with his NATO comrades in France and Britain, unleashed the dogs of war on an African nation seen by much of the world as a paragon of economic and social development.

But this is no mere journalistic exercise to document just one of the innumerable crimes carried out in the name of the American people. No, this is us, the antiwar left in the United States, peering through the cracks in the imperial artifice – crumbling as it is from internal rot and political decay – to shine a light through the gloom named Trump and directly into the heart of darkness.

There are truths that must be made plain lest they be buried like so many bodies in the desert sand.

The War on Libya: A Criminal Conspiracy

To understand the depth of criminality involved in the US-NATO war on Libya, we must unravel a complex story involving actors from both the US and Europe who quite literally conspired to bring about this war, while simultaneously exposing the unconstitutional, imperial presidency as embodied by Mr. Hope and Change himself.

In doing so, a picture emerges that is strikingly at odds with the dominant narrative about good intentions and bad dictators. For although Gaddafi was presented as the villain par excellence in this story told by the Empire’s scribes in corporate media, it is in fact Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, French philosopher-cum-neocolonial adventurist Bernard Henri-Levy, and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who are the real malevolent forces. It was they, not Gaddafi, who waged a blatantly illegal war on false pretenses and for their own aggrandizement. It was they, not Gaddafi, who conspired to plunge Libya into chaos and civil war from which it is yet to emerge. It was they who beat the war drums while proclaiming peace on earth and good will to men. ...

Tweet thread of the Week:

Obama: “When there is a vacancy on the SCOTUS, the President is to nominate someone, the Senate is to consider that nomination... There's no unwritten law that says that it can only be done on off-years. That's not in the Constitution text.” … “The Constitution says that I nominate candidates for SCOTUS when there's a vacancy... [The Senate's] job is to give this person a hearing, to show the courtesy of meeting with them. They are then free to vote whatever their conscience dictates." … "I'm going to do my job. I'm going to nominate somebody... It's not as if the Senate calendar is so full that we do not have time to get this done."

 

R.I.P. Fare:

RIP Stephen Cohen, a friend and guide who spent the last four years of his life standing against a tidal wave of hysterical Cold War hostility with elegance and erudition. His intellectual courage was anchored in experience and scholarship his antagonists could never match.

Stephen F. Cohen: In Memoriam

On Friday, 18 September, professor Steve Cohen passed away in New York City and we, the “dissident” community of Americans standing for peace with Russia – and for peace with the world at large – lost a towering intellectual and skillful defender of our cause

… At all times and on all occasions, Steve Cohen was a voice of reason above all.  The problem of our age is that we are now not only living in a post-factual world, but in a post-logic world.  The public reads day after day the most outrageous and illogical assertions about alleged Russian misdeeds posted by our most respected mainstream media including The New York Times and The Washington Post. Almost no one dares to raise a hand and suggest that this reporting is propaganda and that the public is being brainwashed. Steve did exactly that in War With Russia? in a brilliant and restrained text.

Stephen Cohen Has Died. Remember His Urgent Warnings Against The New Cold War.

As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet, this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen’s expert analysis many times in my own work, and his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what’s really going on with the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions against Moscow.

 

Fun Tweet of the Week:

America — according to Accordian Trump...

 

(Bonus) Quotes of the Week:

Johnstone: The Kafkaesque extradition trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues, with each frustrating day making it clearer than the day before that what we are watching is nothing other than a staged performance by the US and UK governments to explain why it’s okay for powerful governments to jail journalists who expose inconvenient truths about them.

Ian Welsh: “I always wanted to live in a Mediterranean climate like California’s, but who knows where will have that climate in a few years?”