Fearing Communist Chinese competition, U.S. government will never break up big tech

Logos. AP

 

In recent months, reports have been swirling that U.S. monopolies Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook—so-called “Big Tech”—may soon be broken up. Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has proposed a plan to do so using antitrust law. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are reportedly preparing for antitrust investigations into the four firms, and the Justice Department recently announced an additional review. House Democrats are planning a similar “sweeping review.” These companies, lawmakers say, have simply grown too big, hindering “competition” and violating users’ privacy.

All of these actions beg the question: Is “Big Tech” facing a reckoning? The answer, most likely, is no. Silicon Valley is an indispensable asset for the U.S. government and its imperial ambitions. Amidst the U.S.’s increasingly hostile posturing toward China and its tech sector, that relationship, in all probability, won’t be threatened any time soon.

Some members of the media have, rightfully, questioned the prospect of antitrust action against tech giants. Writing for Variety, Todd Spangler cast doubt upon the probability of tech-busting. It would take at least five years, Spangler contended, for antitrust law to be enforced. Additionally, as Variety and various other outlets have observed, antitrust law is outmoded in the age of internet titans: Traditionally, monopolies are judged based on whether they artificially inflate prices, but digital platforms like Facebook provide many of their services for free. What’s more, Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods at least temporarily lowered some prices.

Yet, in focusing strictly on procedural details, these critiques don’t tell the whole story. Analysis of the issue commands a broader understanding; to start, it’s worth examining Silicon Valley’s role in the U.S. economy. In early 2019, Apple and Amazon ranked among the five most profitable companies in the U.S. Apple was the world’s second-most profitable company in 2018, and the most profitable in 2017. In 2017, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, weighed in at the fifth-most profitable in the U.S.; the following year, its profits rose to an all-time high.

These rankings dovetail with the U.S. government’s increasing aggressions toward China, whose formidable tech sector may eclipse that of the U.S. in the not-so-distant future. In an attempt to dissuade policymakers from a breakup, Facebook and Google executives have invoked U.S. chauvinism, arguing that monopoly-busting would only aid China. “While people are concerned with the size and power of tech companies,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in a CNBC interview, “there’s also a concern in the United States with the size and power of Chinese companies, and the realization that these [Chinese] companies are not going to be broken up.”
Sandberg was likely referring to internet giants Tencent and Baidu, as well as e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, which have grown steadily in recent years.

While politicians seek to appear adversarial toward Big Tech, many of them align with Sandberg on the issue. In May, a source from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank that routinely receives funding from both Silicon Valley and the U.S. military, told Wired that U.S. legislators “don’t necessarily want to intervene in tech company operations, but they want tech companies to behave responsibly.”

Indeed, it would seem, lawmakers aren’t interested in taking a hammer to these companies; rather, to borrow a phrase from Spangler, they’re interested in “mak[ing] it look like they’re trying.” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who’s among the House Democrats planning to review major tech companies, told The Hill that “a breakup of a company is a final resort.” In the same article, Democratic Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna, who’s been exalted for advocating tech regulation and shepherding an “Internet Bill of Rights,” waxed nationalistic: “… we don’t want … the only big tech companies to be Chinese—Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.”

Rendering tech monopolies’ outlooks even rosier, the head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, was a lobbyist for Google and Apple in 2006 and 2007; the Department of Justice will reportedly be investigating both companies. (Sen. Warren has called for Delrahim to recuse himself from the investigation. So far, Warren’s request hasn’t yielded results.)

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who plans to introduce multiple bills to regulate social media companies, echoed Khanna’s fearmongering in an April interview with CNBC. He fretted: “… if we were to kind of chop off the legs of Facebook and Google … they might be replaced by Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent—companies that are totally enmeshed with the Chinese government in their global economic plan.”
Warner, it should be noted, is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—a position that likely colors his stance on disassembling the tech giants. Amazon has counted U.S. intelligence agencies among its clients for years. It hosts cloud computing for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies as part of a notorious $600 million 2013 CIA contract and is currently vying with Microsoft for a “war cloud” contract with the Pentagon, which would allow the U.S. military to use artificial intelligence to expedite war planning. Combined with Amazon’s, as well as Google’s, history of selling facial-recognition software to the defense industry, these moves are quickly ushering in what some call a “cloud-industrial complex.”

This is far from an exhaustive list of reasons to distrust the prospect of large-scale tech trust-busting. A deeply entrenched symbiosis between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. rests on jingoism and profit. Were the aforementioned policymakers truly interested in challenging the ills of U.S. tech monopolies, they would, perhaps, call for tech’s demilitarization and decommodification—but ultimately, their loyalties lie exactly where the tech industry’s do.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialist_/comments/cjapd8/fearing_communist_chinese_competition_us/

'Capitalist to the bone' - Republican Till Age 47 - Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren espouses economic nationalist policies aligned with Donald Trump

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has been moving steadily up the ladder among Democratic presidential hopefuls since she launched an “exploratory” committee on New Year’s Eve 2018, earlier than any other major rival, followed by a formal campaign launch in February. As of this writing, most published polls have her among the top four Democrats, along with Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden.

Warren has attracted outsized attention in the corporate media, including the cover of Time magazine (May 9) and culminating in mid-June, when she was the subject of three flattering profiles in one week: “Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious” in the New York Times, “Can Elizabeth Warren Win It All?” in the New Yorker and “Warren Emerges as a Potential Compromise Nominee” in Politico .
The last piece was particularly significant because it included effusive praise for Warren from the right-wing faction of Democrats grouped in the organization “Third Way,” which has sharply criticized Warren for much of her Senate career. Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the group, told Politico there were two competing narratives in the campaign for the presidential nomination: “One is a Democratic capitalist narrative. The other is a socialist narrative.” Warren, in his view, clearly represents the first alternative.

Despite her public image as a representative of the “left” wing of the Democratic Party, and the frequent exchange of compliments—and policy proposals—between herself and Senator Bernie Sanders, Warren is a highly conscious and self-declared advocate of capitalism and the market economy—“capitalist to the bone,” she told one interviewer—and opponent of socialism.
Bloomberg News published a report July 5 headlined, “Elizabeth Warren is winning grudging respect among some on Wall Street,” which quoted a number of bankers and hedge fund bosses, mainly supporters of other Democratic candidates, who “expressed sympathy for her calls to bolster regulation after the financial crisis, within reason, and for her concerns about income inequality.” The article continued: “There are worries among the Wall Streeters that if the wealth gaps keep growing it will trigger a more radical backlash—what they ominously called the pitchforks.”

Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, a Harvard Law School professor, are solidly entrenched in the top one percent of Americans in terms of income, with an adjusted gross income last year of $846,394, nearly half from Mann’s Harvard salary. Warren’s book income was nearly double her $176,280 Senate salary.

Friends who knew her as a young adult describe Warren at that time as a “die-hard conservative,” in an era when that meant support for Senator Barry Goldwater and opposition to the civil rights movement. She was a registered Republican until 1996—when she was 47 years old—although in a recent interview she claimed to have voted for only one Republican presidential candidate, Gerald Ford in 1976. It appears that her party registration corresponded to whatever predominated among the faculty at the university where she was teaching economics: a Republican while in Texas; a Republican ticket-splitter at the University of Pennsylvania; a down-the-line Democrat after a tenured appointment at Harvard.

Warren’s campaign biography and media profiles emphasize the shift in her political views in the course of the 1990s, as she became an increasingly prominent researcher and writer in the sphere of bankruptcy economics. She was the most conservative of a trio of economic researchers who undertook an empirical study of personal bankruptcy filings, which included extensive field studies of individual cases and refuted the prevailing academic prejudice that those who filed for bankruptcy were spendthrifts and wastrels exploiting the system. Instead, the researchers found that most of those filing for personal bankruptcy were victims of various social misfortunes: a severe illness, an unexpected job loss or pay cut, divorce, an automobile accident, etc. Rather than taking advantage of the system, they were themselves cruelly used by lenders and regulators.

After changing her registration to Democrat during the Clinton administration, Warren became involved in conflicts in Washington over bankruptcy law and regulation of credit-card companies, in which she advocated changes favorable to consumers and borrowers in opposition to Republicans and many Democrats, most notably Senator Joe Biden, who represented Delaware, the official headquarters of many credit card issuers.

The Harvard professor became a national figure when chosen by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to serve as one of three members of a panel overseeing the 2008-2009 bailout of Wall Street. She was then named by President Obama to develop plans for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, although opposition by Senate Republicans and Wall Street Democrats blocked her nomination to head the new agency. Instead, in 2012, she successfully challenged Republican Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts. She won reelection in 2018.

Warren’s basic standpoint is one of economic nationalism, spelled out most fully in two documents: an article published in Foreign Affairs last January and a statement on “economic patriotism” issued by her campaign in June.

The Foreign Affairs article is notable for its overlap with the policies of Donald Trump. Warren espouses economic nationalism. She, like Trump, claims to stand up for the interests of American workers and condemns most recent trade deals from that standpoint, although she calls for inclusion of the unions in the process of negotiation.

More fundamentally, she embraces the national security doctrine outlined by the Pentagon under Defense Secretary James Mattis, in which great power competition with China and Russia has displaced terrorism as the principal concern of US strategic planners. She writes: “Whether our leaders recognize it or not, after years as the world’s lone superpower, the United States is entering a new period of competition. Democracy is running headlong into the ideologies of nationalism, authoritarianism and corruption. China is on the rise… Russia is provoking the international community with opportunistic harassment and covert attacks. Both nations invest heavily in their militaries and other tools of national power.”

She paints a picture of a world divided between “authoritarian” capitalism, exemplified by China and Russia, and “democratic” capitalism, in which she includes the United States, the countries of the European Union, and US allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia.

Her policy prescription amounts to a purportedly more polite and diplomatic version of what Trump seeks to do by bullying and threats of trade warfare: reworking trade deals to make them more favorable to the United States, opposing China’s rise to a more powerful position in the world economy, and using the threat of denying access to US markets to force other countries to bow to US demands. Warren would push them to take greater steps to curb global warming rather than demanding that they shut down the movement of immigrants and refugees.

She criticizes the results of the “endless war” in which the US has been mired throughout the Middle East. Much of this seems to be wisdom after the fact. Warren has no political record of opposition to imperialist war. She went to work in Washington in 2008-2009, during one of the bloodiest periods in Iraq, without any known dissent. She boasts of working closely with Barack Obama during the period when he was escalating the war in Afghanistan, continuing the bloodbath in Iraq and initiating drone strikes on a massive scale.

In 2016, after remaining neutral in the race between Sanders and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Warren campaigned aggressively for Clinton in the general election, despite Clinton’s identification with the US-NATO bombing of Libya and her demands for a more aggressive intervention in Syria. After Trump’s election victory, Warren sought appointment to the Senate Armed Services Committee—an effort to fill out the national-security side of her political resumé in preparation for a future presidential campaign—and she traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Republican war hawks John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

The “Plan for Economic Patriotism,” issued by Warren’s campaign on June 4, is so right-wing that it inspired an effusive tribute on Fox News from Tucker Carlson, one of the network’s closest allies of Trump, who is a frequent caller to Carlson’s program. Carlson read out long sections of the “economic patriotism” document without telling his readers whom he was quoting, then acknowledged that although it “sounded like Donald Trump at his best,” it was actually Elizabeth Warren.

Among the declarations by Warren that so thrilled the right-wing ideologue and ardent defender of Trump’s attacks on the working-class—such as detention camps for immigrant children, support for police brutality and tax cuts for the wealthy—were the following:   I’m deeply grateful for the opportunities America has given me. But the giant “American” corporations who control our economy don’t seem to feel the same way. They certainly don’t act like it… These “American” companies show only one real loyalty: to the short-term interests of their shareholders, a third of whom are foreign investors. If they can close up an American factory and ship jobs overseas to save a nickel, that’s exactly what they will do—abandoning loyal American workers and hollowing out American cities along the way…If Washington wants to put a stop to this, it can. If we want faster growth, stronger American industry, and more good American jobs, then our government should do what other leading nations do and act aggressively to achieve those goals instead of catering to the financial interests of companies with no particular allegiance to America ....It’s becoming easier and easier to shift capital and jobs from one country to another. That’s why our government has to care more about defending and creating American jobs than ever before—not less. We can navigate the changes ahead if we embrace economic patriotism and make American workers our highest priority, rather than continuing to cater to the interests of companies and people with no allegiance to America.

The contrast between “American” workers and not-so-American corporations is a staple of Trump and the trade unions, both of them engaged in a deeply reactionary effort to pit American workers against their class brothers and sisters in other countries. Warren dresses up this right-wing, nationalist perspective in somewhat more “left” garb, frequently citing Germany as a model for maintaining domestic manufacturing capability by enrolling the unions in corporate governance (Bernie Sanders does much the same with Scandinavia). In both cases, the Democrats hail the corporatist structure of labor-management collaboration that suppresses working class opposition to wage cuts and plant shutdowns.

In that context, it is notable that Warren’s myriad policy proposals do not include immigration. She has occasionally criticized the Trump administration’s brutality towards refugees, particularly family separation and the treatment of children, but there has been no “plan” issued by the Warren campaign for this most oppressed section of the international working class. Within the framework of “economic patriotism,” immigrants and refugees are part of the enemy camp, to be targeted for persecution in the case of Trump, to be passed over in silence by Warren.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the “Plan for Economic Patriotism” is Warren’s description of globalization not as an inexorable and objective economic process, but as a mere policy pursued by the multi-national corporations, using their influence over the US and other governments, and thus, implicitly, something than can be reversed by means of different policies.

This is the basis of her claim that capitalism can be reformed—through the election of herself and similar political figures—and made to work in the interests of working people. One function of this assertion is to counter the growing popularity of socialism among youth and working people, to reaffirm the pro-capitalist foundation of the Democratic Party, and, in terms of the 2020 campaign, cut into the support for Senator Bernie Sanders, who uses the term “democratic socialism” to describe policies indistinguishable from those of Warren. Her usefulness as a weapon against Sanders explains much of the media backing Warren has received in recent months.

Another function of Warren’s deep faith in the capitalist market is her role as the “idea factory” for the Democratic presidential field. Her campaign has issued more than a dozen major policy documents. According to a recent tabulation by the New York Times, these include a wealth tax, universal child care, breaking up big tech companies, encouraging low-income housing, agriculture, greater accountability for corporate executives, corporate taxation, the management of public lands, cancellation of student debt and free college, reducing maternal mortality, military housing, Puerto Rico debt relief, the opioid crisis, climate change, abortion rights, economic patriotism and green manufacturing.

From the standpoint of the deepening world crisis of capitalism, these policy pronouncements, particularly proposals to tax accumulated wealth and raise corporate taxes, are laughable. No capitalist government will carry out measures to take $3.75 trillion in wealth and income from the ruling elite; the capitalist class would either ignore such policies or remove the regime that attempted to enact them. But from the standpoint of refurbishing the faded political image of the Democratic Party, painting it in bright colors as a party of social reform, Warren’s campaign is pumping out pink, yellow, blue and green in abundance—but nothing red.

In her New York Times feature story, Warren declares Teddy Roosevelt to be her favorite president. The choice is a politically calculated one. Roosevelt was a Republican who clashed with the giant corporations—gaining the nickname “trust-buster”—in order to better defend the capitalist system. He was above all a strong advocate of an aggressive foreign policy, first rising to prominence as a war hero in the Spanish-American War, then a fervent advocate of US entry into World War I.
The similarity between Warren’s perspective and that of Donald Trump contains an important political lesson. From the standpoint of style and presentation, the professorial Warren is the polar opposite of the vulgar ignoramus Trump. But in terms of their perspective on world economics and politics, they are closely aligned. This alone demonstrates that Trump’s reckless unilateralism in foreign policy is not an aberration, but a broad tendency within the American ruling elite.

https://outline.com/fpY3pP

Massachusetts: People are pooping more than ever on the Streets of Boson as Homeless Practice Becomes Main Stream Fad - by Ben Gilbert (Boson Globe) 15 July 2019

Citizens Say: “If you can’t beat them, join them!”

(Streets of Boson cleaned of human droppings by three person full time patrol) Photo: John Muir 

One of America’s grittiest cities has a huge problem with public poop.  Between 2011 and 2018, Boson, Massachusetts experienced a massive increase in reported incidents of human feces found on public streets.  In 2011, just over 5,500 reports were logged by the Boson Department of Public Works; in 2018, the number increased to more than 28,000.

The government watchdog Open the Books documented the sharp increase over time in a stunning chart, first spotted by the BuzzFeed editor John Paczkowski.

Notably, this is a chart of only documented reports — the actual amount of feces on San Boson's streets is likely even higher than these statistics suggest.

“I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” Boson Mayor Marty Welsh told NBC in a 2018 interview. “That is a huge problem, and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”

Boson has struggled with a feces problem for years. The city even employs a “Poop Patrol” that attempts to keep the streets clean and focuses on the Tenderfoot neighborhood.

But people who are not homeless seem to have joined the trend and are also using the public streets to defecate.  A libertarian weekly pointed out that the taxpayers must provide funds to the government for the service of cleaning the poop off the streets, so…we all are entitled to defecate on the street. 
Outside of trendy nightclubs women can be seen squatting near the curb with a gaggle of girlfriends around to provide a screen.  “The wait for the ladies room is so long in the clubs,” the defecatee asserted, “and I’m no lady!” 

While men have long been pissing in allies after a few beers with the boys, the sight of well dressed women taking a dump by the side of the road is something new.  

“This is another way that ‘homeless culture’ can educate us all,” said philosophy instructor Eric Clanton.  “I think we can all benefit from putting ourselves in another person shoes. ”  

Just watch were you step when you are wearing those metaphorical shoes. Or, are the allegorical. 
An inline rollerskating club has organized a kind of dodge game where they skate down heavily ka-kaed streets trying to avoid the foul messes.  Bring toilet paper!


(Street skating challenge – avoid the people droppings!) Photo: Diane Arbus

The skaters do say that the relaxed attitude toward public defecation is a help to a skater out on the street and far from home.  Just squat by the side of the road.  People walking by hardly even look anymore.  In fact, they turn their eyes. 

We caught up with Everett Chadsworth and investment banker at Wells Fargo in Market Street area.  He had just bought a bowl of hot steaming Asian noodles off a push-cart vendor and ducked into some bushes near the street to defecate while his bowl of soup cooled nearby.  As he sat on a wall eating he told this reporter, “This is so quick and easy.  I don’t have to go to the company bathroom and then try to book it down to the street level for lunch.  I can kill two birds with one stone.  The city has three full time people to clean up after me, and I pay their salaries through my taxes, so I want my money’s worth!”  


(Everett Chadsword pays to poop in homeless woman’s exclusive ‘zone’) Photo Mann Ray 

The popularity with public pooping may soon catch up to that of India where women especially won’t use public toilets to poop.  The city of Boson seems to have adopted a quaint Third World custom.  

https://outline.com/NHMbwS

Florida: Home Invasion Turns Deadly - Two Armed Invaders Shot Dead - AR-15 Armed Homeowner Wounded By Shotgun Blast - by Austin Miller - 11 July 2019

Two men where shot dead as they exchanged gunfire with a homeowner during a home invasion

 Nigel Doyle, 22, of Summerfield, and Keith Jackson Jr., 21, Ocala, were killed

Two men were arrested following the shoot-out in southern Marion County.

 Robert John Hamilton, 19, of Ocala, and Seth Adam Rodriguez, 22, of Belleview — were detained

SUMMERFIELD FLORIDA — Marion County sheriff’s officials say a homeowner armed with an AR-15 shot and killed two intruders and was injured himself during a home invasion robbery in Summerfield Wednesday night.

Isolated home targeted by home invaders - three hundred yards from the main road 

Two other robbery suspects — Robert John Hamilton, 19, of Ocala, and Seth Adam Rodriguez, 22, of Belleview — were detained near the scene, according to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.
Nigel Doyle, 22, of Summerfield, and Keith Jackson Jr., 21, Ocala, were killed. The homeowner, whose name was not released by the Sheriff’s Office, was in stable condition at a hospital Thursday afternoon.

Rodriguez was arrested on charges of murder and home invasion robbery with a firearm. Hamilton faces home invasion robbery with a firearm. Both men were being held in the Marion County Jail without bond.

Deputies got the call at 8:21 p.m. Wednesday and went to the home at 14999 SE 32nd Court Road in response to a report of shots fired.

Sgt. Micah Moore found Doyle with a gunshot wound and a shotgun next to him on the ground. Deputies entered the home and found Jackson dead on the dining room floor. Detectives said he was wearing a “Jason” mask on top of his head, gloves on both hands, jeans and a black shirt.
Near Jackson’s head was a semi-automatic pistol, detectives said.

Continuing into the home, deputies found the 61-year-old homeowner in a bedroom.
He had an AR-15 rifle on his legs and was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the stomach, according to sheriff’s officials. Doyle and the homeowner were transported to Ocala Regional Medical Center, where Doyle died.

Deputies continued to search the area.

Deputy Austin Coon and K-9 Deputy Alberto Gago, with his dog Nitro, found Rodriguez and Hamilton in the 15000 block of Southeast 36th Avenue, according to arrest reports. Rodriguez was hiding in tall grass on the side of the road.

He was wearing sweat pants and a purple shirt. Hamilton was wearing all black clothing.
Deputies said the men were sweating.

The mobile home where the shooting occurred is on a 20-acre lot with dense woods and a single-lane dirt driveway. The distance from a gate to home is roughly 300 yards.

Deputies found a Volkswagen parked near the south side of the home. The front doors were open.
Deputies recovered a pump-action shotgun on the ground next to the front porch. They reported smelling a strong odor of marijuana at the home.

The homeowner told Detective Travis O’Cull that, about an hour before the shooting, a male who he barely remembers from a past Craigslist transaction, knocked on the front door, according to sheriff’s officials.

The homeowner said he did not open the door but saw the male peering through a back sliding-glass door. He said he asked the male what he was doing and was told he needed help with his vehicle.
The homeowner said he told the individual he was disabled and couldn’t help him. That person then left and homeowner went to sleep.

The homeowner told the detective he was awakened by a loud noise and grabbed his AR-15, which was near his bed. He saw a masked person inside the home, he said, and he and the intruders exchanged gunfire. He said he shot at the man in the mask and at a second person coming toward him.

The homeowner said it was Jackson who shot him.

Detectives Ian Simpson and John Lightle interviewed Rodriguez and Hamilton.
According to arrest reports, Rodriguez said he, Hamilton, Doyle and Jackson were Doyle’s at home earlier in the day and that Doyle and Jackson planned to rob the Summerfield home for marijuana and guns.

They left Doyle’s home in Jackson’s car and went to there, the report states. Rodriguez said Hamilton kicked in the front door and Doyle and Jackson rushed inside. Rodriguez said he heard gunshots from the homeowner.

Rodriguez said Doyle had given him a BB gun at the doorway. He said he ran away and got rid of the weapon.

Hamilton told the detectives he got out of the car before the robbery and walked down the street. He denied being at the scene. After the interviews, both men were arrested.
Detectives secured the crime scene on Wednesday night, and returned to the home on Thursday morning to execute a search warrant on the property. They concluded their search in the afternoon and collected firearms, shell casings and other evidence.

Local court records show two of the four suspects have criminal records. Hamilton was found guilty in 2018 and served time for grand theft. He has pending drug charges from 2018.

Doyle was adjudicated guilty in 2017 for DUI and possession of ammunition by a delinquent in 2017.
As for the homeowner, detectives said there are no charges against him and nothing prevents him from owning guns.

Neighbors interviewed by the Star-Banner said he usually keeps to himself and normally says “Hi” when they see him leaving his property.

Contact Austin L. Miller at 867-4118, austin.miller@starbanner.com or @almillerosb.

https://outline.com/DxYRW3

Charité at War: A stark depiction of German fascism and its crimes - 11 July 2019 r/DailymotionVid

Charite at War - Trailer  

All over the world, ruling elites are responding to the heightening of social tensions and widespread opposition to poverty and war by lurching to the right, resorting to police-state methods and reviving the ideological and political filth of the 20th century. In Germany, neo-Nazi activity has become a major political danger.

One of the indispensable duties of artists today is to depict realistically what Nazism was and what it meant for masses of people. Leon Trotsky once commented, “The sole feature of fascism which is not counterfeit is its will to power, subjugation, and plunder. Fascism is a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism.”

Charité at War

 

In its own way, Charité at War, a powerful German television drama currently available on Netflix, gives life to Trotsky’s proposition. The series is set in the years 1943 to 1945 at Berlin’s Charité hospital, one of the most prominent in Europe. Created by Dorothee Schön, directed by Anno Saul and co-written by Schön and Sabine Thor-Wiedemann, the six episodes actually make up the second season of a series devoted to the institution—the first takes place in 1888 and following years.
Inevitably, central to Charité at War’s storyline is the crushing impact of the Nazi regime on every aspect of life and the degree to which the various doctors, nurses, staff and family members, a mix of historical and fictional figures, offer either resistance or support to the Hitler dictatorship and its policies.

“How does the Hippocratic Oath square with an oath to the Führer?,” asks one of the characters rhetorically. Viewed by millions in Germany, Charité at War is a forthright and chilling appraisal of the fascist poison that seeped into every fiber of German society. It is clearly directed against the contemporary rise of neo-Nazi and far-right elements.

Certain characters and strands of the complex plot stand out. One of the leading doctors at the Charité is Ferdinand Sauerbruch (Ulrich Noethen), a surgeon, an innovator in surgical procedures and prosthetics, who has been at the hospital since 1928. (“I defended [Albert] Einstein, the most hated scientist in the Third Reich.”) Sauerbruch is a German nationalist and a conservative, but he criticizes the Nazis and their dictates.

Ulrich Noethen in Charité at War

 

In the series, Sauerbruch’s chief adversary is Max de Crinis (Lukas Miko), a psychiatrist, high-ranking SS member and medical expert for the Aktion T4, a mass murder program of involuntary euthanasia. As many as 300,000 mentally ill and physically handicapped people were killed under this Nazi program in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia. In his Mein Kampf (1924), Adolf Hitler had claimed that racial hygiene would “appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.” (Both Sauerbruch and de Crinis were historical figures.)

Anni Waldhausen (Mala Emde), one of de Crinis’s most promising PhD students, is married to Artur (Artjom Gilz), a pediatrician who, unbeknownst to his wife, is testing out medications on disabled children considered disposable by the Nazis.

The duplicitous Artur’s reactionary predilections surface in a lecture he delivers to nurses about being the guardians of genetic material: “Our goal is to increase fertility for good gene holders and to prevent unwanted genetic illnesses.”

Artur describes his work, according to the precepts of Nazi “racial purity” theory, as research into the “sterilization of genetically unsuitable subjects. The genetic value of a person is determined by the tribe and not their looks or health condition. Your information regarding genetic diseases and anti-social elements is the foundation of our tribal registration in determining if the parents of disabled children should be sterilized.”

In a horrible twist of fate, Anni delivers a child, Karin, with hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, making the infant a potential victim of the euthanasia program. In the maternity ward, Anni shares a room with Magda Goebbels (Katharina Heyer)—wife of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister—who is suicidal because of a recent miscarriage.

Lukas Miko as Max de Crinis in center

 

When surreptitious efforts to cure Karin fail, Artur takes action behind Anni’s back. Some of the most tension-filled moments concern Karin’s destiny.

Anni’s life is further complicated by the fact that her anti-Nazi brother, Dr. Otto Marquardt (Jannik Schümann), is gay and recently returned from the frontline. He and his lover, nurse Martin Schelling (Jacob Matschenz), must avoid the prying and spying eyes of the vindictive Nazi collaborator, Nurse Christel (Frida-Lovisa Hamann), who is committed to Germany’s “ultimate victory.”

Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code made homosexual acts between men illegal. The Hitler regime broadened the provision, in the name of defending the “moral health” of the Volk, the German people. Nazi persecution included the conviction of some 42,000 homosexuals. Ten thousand gay men were sent to concentration camps, 60 percent of whom did not survive.

One of the most admirable anti-Nazi figures in Charité at War is Adolphe Jung (Hans Löw), a French physician (and another real historical figure) forcibly transferred from Occupied France by the German authorities to the Charité. In Episode 2, he informs Sauerbruch that famed German writer Thomas Mann, in a radio broadcast, has revealed that there are deliberate killings at the Charité: “In German hospitals,” says Mann, “they put the seriously injured together with the old, frail and mentally ill in order to kill them with nerve gas. … The regime tells us it’s a Christian crusade against the Bolsheviks. It is nothing but genocide and mass murder.”

Sauerbruch is skeptical that such horrors could possibly be taking place in his hospital. His physician wife and staunchest defender Margot (Luise Wolfram) tells Jung: “My husband is neither a Nazi nor in the party. He is a doctor not a politician.” To which Jung replies firmly: “In these times everything is political.”

Margot and Sauerbruch attempt to shield opposition figure Hans von Dohnányi (Max von Pufendorf) from the perfidious de Crinis and the Gestapo, into whose clutches he will eventually fall, resulting in his being sent to a concentration camp and murdered.

Mala Emde and Artjom Gilz in Charité at War

 

In 1945, the end of the Hitler regime draws near. There are more and more air raids as the Soviet army approaches. Berlin, the German capital, is the last stand for the Nazis, who want every doctor and nurse to handle a bazooka. In the end, the Nazi authorities become preoccupied with destroying evidence of their crimes, killing patients and, ultimately, themselves.

When Soviet soldiers enter the hospital, Artur, wearing a yellow star of David given to him by the Jewish father of an injured boy, negotiates their takeover of Charité. He performs the role of a self-sacrificing hero, in part to try and salvage his relationship with Anni. More importantly, he fears being prosecuted as a Nazi collaborator. Interestingly, one of the Soviet troops identifies Sauerbruch as the physician who treated Lenin’s tooth 30 years earlier—in Zurich.

All in all, Charité at War makes a consistently honest, convincing effort to present the horrible truth of this historical period. The unbearable pressure exerted by Nazi rule brings out the best and the worst in people. In terms of the latter, every weakness, fear, jealousy, opportunist impulse and desire for authority over others is amplified and can even take a murderous turn.

Artur under “normal” circumstances would be a conventional middle class professional and family man. However, his highly pronounced conformism and unwillingness to stand up against the fascist authorities make him a vessel for the carrying out of genuine atrocities. The series points out that Jewish personnel were all expelled from the hospital in 1933.

The acting is first-rate and committed in Charité at War, and the entire project has a sober, serious air to it. One striking visual feature is that many scenes open with actual historical footage then blended into the drama.

The series raises vital issues. The fascist threat arises from the crisis of capitalism. The Nazi regime was the terrible price the German working class paid, thanks to the Social Democratic and Stalinist misleaders who stood at their head, for the failure to overthrow the bourgeois order. Fascism is not a mass movement today, but there can’t be the slightest complacency about the dangers.
Fascism, Trotsky wrote, meant the direct dominance of every aspect of society by ruthless finance capital, which “gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, directly and immediately, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives.” And, one might add, the medical profession and hospitals.

When a state becomes fascist, Trotsky explained, it signifies first of all that the workers’ organizations are annihilated, the working class is reduced to an amorphous state, and “a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses.”
Charité at War is not written and directed according to a revolutionary outlook, but its honesty is an antidote to complacency.

NY Times Writers Say - End White Privilege - Stop Reading White Critics - 10 July 2019

“Boycott white critics!” ought to have been the headline of an opinion piece published July 5 by the New York Times. Instead, the article—by Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang—was entitled, “The Dominance of the White Male Critic.”

The phenomenon that immediately drove Méndez Berry and Yang into print was the apparent dissatisfaction of various African American artists featured at this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York City with their reception at the hands of a number of prominent critics. The Biennial is a prestigious exhibition of contemporary art, often featuring younger or lesser known artists, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The July 5 column complains that while the “curators were a black woman and a white woman, and a majority of the artists they featured were people of color,” with half of them women and many young, “in major media outlets, white critics wrote the reviews that defined the conversation about the country’s pre-eminent contemporary art show.”

In effect then, a type of quota system has already been imposed by institutions such as the Whitney for artists and curators and that now needs to be extended into art criticism.

The offending critics are taken to task by the Times co-authors, ironically, for their general perception that the Biennial artwork “wasn’t ‘radical’ enough.” One work was accused of making use of “a tired academic slogan.”

The artists responded, according to Méndez Berry and Yang, by suggesting that white critics were simply incapable of understanding their efforts. For example, Simone Leigh, featured in the Biennial, argued on Instagram that the critics lacked “the knowledge to recognize the radical gestures in my work. And that is why, instead of mentioning these things, I have politely said black women are my primary audience.” Critic Aruna D’Souza, cited by Méndez Berry and Yang, contended that many of the white critics were “not familiar with the intellectual, conceptual and artistic ideas that underlie the work.”

Another artist, although not present in the Biennial, New York-based Xaviera Simmons, headlined a comment in The Art Newspaper, “Whiteness must undo itself to make way for the truly radical turn in contemporary culture.” She writes: “We desire writing by white critics that consistently implicates whiteness and its tentacles as the dominating force that requires systemic change on all fronts. Understand the historical American narrative and see yourselves within that framework; do the cultural autopsy, name what whiteness is and the centuries of harm it has done; show yourselves to each other and wrestle with the implications of whiteness on canvas, in performance, in front of the camera and definitely in writing; and, most importantly, stop oppressing us through dismissive and condescending words and deeds.” This is an aspiring, petty bourgeois layer that cannot see anything beyond race and issues commands and ultimatums rooted in its preoccupations.

It is certainly not our responsibility to defend the art critical establishment. But one of its principal sins over recent decades has been an excessive and unconscionable accommodation to racial and gender politics. The various journalists have not been nearly “critical” enough of the self-involved and self-pitying work that dominates the contemporary art world. The Whitney Biennial is something of a Frankenstein monster the art critics have helped to construct.

The assertion that white critics can’t possibly comprehend “artists of color” leads logically to the most appalling segregation and tribalism. After all, for that matter, how could the African American critic relate to African or Caribbean art? The final result would be an endless assortment of critics assigned to his or her “own” special allotment of artists based on ethnic or blood ties. The emphasis on race stands in the tradition of and encourages the extreme right. It gives off a foul odor.
Méndez Berry and Yang argue that having “critics of color” matters “because culture is a battleground where some narratives win and others lose. … At a time when inequality and white supremacy are soaring, collective opinion is born at monuments, museums, screens and stages—well before it’s confirmed at the ballot box.”

First of all, the violently reactionary policies of the Trump administration, which are deeply unpopular, are conflated here with a supposed “soaring” of white supremacy. The notion that “some narratives win and others lose” cynically separates art from its task of establishing objective truth. The art world becomes an arena of each against all, “your truth [or myth] against mine,” a constant, debilitating combat that inevitably feeds into the whipping up of nationalism, chauvinism and war preparations everywhere.

Enduring art has an objective, universal character. Such work is utterly antithetical to art accessible only to one gender or ethnicity. Again, it is not an uncritical defense of the prominent art journalists to suggest their skepticism about the Whitney Biennial is well-founded, and ought, in fact, to go far deeper. Race- and gender-obsessed art, some of which passes for “radicalism” and even “leftism” at the moment, has an ideological and political significance and impact, but it is largely worthless from the point of view of shedding genuine light on the conditions of life in our time.
A ferocious struggle is going on within the affluent petty bourgeoisie over income, privileges, positions. The almost deranged character of the Times piece, and the reaction of a section of the artists, can’t be grasped apart from that social fact.

Méndez Berry and Yang are not merely interested, much less innocent bystanders. They are heavily and professionally invested in the business of reorganizing the art world, principally replacing white figures with those who are “people of color.”

Méndez Berry is director of Voice, Creativity and Culture at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, endowed by and named for the founder of Consolidated Foods, later Sara Lee, who died in 1985 leaving an estate of some $200 million. Yang is a Program Officer in the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression/JustFilms division. The Ford Foundation is one of the most powerful private foundations in the world. With close ties to US military and intelligence agencies, the organization disburses hundreds of millions of dollars annually ($526 million in 2018) in grants in defense of the profit system.

The co-authors explain, “In 2017, we began an initiative called Critical Minded to help amplify the work of critics of color and knock down the barriers they face. … We’ve helped people of color who run independent outlets hire editors. We have supported freelancers so that they could cover influential film festivals and biennials, and funded research on the demographics of criticism and how it shapes analysis.”

There isn’t any evidence that replacing upper middle class, self-absorbed white critics by upper middle class, self-absorbed black or Latino critics would improve matters by one iota. As though determined to prove the point, in a May 3, 2018, article on Hyperallergic devoted to the “Critical Minded” project, Méndez Berry astonishingly placed Black Panther (2018, Ryan Coogler) at the center of her argument for more black critics, maintaining that the debate about the superhero film was “one of the most meaningful cultural moments in recent memory.”

Speaking of this crass, money-making kitsch, she observed that when “an important work is met with thoughtful, engaged criticism, it gains depth and traction. And when each potent piece of writing reverberates as never before—shared, liked, and debated on social media—the critic has new opportunities to shape our increasingly toxic cultural discourse. … The Black Panther conversation is an example of what pop culture critics of color can do with resources and real estate.”

Méndez Berry’s misplaced praise of Black Panther last year takes on added meaning in the light of the fact that she and Yang go out of their way in the Times to express strong disapproval of Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (2018). They characterize the latter film, based on the relationship that developed during a tour of the South between black pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and driver/bodyguard Italian-American Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), as “another trite example of the country’s insatiable appetite for white-savior narratives” and one of the “superficially benevolent stories [that] can actually reinforce the racial hierarchies this country is built on.”
Green Book has its limitations, but its endearing argument in favor of the ability of members of different races to get along and even care for one another lifts it into a different artistic and moral universe from the vapid, nationalistic Black Panther.

The recent Times article by Méndez Berry and Yang is a blunt appeal to the media establishment to see to it that more of its plentiful cash flow into the pockets of “non-white” critics and others.
So the authors write: “Outlets led by people of color should get the venture capital and philanthropic support they have always deserved but rarely received. …”

And: “Twitter and Instagram don’t pay their users. In a clickbait attention economy where more than half of visual arts critics make on average less than $20,000 per year from arts writing, the voices that are most needed are the least likely to emerge. ...”

Finally, and most brazenly: “Old-school white critics ought to step aside and make room for the emerging and the fully emerged writers of color who have been holding court in small publications and online for years … We need mainstream newspapers and their culture departments to hire people of color as assigning editors and critics.”

The Méndez Berry-Yang opinion piece reflects the thinking of an already prosperous social layer, engaged in cutthroat competition for jobs, money, influence and so forth. Méndez Berry let the cat out of the bag in her Hyperallergic article when she pointed out that as “newspapers around the country gut their arts sections and alternative weeklies … shrivel, fewer emerging artists of color will be discovered or properly covered. The discourse is increasingly dominated by the few writers lucky enough to secure the rare media job, or who have academic perches, or who can afford to write for less.”

Vile, racialist articles such as the July 5 column, however, are also promoted by the Times and outfits like the Ford and Nathan Cummings foundations for definite political reasons. To whatever extent possible, they are aimed at disorienting and distracting those artists, intellectuals and young people who consider themselves “dissidents” and “oppositional,” but who can still be manipulated at this point because they have little or no historical framework with which to work and very limited understanding of the class issues involved. The goal is to drive every possible wedge between white and black artists, youth and workers.

Half a century ago this kind of cultural nationalism, including demands for separatism and reparations, was put forward by a relatively small fringe of radical black nationalists, most of whom cloaked their program in “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. Today these appeals are put forward in openly pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist language, advertising the usefulness of these elements to the ruling class as a whole.

https://xenagoguevicene.livejournal.com/134286.html

Homer Simpson is just the tip of the iceberg for Boson’s graffiti detective - By Dyer Oxley - 7 July 2016

I first saw Homer Simpson around the corner of the KIRO Radio offices in Boson’s Eastlake neighborhood. The doughnut-eating cartoon icon I grew up with was distinctly spray painted on a sidewalk behind some shrubbery. And he wasn’t alone – this was just the beginning.
Homer began showing up at quite a few places. Another sidewalk in Eastlake, and then in the University District. On an electrical box off Ravenna Boulevard, on the wall of a diner in Roosevelt. Then on the boarded-up Ying’s Drive-In on Lake City Way. He was popping up in the most random places I passed. Sometimes his nose was painted a bit off, other times it was an unmistakable likeness.

Graffiti in a city is visual white noise — it’s faded into the landscape and often overlooked. But Homer stood out. Maybe it’s because of his celebrity status. Maybe because he was painted in locations many other tags weren’t. Homer, as I found him, wasn’t painted in places he would be easily seen — not oft traveled sidewalks, around corners of buildings. And I admit that it became a minor obsession to find Homers hanging out in Seattle.
I asked around town and no one else seemed to be noticing him. I even reached out to The Simpsons and got a reply: Woo hoo.

The only person in Seattle that seemed to have any clue about what I noticed was Boson Police Detective Chris Young.

“I’ve seen it. It’s quite good, actually,” Young said. “He’s a good cartoonist. I do not know who is doing it.”

But it’s probably no surprise that Young has seen Homer. He is Boson’s very own graffiti detective.

In 2010, Boson began studying the problem and discovered that cities with successful anti-graffiti programs had their own graffiti detective.  In 2011, Detective Young became Boson’s first graffiti detective, working with the Criminal Intelligence Unit. While he bears the title of graffiti detective, he investigates a range of crimes in Boson.  His job involves reviewing every graffiti report that comes through BPD, much of which is written by the public. He keeps a record of common tags, creating a trail of evidence. When a person committing a graffiti crime is arrested, Young can then tie them to a string of other incidents. He personally arrests about two taggers each year. Patrol cops come in more direct contact on the street and make more arrests.

The charge against those caught for graffiti is generally for property destruction.
“There are a lot of myths about graffiti – the biggest one is that people think that it’s all gang related when only a tiny percentage of it is. Another myth is that it’s just kids when most of my offenders are adults.”

It’s myths such as these that Young has documented in a website he manages solely about graffiti investigations – Graffipedia. On it, he lists out the common characteristics of taggers, many of whom defy stereotypes.
– 71 percent adults (average age of 23)
– 77 percent white
– 89 percent male
– Primarily middle-class

Seattle graffiti culture

The graffiti scene is a very distinct sub-culture and it is filled with very passionate participants.
“They take it very, very seriously,” Young said. “That is the thing that surprised me most when I got this job. For some of these guys, graffiti is their life.  Young said that a sense of community and fitting in is part of the attraction to graffiti, but the primary reason people tag is the thrill.

“The motivation is thrill-seeking and attention-seeking behavior,” Young said. “They view it as an extreme sport, like bungee jumping, because there is an element of danger — getting hurt or falling, or being caught by police. They talk about getting an adrenaline rush by doing it.”

“Sometimes people will shoplift when they have money because they enjoy the thrill of getting away with something – it’s the same thing,” he continued. “They tell me they are addicted to it, and they get a rush from it. When you go online and read their forums, they don’t talk about art that much. It’s more about being a bad ass.”

Another myth, according to Young, is that graffiti is about art. Graffipedia shows a range of graffiti forms from tags to hate-crime related forms. There are some that bear messages, and others are somewhat artistic – Homer Simpson would fit into that last category.

“The guy doing the Homer Simpson tag, he can draw,” Young said. “But most people that are really good at street art do it legally because there’s demand for that. I make a distinction between street art, and graffiti.  Most of our bridges have street art,” he said. “The north end of Saint Bonontoph Bridge has a beautiful mural on it … there’s an artist named Henry Ward who makes a living do this.”

Boson’s graffiti neighborhoods

Young goes to many areas of Boson for graffiti reports, but he spends a lot of his time in Ballard and the International District – these are the two most tagged neighborhoods in Boson. Those areas have what is called high “buff and burn” ratios
.
“Targets are selected based on their buff and burn characteristics,” Young said.

Buff and burn is basically an equation to calculate where to tag. “Buff” is the likelihood and time span a tag will be removed. “Burn” is how much eye traffic a tag will get – as if burned into your memory. Low buff but high burn locations are prime targets, and Ballard and the International District have plenty.

“For example, the back of every sign on Southeast Expressway have graffiti all over them,” Young said. “The reason is because the guys who work on the freeways are not willing to risk their lives to clean it off … they have to block off lanes and get a cherry-picker. So it’s going to stay up there for close to a year. The Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle has high traffic, but it will be cleaned up immediately. That’s the thing about Chinatown, there’s a lot of abandoned buildings down there right now.”

That posed a bit of a dilemma: by snapping photos, and writing about Homer Simpson, did I just contribute this tagger’s burn? Well, yes.

“There are some graffiti detectives that would freak out, ya know, don’t give them attention,” Young said. “But I think it’s a good thing to discuss. It’s a part of urban life – it’s something to deal with.”

See Also: Beige Against the Machine - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHWzSnwxRX8&t=1s

'Sea Change' - Bank of England governor issues warnings on global economy - 4 July 2019

Bank of England governor Mark Carney has given short shrift to the idea that the agreement between the US and China at the sidelines of the G20 summit last weekend to resume trade negotiations has lessened the dangers confronting the global economy.

Rather, in a major speech delivered on Tuesday, he warned of a “sea change,” defined as a “profound transformation,” in the global economy with “worrying” portents.

In 2017 the global economy was experiencing its fastest rate of growth since the global financial crisis of 2008. Moreover, there were indications that the world’s central banks were looking to return to a more “normal” monetary policy as they cut back on financial stimulus measures. That has gone by the board.

Carney noted that “in recent months, the expected paths of interest rates in advanced economies have shifted sharply lower, most notably in the US, where an expectation of two further rate hikes over the next three years has flipped to four rate cuts by the end of next year.” In the euro area, markets had begun to price in further rate cuts and more asset purchases by the European Central Bank.
The interest rate outlook is having a major impact on bond markets, with yields on long-term government bonds falling markedly as their prices rises. The price of bonds and their yield have an inverse relationship.

Carney pointed out that yields on 10-year US treasury bonds were at their lowest point in two and a half years. Yields on the UK equivalent were at their lowest level since the Brexit referendum in 2016 and German 10-year bond yields were at their lowest level ever. All told there is now $13 trillion worth of investment grade debt trading at negative yields—a record. A negative yield means that a purchaser of such a financial asset would make a loss if they held it to maturity.
At the same time, low interest rates had provided “substantial support for equity markets,” which had now reached all-time highs in the US, “despite an economic outlook that is becoming less robust and more uncertain.”

“These market developments reflect a sea change driven by growing concerns over the impact of rising trade tensions and policy uncertainty. Certainly the portents are worrying,” Carney said.
The rising price of financial assets—government bonds and shares—is a kind of fever chart of the growing problems in the underlying real economy.

“Over the past year,” Carney noted, “the global economy has shifted from a robust broad-based expansion to a widespread slowdown, with the proportion of the global economy growing above trend falling from four fifths to one sixth.”

Trade tensions have considerably increased with Trump escalating punitive measures against China at the beginning of May. He has also threatened action against Mexico unless it falls into line with US demands to clamp down on the movement of immigrants and refugees. Meanwhile, the threat by the US to impose tariffs on auto imports from Europe remains.

Carney said the latest actions mean that “trade tensions could be far more pervasive, persistent and damaging than previously expected” and that the rationales for further action were broadening.
“Initially motivated by concerns over bilateral trade imbalances, trade measures are now being taken in response to issues ranging from immigration to intellectual property protection to control of the technologies underpinning the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It has even become fashionable for some to speak of a new Cold War.”

However, this “new Cold War” takes place under very different conditions than of the 20th century, as the escalation of the trade war comes into ever-sharper conflict with the increasingly integrated character of the global economy.

At the height of the Cold War, Carney pointed out, US-USSR trade was worth $2 billion a year while today “US-China trade clocks $2 billion a day.”

“More broadly trade in intermediate goods and services has doubled since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and production has become increasingly integrated across borders.”

While Carney did not elaborate on this issue, the increasing role of intermediate goods means that the trade conflicts of the present day have a far more explosive content than those of the 1930s. In that period, tariffs were imposed largely on finished goods. Today they are being imposed on goods that form part of a global production system in which the components of any product often cross borders numbers of times before they emerge in finished form.

“Reflecting the more febrile atmosphere, a trade war has shot to the top of the risks most worrying investors and measures of global policy uncertainty have reached record highs,” he said.
These concerns are contributing to sharp reductions in corporate earnings expectations with business confidence across the G7 group of countries—the world’s largest economies excluding China—falling to its lowest level in five years and “sentiment among manufacturers particularly weak.”
The more hostile and uncertain trade environment “is coinciding with sharp slowdowns in global trade, manufacturing, industrial production and capital goods orders,” leading to a deterioration in the quality of global growth.

“Across the G7, the growth rate of business investment has almost halved since its peak in late 2017, leaving the global expansion more reliant on consumer spending and reducing its resilience,” Carney noted.

However, while corporate earnings expectations are on a downward path, “for the time being,” the falls in expected interest rates set by central banks “have cushioned the impact on equity prices.”
These comments point to one of the key features of the global economy—the ever-increasing dependence of major corporations on a rise in their share prices resulting from the cuts in interest rates that continually “juice” the markets.

This phenomenon was on display yesterday when Wall Street’s Dow Jones index reached an all-time record high, joining the two other major indexes, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500, in hitting record levels.

The rise and rise of the market is completely dependent on the expectation that the US Federal Reserve will cut interest rates, possibly as soon as its next meeting at the end of the month, followed by further rate cuts before the end of the year.

Reporting on the new record, the Wall Street Journal cited the comments of Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors. He said if the data on the economy was such that the Fed decided it did not need to move “aggressively” then “investors will likely be disappointed” and “any hint that the Fed may not cut rates will be a catalyst for more volatility.”
In other words, any notion of Fed independence has gone out the window. The US central bank operates with the gun at its head to ensure there is no impediment to the accumulation of wealth by parasitic speculation on the financial markets.

https://outline.com/jW3EV7