Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Rescue Our Democratic Society: Constitutionally Render Corporations Unequal to Humans

February 14, 2023
Source: Counterpunch


No other institutions consistently Rule over as Much in the World as the Giant Global Corporations – not governments, not armies, not religions and certainly not trade unions. These fictional corporate entities have largely achieved transcendent imperial status, as they amass coordinated control over capital, labor, technology and governments because they have secured the rights bestowed upon human beings. In a confrontation or a conflict or even a contract, it is no contest: mere people don’t have a chance.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned in 1933, we have created a “Frankenstein monster” in our midst, whose unifying lust for power and control on behalf of their profits know few limits.

In last week’s column, I described a dozen sectors in which the privileged legal advantages of corporate supremacy over real people make the former more powerful every day. And every day people start with a massive disadvantage whether in the marketplace, the workplace, the environment, the taxation realm, the electoral and governmental arena, and access to justice. Yes, in cultural appropriations as well.

For about 150 years the courts have arbitrarily accorded corporate personhood the same rights as real humans even though the words “corporation” or “company” never appear in our Constitution. This blatant fictional identity has upset some pretty serious jurists. In his dissent against the justices who, breaking precedent, decided in 2010 that corporations could give unlimited money to oppose or support candidates for public office, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote: “Corporations have no conscience, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires … they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom the Constitution was established.” He called the deciding Justices’ claim that “money is speech” for purposes of the First Amendment, “…a conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons…” in the political sphere.

Ronald Dworkin, a well-regarded legal philosopher, declared: “The argument – that corporations must be treated like real people under the First Amendment – is in my view preposterous. Corporations are legal fictions. They have no opinions of their own to contribute and no rights to participate with equal voice or vote in politics.”

Long ago Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine warned about early commercial giants in their day. In 1910 former President Theodore Roosevelt told a gathering of Union Army Veterans: “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.” (Through state charters that bring corporations into existence.)

None of these and other similar commentators wished to deny full constitutional rights to people working in these legal fantasies called corporations. They just didn’t want corporations to be able to utilize corporate personhood per se as a juggernaut for their pursuits.

What is happening with each passing year, with fearsome perils, is that large corporations are attaching their special privileges and immunities to technologies. These privileges and immunities include artificial intelligence (robots), biotechnology (changing the nature of nature) and nanotechnology (used in autonomous weapons, etc.) and, of course, nuclear power and weapons of mass destruction. Corporate lawyers will soon be advocating those corporate-owned, complex, self-activating robots have the same legal fictional rights as their owner, lessor or breeder.

As law professor George J. Annas observed: The artificial person fantasy continues to grow, as does the destructiveness of major corporations. He heralded “climate change” as one devastating example.

After much documentation of large corporate predations savagely out of control by mere nation-states, outwitting most civic and political challenges to their sprawling hegemony, it is time to move from skirmishes to fundamental constitutional subordinations of the corporate entity to the supremacy of natural persons. This will require two streams of parallel, deliberative action. First, citizen groups who know better must elevate their experience by taking on big business and moving from symptoms to root causes that enable these “Frankenstein monsters” uber alles. Civic groups need to educate people about the fact that corporate birth certificates, which allow companies to exist, are created by governments and can be conditioned or abolished by that same authority.

People understand the cruelty of uneven playing fields at the starting gates. Continual public education is essential for transformative displacement of the corporate entities to a secondary status to prevent or contain commercially-driven abuses of power.

The second stream must come from the recognition that the necessary constitutional amendment placing the corporate entity in a distinctly unequal status vis-à-vis human beings will require rigorous research and thought. Establishing inferior legal status for corporations within our political economy is essential. New corporate structures for non-commercial activities will need to be explored, and other forms of collective organizations will need to be developed or recalled from history. Many academic disciplines and their practitioners in real life need to be enlisted.

Make no mistake, the leading reversal of the contrivances of corporate attorneys, must come from lawyers and scholars in the public interest who know how corporate attorneys have constructed the corporate state. It is time to rein in unaccountable, cost shifting, autocratic, hierarchical “Frankenstein monsters” that create their own out of control engines.

Drafting the enforceable statutes to implement the basic constitutional amendment is a task of unravelling and creating never before attempted. Ever more widely perceived runaway corporate controls of our daily lives, (already decried by over 70% of people in polls) with their associated manifestations of corporate coercion, corporate violence and corporate takeover of public institutions, will generate this last clear chance. Act before the concentrated automation of these global forces, bereft of actionable legal and ethical frameworks, turn omnicidal.

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Ralph Nader

Nader is opposed to big insurance companies, "corporate welfare," and the "dangerous convergence of corporate and government power." While consumer advocate/environmentalist Ralph Nader has virtually no chance of winning the White House, he has been taken quite seriously on the campaign trail.

Indeed, he poses the greatest threat to Sen. John Kerry. Democrats fear that Nader will be a spoiler, as he was in the 2000 election, when he took more than 97,000 votes in Florida. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes. The win gave Bush the election. Nader, an independent candidate, who also ran in 1992 and 1996, is on the ballot in 33 states, including Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and New Mexico—tough battleground states. Kerry stands a chance of losing those vital states if Nader siphons away the votes of Democrats. President Bush and Kerry have been in a statistical dead heat in nationwide polls, and votes for Nader could well tip the balance in favor of Bush.

Many Kerry supporters contend that a vote for Nader is in reality a vote for Bush and have made concerted efforts to persuade Nader to throw his support behind the Democratic candidate. Nader, however, has held fast to his convictions that the two candidates are nearly indistinguishable and are pawns of big business.

Designing Cars for Everything but Safety

Nader was born in Winsted, Connecticut, on Feb. 27, 1934 to Lebanese immigrants Nathra and Rose Nader. Nathra ran a bakery and restaurant. As a child, Ralph played with David Halberstam, who\'s now a highly regarded journalist.

Nader with Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter outside of Jimmy Carter\'s home on August 7, 1976, discussing Consumer Protection. (Source/AP)
Nader graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1955 and from Harvard Law School in 1958. As a student at Harvard, Nader first researched the design of automobiles. In an article titled "The Safe Car You Can\'t Buy," which appeared in the Nation in 1959, he concluded, "It is clear Detroit today is designing automobiles for style, cost, performance, and calculated obsolescence, but not—despite the 5,000,000 reported accidents, nearly 40,000 fatalities, 110,000 permanent disabilities, and 1,500,000 injuries yearly—for safety."

Early Years as a Consumer Advocate

After a stint working as a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut, Nader headed for Washington, where he began his career as a consumer advocate. He worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Department of Labor and volunteered as an adviser to a Senate subcommittee that was studying automobile safety.

In 1965, he published Unsafe at Any Speed, a best-selling indictment of the auto industry and its poor safety standards. He specifically targeted General Motors\' Corvair. Largely because of his influence, Congress passed the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Nader was also influential in the passage of 1967\'s Wholesome Meat Act, which called for federal inspections of beef and poultry and imposed standards on slaughterhouses, as well as the Clean Air Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

"Nader\'s Raiders" and Modern Consumer Movement

Nader\'s crusade caught on, and swarms of activists, called "Nader\'s Raiders," joined his modern consumer movement. They pressed for protections for workers, taxpayers, and the environment and fought to stem the power of large corporations.

In 1969 Nader established the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, which exposed corporate irresponsibility and the federal government\'s failure to enforce regulation of business. He founded Public Citizen and U.S. Public Interest Research Group in 1971, an umbrella for many other such groups.

A prolific writer, Nader\'s books include Corporate Power in America (1973), Who\'s Poisoning America (1981), and Winning the Insurance Game (1990).
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The Market Will Never Solve the Climate Crisis
February 14, 2023
Source: Jacobin


When oil prices plummeted during the pandemic, fossil fuel companies made vague efforts to invest in clean energy. Now pulling in bumper profits, Big Oil is discarding those initiatives to maintain their business model: capital over climate.

In the midst of the pandemic, climate-conscious financiers became excited by a relatively obscure piece of market news. NextEra Energy — the largest renewable energy company in the United States — surpassed ExxonMobil in market capitalization.

In other words, NextEra briefly became the most valuable energy company in the United States. This reversal was all the more shocking given that ExxonMobil was generating vastly more revenue than NextEra, raking in $265 billion in 2019 next to NextEra’s $19.2.

Exxon eventually overtook NextEra once again, but the shift was seen as a harbinger of future market movements by many investors.

While it may be difficult to imagine today, oil prices briefly fell to near zero in the midst of the pandemic. The collapse in prices was down to a combination of a dramatic slowdown in demand for fossil fuels and a quirk in commodities markets that encouraged investors to offload their oil futures all at once.

The big fossil fuel companies took a big hit from collapsing energy prices. The shock was particularly deep for Exxon, which is notorious for its refusal to countenance a shift away from fossil fuels.

The company’s former CEO, Rex Tillerson, who went on to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, was adamant that climate change was simply a new trend to which the world would have to adapt. In 2016, he stated outright that “[t]he world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.”

Exxon is also currently on trial for concealing information about the impact of burning fossil fuels on the climate. As far back as the 1970s, scientists working for ExxonMobil found strong evidence of the greenhouse effect. The company’s response was to slash funding for its science department and divert the cash into promoting climate denialism.

Exxon’s utter failure to signal its willingness to shift away from fossil fuels is a big part of why investors punished the company so heavily during the pandemic. In the first few months of 2020, ExxonMobil lost nearly half its market value.

When the company was overtaken by NextEra, market watchers took it as a clear signal that investors had had enough of fossil fuels.

There was a significant amount of triumphalism at this moment among the world’s capitalist class. The market had finally provided a solution to climate breakdown.

Whether due to demand for green investment products among retail investors, regulatory innovations like ESG scoring and carbon pricing, or simply the realization that green energy was the future, investing in fossil fuels no longer seemed like a sensible strategy for your average investor.

This transition, many argued, would put a great deal of pressure on companies like Exxon to shift investment away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. And sure enough, the fossil fuel companies were quick to respond.

Total rebranded itself as “TotalEnergies” in a bid to become a “world-class player in the energy transition.” Shell announced it would increase the amount it was investing in renewable energy. BP bought a significant stake in a renewable energy company. Even Exxon finally caved to market pressure and said it would invest billions in “lower greenhouse gas emissions initiatives.”

The upshot of the “success” of these market-based solutions to climate breakdown was, of course, that the world no longer needed to toy with “socialistic” solutions to climate breakdown like the Green New Deal.

But under the surface, the situation was a lot murkier.

Most of the pledges made by the big oil companies were vague and slow to be implemented. In some cases, the announcements amounted to nothing more than greenwashing. The oil companies were betting that the age of oil was far from over.

A number of savvier investors agreed. Several hedge funds quietly started to make big bets that the price of oil would recover quickly as the world transitioned back to fossil fuels once the pandemic was over.

And they were right. After the worst of the pandemic was over, it wasn’t long before the price of oil recovered to pre-pandemic highs. Then it started to skyrocket. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of natural gas also soared, which proved a significant boon for the US fracking industry.

The fossil fuel companies, and the investors quietly channeling money into them, had made the right bet. Without a coordinated shift away from fossil fuels, led by the public sector, the world was going to continue to rely on dirty energy.

The market, in other words, was never going to provide a solution to climate breakdown.

ExxonMobil recently announced that it made record profits of $56 billion in 2022. This isn’t only a chart-topping profit for Exxon, it represents an “historic high for the Western oil industry.”

Five percent of these profits will be directed into Exxon’s climate pledges, many of which center on expensive and relatively untested work-arounds like carbon capture and storage. Meanwhile, it continues to ramp up its investments in oil and gas.

BP, which also made record profits of £22 billion last year, has been even more brazen. Alongside a massive share buyback to enrich its investors, BP announced that it would be slowing the shift away from oil and gas. As the think tank Common Wealth points out, the company is spending ten times as much on share buybacks as it is on “low carbon” initiatives.

During the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world missed out on an historic opportunity. With the value of fossil fuel companies tanking, governments could have bought up large chunks of these companies and pressured them to shift toward renewable energies.

And when both demand and inflation were relatively low, they could have announced stimulus packages that promoted decarbonization.

Instead, the oil companies were left to their own devices, Joe Biden’s climate plan was torpedoed by a senator in the pocket of ExxonMobil, and the EU announced a pretty pathetic attempt at their own “Green Deal.”

The result has not only been higher greenhouse gas emissions, it has also been a massive transfer of wealth from households to some of the largest energy companies in the world.

“The market” was never going to solve climate breakdown — and it was either naïve or, more likely, deeply cynical to pretend otherwise.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

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Mexico’s AMLO Announces Campaign Against US Blockade of Cuba, Denounces Neoliberalism

By Ben Norton
February 14, 2023
Z Article


Mexico’s progressive President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that his country will lead an international movement to end the US government’s illegal blockade against Cuba.

The Mexican president, known popularly by his initials AMLO, condemned the six-decade US blockade of Cuba as “inhumane”. He said the global campaign to overturn it must be more “active”, complaining that, while the vast majority of countries on Earth vote against the US embargo every year at the United Nations General Assembly, nothing ever changes.

AMLO also praised the Cuban Revolution for creating “one of the best health systems in the world”. He thanked Cuba for sending doctors to provide medical attention to people in underserved rural areas in Mexico and other countries around the world.

Criticizing the “neoliberal oligarchy” who ruled before him and “the corrupt neoliberal privatizers” who sold off many of the Mexican state’s assets, López Obrador explained that his government’s goal “is to establish a system of public healthcare, to guarantee the people’s right to healthcare”.

“The right to healthcare is a fundamental human rights, and it cannot be treated like a market”, AMLO declared.

The Mexican leader made these comments in a February 11 press conference in the southern port city of Campeche, alongside Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who addressed the two countries’ collaboration in public health.

The event featured dozens of Cuban doctors who were sent to Mexico as part of a solidarity mission.

López Obrador has consistently spoken out against the US sanctions and embargo against Cuba, which violate international law.

In June 2022, the Mexican president denounced the US blockade as a “type of genocide” and “tremendous violation of human rights”.

At the February 2023 event, AMLO honored Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro as “a visionary, a giant to whom we pay tribute”, adding, “Conservatives in Mexico and around the world can say whatever they want, but they will never, ever be able to counteract the teaching, the example of solidarity, of brotherhood that the revolutionary movement and its leaders have left Cuba”.

In the fiery speech, AMLO stated:

Such vision Commander Fidel Castro had! While the neoliberals [in Mexico] were preventing the training of doctors, in Cuba they were driving the training of doctors, and consolidating one of the best health systems in the world.

That is not done by a mere man of the state; that is done by a man of the nation, a visionary, a giant to whom we pay tribute for this great work that you all have continued (referring to the Cuban doctors in the audience).

Conservatives in Mexico and around the world can say whatever they want, but they will never, ever be able to counteract the teaching, the example of solidarity, of brotherhood that the revolutionary movement and its leaders have left Cuba.

For this, our respect, our gratitude, our support.

We are going to continue demanding that the blockade against Cuba be lifted, that it be eliminated. It is inhumane.

And not only when it comes to voting in the UN, where it is always only one or two countries who vote in support of it, while the vast majority of the countries in the world abstain or vote for the blockade to be eliminated. But when the [General] Assembly is over, it is back to the same old.

I offer to President Miguel Díaz-Canel that Mexico is going to lead a more active movement, so that all countries unite and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba, and never, ever treat it as a ‘terrorist’ country, or put its profoundly humane people and government on a blacklist of supposed ‘terrorists’.

Long live the dignified people of Cuba!

In his remarks at the public health press conference, Cuban President Díaz-Canel stressed the “deep and historic ties” that his country has enjoyed with its “brothers” in Mexico.

He recalled that Castro and other Cuban leaders planned the revolution while living in exile in Mexico.

Díaz-Canel highlighted the medical support that Cuba and its doctors have provided to Mexico over the decades.

The Cuban leader also thanked Mexico, noting it “has supported us historically in the battle for the lifting of the blockade, which has done so much damage to our economy, and especially to the health sector”.

While Díaz-Canel was visiting, López Obrador gave the Cuban leader the prestigious Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest state honors for a foreign national.

López Obrador is one of the world’s most popular leaders, and has a consistent approval rating of between 60 and 70% since he came to power in late 2018.
Mexico’s President AMLO condemns neoliberalism, pledges support for public healthcare and education

AMLO also used his speech to denounce the “neoliberal period, which lasted 36 years in our country”.

The last Mexican head of state who pursued policies of economic nationalism was José López Portillo. In 1982, Miguel de la Madrid took power, and he began implementing neoliberal reforms – largely in response to a disastrous debt crisis and hyperinflation that were fueled by a skyrocketing increase in interest rates under US Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker.

AMLO referred to this neoliberal period as the era of “Neo-Porfirismo”, referencing former military dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1876 to 1911.

Díaz’s rule ended with the Mexican Revolution. AMLO invoked the historical legacy of this revolution to explain the “Fourth Transformation” that he is leading today.

In the neoliberal period, “Policies were applied to benefit the minority, the oligarchy. They talked about democracy, but in reality it was an oligarchy”, AMLO said.

“No one wanted to go and work in rural hospitals, where specialists were needed”, he added. “Because of that, we are very grateful for the doctors from the brotherly people of Cuba… for helping us, so that doctors and specialists could cover all of the country”.

“It is something truly terrible, even unbelievable”, AMLO continued. “In the 36 years of neoliberal politics, they sold off the public companies, the nation’s banks, the railroads, the mines, the ports, the airports. They also carried out privatization of the electricity and oil industries”.

“And they didn’t stop, not even in relation to education and healthcare. The so-called structural reforms aimed to put education and healthcare on the market, as if they were goods for sale, with the goal so that those who wanted to study or get medical attention had to pay”.

“Fortunately, the people said ‘Enough!’, and, in a democratic way, decided to change these politics and carry out a transformation”, AMLO said. “Also to confront the tremendous decay that we suffered. The corruption brought about a process of gradual degradation in all of the fields of public life”.

“And to confront decay, there is no alternative option other than a deep transformation, to pull out the roots of the regime of injustices, of corruption, of privileges. And that is what is being done in Mexico”, López Obrador declared.

“We are pushing forward on education, pushing forward with healthcare, so that they aren’t like what the corrupt neoliberal privatizers wanted, as privileges, but rather as rights for our people”.

“The state cannot fail in its social responsibility. The state is obligated to guarantee public education, free and of good quality, at all levels”.

Today, AMLO said, his government’s “goal is to establish a system of public health, to guarantee the people’s right to healthcare”.

He said his priority is also expanded access to inexpensive medicines. “Because, in the times of neoliberal, the sale of medicines was a big business”, López Obrador recalled. He noted large pharmaceutical companies made huge profits through corruption, selling overpriced medicines to the government at unfair prices.

“Because the right to healthcare is a fundamental human right, and it cannot be treated like a market”, he added.

AMLO revealed that his government has opened nearly 100 medical schools to train doctors and nurses, and he plans on creating 55 more across the country before his term ends. His administration also doubled the number of scholarships available.

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Rents Push Up U.S. Consumer Prices; Inflation Gradually Cooling

By Lucia Mutikani
02/14/23 
A shopping cart is seen in a supermarket in Manhattan, New York City

U.S. consumer prices accelerated in January as Americans continued to be burdened by higher costs for rental housing and food, suggesting that the Federal Reserve was far from pausing its interest rate hiking campaign.

The report from the Labor Department on Tuesday also showed the pace of disinflation in the annual consumer price measures slowing last month. Still, the continued gradual slowdown in inflation likely keeps the Fed on a moderate interest rate hiking path. Sticky inflation and a stubbornly tight labor market have led some economists to expect that the U.S. central bank could continue hiking rates through summer.

"Inflation is easing but the path to lower inflation will not likely be smooth," said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial in Charlotte, North Carolina. "The Fed will not make decisions based on just one report but clearly the risks are rising that inflation will not cool fast enough for the Fed's liking."

The consumer price index increased 0.5% last month after gaining 0.1% in December. A 0.7% rise in the cost of shelter, which mostly reflected rents, accounted for nearly half of the monthly increase in the CPI.

Inflation was also boosted by rising gasoline prices, which rebounded 2.4% after declining for two straight months. Americans also paid more for natural gas and electricity.

There were also increases in prices of food, which rose 0.5% after advancing 0.4% in December. The cost of food consumed at home climbed 0.4%, lifted by rising prices for meat, fish and eggs. Prices for cereals and bakery goods rose as did nonalcoholic beverages, but fruits and vegetables cost less.

January's increase in the CPI was in line with economists' expectations. Economists said some of the rise in the monthly CPI reflected price increases at the start of the year, mostly evident in the 2.1% surge in prescription drugs and 1.2% jump in motor vehicle fees.

"In today's higher-inflation environment, firms are likely to implement larger price increases when they reset their prices than they normally would when inflation was low and stable, leading the seasonal factors to underestimate inflation at the start of the year when price resetting is more common," economists at Goldman Sachs wrote in a note.

The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also updated the seasonal adjustment factors, the model that it uses to strip out seasonal fluctuations from the data.

Spending weights used to calculate the CPI were also updated effective with January's report. The new weights, reflecting consumer spending in 2021, were seen as inflationary for January's report. Housing now has a bigger share in the CPI, while weights for transportation and food were lowered.

In the 12 months through January, the CPI increased 6.4%. That was the smallest gain since October 2021 and followed a 6.5% rise in December. The revisions to 2022 CPI account for the modest slowdown in the year-on-year CPI.

The annual CPI peaked at 9.1% in June, which was the biggest increase since November 1981.

President Joe Biden said in a statement that the CPI report "reinforces that we have made historic progress and are on the right track, and now we need to finish the job."

Stocks on Wall Street were trading lower. The dollar was steady versus a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices fell.



GOODS DEFLATION PAUSES

The moderation in annual inflation reflects tighter monetary policy, which is weighing on demand, as well as improved supply chains. But it will be a while before inflation moves back to the Fed's 2% target.

The Fed has raised its policy rate by 450 basis points since last March from near zero to a 4.50%-4.75% range, with the bulk of the increases between May and December. Two additional rate hikes of 25 basis points are expected in March and May. Financial markets are betting on another increase in June.

"The risks lie on the upside for further rate increases," said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide.

Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI increased 0.4% after rising 0.4% in December. In addition to the 0.7% advance in owners' equivalent rent (OER), a measure of the amount homeowners would pay to rent or would earn from renting their property, the so-called core CPI was also supported by higher prices for apparel. OER increased 0.8% in December.

Independent measures, however, suggest rental inflation is cooling, leading many economists to believe that price pressures could decelerate considerably in the second half. The rent measures in the CPI tend to lag the independent gauges.

Healthcare costs fell 0.4%. Excluding food, shelter and energy, the CPI rose 0.2% after gaining 0.1% in December. Prices for used cars and trucks fell 1.9%, while the cost of apparel increased 0.8%, the largest gain since December 2021. Core goods prices rose 0.1%, increasing for the first time since August.

In the 12 months through January, the core CPI advanced 5.6%, the smallest gain since December 2021, after rising 5.7% in December.

"We continue to look for inflation to trend lower, but we believe getting back to an inflation rate the Fed can live with on a sustained basis will neither be quick nor painless," said Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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U$A
For All The Layoff Talk, Most Law Firms Are Holding Steady And Banking On Swift Recovery

New financial report shows cause for optimism.

By JOE PATRICE
February 14, 2023
Despite what the Federal Reserve keeps saying, the looming recession is more hypothetical than real. Tech companies are taking a hit as Facebook’s foray into janky VR chatrooms and Tesla’s… every stupid thing that guy does have brought down the high-flying sector like a Chinese spy balloon. But outside of that, the economy is pretty solid actually. GDP is growing at around 3 percent per quarter, unemployment is down, inflation — again, despite the fever dreams of the Fed — remains under control, and even eggs are cheaper again thanks to the Swifties.

So why are law firms laying people off? Well… they aren’t really. At least most of them.

The Thomson Reuters Institute just put out the Q4 2022 Thomson Reuters Law Firm Financial Index, reporting that firms took an unsurprising hit to demand in the fourth quarter. Law firms experience lagged economic impacts. As the economy suffered two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the first half of 2022, law firms continued to enjoy cautiously good times. The reckoning comes due now, but with the economy already springing back, most firms refuse to overreact:

“Law firms are at a bit of a crossroads as they face weaker demand and inflationary pressures,” said Paul Fischer, president, Legal Professionals, Thomson Reuters. “Our Financial Insights data notes that firms are moderating their expense growth and generally maintaining their headcount, so they could be well positioned for improved profitability if demand picks up later this year.”

Firms with a heavy tech sector portfolio or preparing for a merger and resulting redundancies will cut back, but most firms see this as a temporary setback. Transactional work took a hit as the year went on and non-transactional work hasn’t recovered from the pandemic yet, leaving firms with a sense of weightlessness last quarter. But that should work itself out by mid-year.

That’s not to say things will return to the heady days of 2021. The era of clearing almost $350K in profit per lawyer during the post-pandemic deal boom is unlikely to return, but can the profession settle into a nice $300K or so? Sure.



Of course, the Fed could introduce real chaos if it keeps up with its obsessive chase of a wage-price spiral that doesn’t yet exist. If interest rate hikes make significant transactional work untenable, law firms could be mired in a demand slump for an extended period.

But for now, we’ll bask in the optimism.



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Earthquake in Turkey exposes gap between seismic knowledge and action – but it is possible to prepare

Worst-hit areas in Turkey were reduced to rubble. 
Erhan Sevenler/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

THE CONVERSATION
Published: February 14, 2023 

Two days after a devastating earthquake struck, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited one of the worst affected areas and declared that it was “not possible to be prepared for such a disaster.”

Certainly the scale of the destruction was unforeseen. The death toll from the earthquakes of Feb. 6, 2023, that struck Turkey and northern Syria is still climbing. But one week on, it has been documented that over 35,000 people were killed, with more than 50,000 injured and over 1,000,000 receiving aid for survival in bitter cold conditions. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit while many were sleeping in the town of Pazarcık in Kahramanmaraş, southern Turkey – the epicenter of the quake. It was followed nine hours later by a major aftershock in Elbistan, a town about 50 miles from the initial quake, sending buildings weakened in the first shock to total collapse.

The final death tolls are likely to place these two successive earthquakes among the worst natural disasters that have been witnessed in the world.

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The sobering question to us, as disaster mitigation scholars, is whether this enormous loss of lives, homes and livelihoods could have been avoided. There is no way to prevent an earthquake from occurring, but what can be prevented – or at least curtailed – is the scale of the calamity caused by these inevitable tremors.

In our view, any suggestion that a country cannot “be prepared” for an earthquake of the magnitude that hit Turkey and northern Syria is a political statement – that is, it reflects the political choices that were made rather than the science. In Turkey, the lack of preparedness contrasts sharply with the known conditions of seismic risk that the country faces.

Missed opportunities

According to the Turkey Earthquake Hazard Map, which was revised and published in 2018, nearly all of Turkey is vulnerable to seismic risk, with two significant fault lines – the East Anatolian Fault zone and the North Anatolian Fault zone – crisscrossing the country.

The North Anatolian Fault, 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) long, runs east to west across the northern half of the country, menacing the major cities of Ankara, the country’s capital, and Istanbul, and threatening the most industrialized section of the country. The East Anatolian Fault, about 620 miles (nearly 1,000 kilometers) in length, runs diagonally across the southeastern part of the country. It covers an area of smaller cities and villages, but millions of people are at risk in the region.

Turkey has made repeated efforts to address this fundamental seismic risk. In 1959, the Turkish parliament passed Disaster Law 7269, establishing a plan to institute disaster preparedness regulations at national, provincial and municipal levels. The law raised awareness to some degree, but five significant earthquakes in the 1990s shattered any expectations that existing preparedness measures were sufficient to protect the growing population from death and destruction.

After the devastating 1999 earthquakes in the Marmara region of northwestern Turkey – in which more than 17,000 died – the Turkish government instituted a major program of recovery and rebuilding intended to strengthen building codes and improve cross-jurisdictional coordination. Yet, this ambitious program was hampered by chronic corruption and weak implementation of the building codes.

The Turkish government also levied an “earthquake tax” after the 1999 disaster, purportedly to raise funds to better prepare the country for future quakes. Since it was passed, an estimated US$4.6 billion has been raised through the levy. But there are serious questions over how the money has been spent.

The destruction caused by Turkey’s 1999 earthquake. Manoocher Deghati/AFP via Getty Image

Then in 2009, Turkey instituted a National Disaster and Emergency Management Authority to build capacity for disaster risk reduction and management.

AFAD’s mission was to organize disaster preparedness training for provincial and municipal officials and to conduct disaster preparedness training exercises for communities at risk. The approach was to decentralize and reverse the top-down governance approach, enabling local communities to strengthen their own capacity for managing disaster risk.

In a further bid to strengthen Turkey’s preparedness, the country introduced a National Disaster Response Plan in 2014. It set out the role of government institutions in case of a disaster under sections such as nutrition group, emergency sheltering group and communication group.

After the Soma mine accident of 2014, in which 301 miners were killed in an underground fire, the Turkish government initiated a review of the national plan. It appointed an international advisory committee that included participants from Japan, the U.S. and Europe to review the existing law and make recommendations for change.

The resulting recommendations included regular monitoring of risk, improved training of emergency personnel and updated technologies for interagency communication. The plan was presented to Turkey’s political leadership, which approved the changes in principle with a view to begin implementation in January 2015.

But the fully revised National Disaster Management Plan was never implemented. In early 2015, the national government changed the leadership of the National Disaster and Emergency Management Authority. In the process, experienced personnel who had advocated for better training, advanced communications technology and updated equipment for local governments were replaced. From our observation, this shift had the effect of reducing the capacity of local governments to take immediate action when hazards occur, as funds for training, new equipment and additional personnel were not granted. Although the plan was in place, little action was taken.

Lessons from Japan, California

The nonimplementation of the revised disaster plan reflects the gap between knowledge and action in managing Turkey’s seismic risk. It is not possible to stop the earthquakes, but it is possible to construct buildings that do not collapse and kill their residents on a massive scale – as both Japan and California have managed to do.

Turkey has designed and approved building codes that are the equivalent of the rigorous codes implemented in seismically challenged California. And there are approximately 150,000 civil engineers in Turkey who have the knowledge and skills to construct buildings, roads and dams that may suffer strain from seismic events but not fail.

But the cost of upgrading existing subpar buildings causes the effort to proceed at a glacially slow pace. While the building design regulation introduced in 2000 is implemented well in major cities, its state-of-the art requirements are poorly understood by engineers in the rest of the country.

A building construction supervision system has been in place since 2010, but its coverage is still too narrow to monitor the country’s 16 million buildings.
The way forward

Turkey again is at a crossroads and this latest disaster creates an urgent call for national action. Short-term solutions – rebuilding the same style of flawed housing and infrastructure – will only increase the chance of future tragedies.

But there is another course. Turkey’s current generation of engineers, economists, policy analysts and leaders can opt for bold action: redesigning their built environment to live with seismic risk, and engaging the whole population of Turkey in an ongoing experiment to create a society that recognizes earthquakes as a continuing threat that can be managed.


Authors
Louise K. Comfort
Louise K. Comfort is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Public and International Affairs, former Director of the Center for Disaster Management, University of Pittsburgh
Burcak Basbug Erkan
Associate Professor at Department of Statistics, Middle East Technical University
Polat Gulkan
Professor of Earthquake Structural Engineering, Başkent University

Disclosure statement

Louise K. Comfort has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Quick Response grant program at the Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of Pittsburgh for three previous reconnaissance studies of earthquakes in Turkey.

Burcak Erkan is affiliated with Gelecek Partisi (Future Party) in Turkey.


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Capitalism in Black and Blue

John Parker
08 Feb 2023 

Policing is inextricably linked to racism and to capitalism.

Policing is inextricably linked to racism and to capitalism.

There are two very frightening realities faced by the capitalist ruling class - their smaller numbers in relation to the majority, and their inability to derive profit without exploited human labor. Since they are the sole owners of the means of production (the factories, land and machines) – with an essential armed force to protect that ownership – they have irreconcilable differences with the majority of people who, instead of owning those means, are exploited by them. We can’t even decide how the profits created by our labor, which turns into the wealth of the nation, gets used. Only the capitalist class gets to decide that with their bought and paid for politicians in Washington.

So, the problem for the ruling class is how to hide that reality from the human labor they depend on for profit. How do you keep the majority from understanding that their misery is based on their not owning the means of production and having no role in how the wealth produced from those means is spent? Should it go towards endless wars, WWIII, more police, joyrides to space? Or, for healthcare, jobs and housing?

And, more importantly, how do you hide from this class of people that they reside in the same boat sharing a reality of economic exploitation, increasing with every utility gas hike, deteriorating social services or diminishing wages?

That is the role of racism, to keep those in the boat from recognizing each other’s similarity. Like a magician’s use of misdirection, they hide that truth by defining the parameters of difference for us, then giving those who meet the preferred parameters of the ruling class more. They get more in terms of quality of life, allowing them the tools and opportunities to develop a fantasy of superiority. However, even with all those benefits the preferred in that boat are still simply the human labor necessary to develop profit for those owners of the means of production - the ruling class. They will continue to have no say so in how the wealth they create is used, and eventually their benefits will hit up against austerity - losing their pensions, jobs and quality of life to maintain the profits of the ruling class - forcing even the “preferred” to react. This is when the wealth founded on their labor is ironically used to pay for the police or military now taking aim at them.

Let’s get back to that racism thing.

Racism is a tool to weaken our working class through division in general. It’s specifically used as a whip that inflicts pain to the oppressed for the purpose of maintaining the system of Capitalism and it’s neocolonial relationships. In order to attempt to feel less of that pain some cowardly people of color will willingly lend themselves as the lash of that whip, hoping to divert their pain onto another’s back.

They will lend themselves as mercenaries for the ruling class, but they must meet the higher standards of allegiance to their white masters by frequently having to prove a willingness to match the psychopathic violence of their white supremacist peers. They are traitors for sure.

Sometimes they serve as presidents or legislators serving their imperial masters at Lockheed, Raytheon and the various financial and oil monopolies making up the ruling class. They willingly participate by commanding drone assassinations even on the continent of Africa. And many of them are found wearing a uniform they should never adorn – the Blue one.

But no matter who has transformed into the lash of that whip, they are all under strict orders to aim their greatest violence towards the oppressed, wielded for a ruling class desperate to maintain and enforce the ideology of white supremacy.

That ideology had its primary beginnings in the 17th Century when it became clear that the numerous slave revolts consisting of a combination of enslaved Africans, Indigenous and poor and indentured whites jeopardized not only the slave owners and the monarchy, but the developing capitalist class.

In order to break up that unified struggle, slavery, where it had its greatest institutional development in the Americas, had to begin to be defined for an exclusive few using skin color and African and Indigenous ethnicity. However, the greatest emphasis - in regards to maintaining a continued supply of this free labor – was reserved for those from the African continent. This meant that Europeans would soon no longer be considered for slavery (as some were in the 17th and earlier centuries) and only as indentured. And, even if indentured, would be morphed into overseers, or slave catchers for runaway slaves; eventually given the title of police shortly after Reconstruction targeting Black people in the South using ¨legality.” The Southern ruling class created laws designed to justify imprisonment for the purpose of continuing the slave labor they were economically addicted to.

Racism also aims at the mental health of the oppressed. It’s used as a means to destroy its targets from the inside with self-loathing and self-doubt and a general belief of inferiority. This also is sometimes a motivation for Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples to put on that blood-drenched uniform of Blue: to become something different. But, even if by ignorance people of color join U.S. police forces, they will quickly learn the genocidal role of their employer and either quit or remain with a clear understanding that they are an enemy of their own ethnicity and class.

Those murdering cops who killed Tyre Nichols, just like their peers who killed George Floyd knew the role they were playing in protecting, not us, but a racist murderous system of Capitalism. The only color that mattered in those incidents and the multiple incidents this year set to create another record of police killings, was the color of their uniforms.

As the U.S. economy sinks further into crisis of overproduction, inflation and war economy - austerity will continue to increase and generalize the want that oppressed people in this country have always endured. This is when racism is of utmost importance, whether it's used here or in Ukraine (with different parameters – Russian ethnicity is part of the subhuman race as defined by Nazi Germany and the current neo-Nazis leading a significant portion of the government and military in Ukraine). Racism is an integral part also of fascism and it will do us no good to deny its existence.  It exists for Black and Brown people on a daily basis when we are treated horribly by those receiving more in society and when we apply for a job not meant for us or come home to communities occupied by military forces of the ruling class. How can we be told that our rage against prejudice, disrespect and the targeting of our children by police is simply a reaction to a phantom? We cannot disconnect the gun from the bullet as if they exist independently. Capitalism and Imperialism and Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism depend upon their bullet of racism - and they cannot exist for very long without each other.

John Parker is the coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center For Social Justice In Los Angeles  and a leading member of the Socialist Unity Party . He accompanied former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on many anti-war delegations abroad. Parker was only 18 when he organized his first union election--at a small steel plant in New Jersey. Having authored a $15 minimum wage ballot initiative in 2014, his organizing efforts helped to push the city to act on the minimum wage increase proposals in Los Angeles. John Parker is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. 

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Why The Rage Against The War Machine Rally Is #AntiWarSoWhite

Jacqueline Luqman
08 Feb 2023



Leftists, especially the Black left, do not share common cause with everyone who wants to end U.S involvement in Ukraine. The politics of some who call themselves anti-war cannot be ignored.

I’m looking at this Rage Against The War Machine rally that is being organized by the Libertarian Party and I am genuinely confused about how folks on the left are involved in this at all. Oh, I understand the need to revive and mobilize a strong not just anti-war movement, but an anti–imperialist and people-centered human rights movement, so sure, sometimes we’re going to have to organize with people we don’t agree 100% on everything with. But THESE people?

And look, on the surface, if one would look at the list of demands on the Rage Against The War Machine webpage - and I do take offense at their play on the name of the band Rage Against The Machine - one easily agrees with not sending one more penny to Ukraine, to slashing the Pentagon budget, to abolishing war and empire, to disbanding NATO, and to freeing Julian Assange, among others reasonable sounding demands and think, “Well this is great, I agree with all of these things, so of course I’ll support/align with them!”

But, if you compare those nice-sounding words to the actual ideology of today’s Libertarian Party, and particularly of the Mises Caucus that has gained control of it, something starts to smell funny. So let me hip you to who these people are and why I’m now calling this and the support from too many white so-called leftists in the anti-war movement, #AntiWarSoWhite.

Back in May of 2022 Reason Magazine published an article examining the takeover of the Libertarian Party by the Mises Caucus which happened when the Caucus got their candidate Angela McCardle elected to chair the national party with 69% of the voting delegates. The article points out that while McArdle was the Mises Caucus candidate, the behind-the-scenes mastermind of its victory was caucus founder and leader Michael Heise.

The caucus's official platform is typical libertarian stuff - personal liberty, little to no federal government oversight or no federal government for that matter, no “unconstitutional” war, no federal regulation on guns, the primacy of private property - which has always screamed capitalist greed and a host of other problems including racism, since racists have taken the libertarian creed of freedom to associate with no federal oversight on freedom to exclude people of color. But the key to understanding the danger of the Mises Caucus isn’t in what their platform says; it is in what their members have said and have done. Because even old-guard libertarians say that too many of the Caucus members are obnoxious bullies, and are also often racist.

The Reason Magazine article cites the example of the New Hampshire L.P., a powerful vector of Mises Caucus messaging, tweeting on Martin Luther King Day that "Black people in America get special access to essential drugs, receive special federal funding due to race, and are first-in-line for every college and every job. America isn't in debt to black people. If anything it's the other way around."

Aside from the assertions that Black people get preferential anything in this country being typical racist drivel and patently false, the racist imaginary grievances were a response to Nicole Hannah Jones tweeting not her sentiments, but the words of Dr. Martin Luthe King, Jr. when he said in the oft miscontextualized “I Have A Dream” speech: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds…” But sure, we get preferential essential drug and job and college admittance treatment at a time when economic inequality between Black and white persists , with whatever meager gains the so-called Black middle class has achieved not translating to increased economic stability for the Black masses, and all Black households are far behind white households in income and assets, including the much-celebrated Black petit bourgeoisie.

Then there’s the influential member of the Caucus Jeremy Kauffman who tweeted that transgender people should be killed to achieve a more moral world, as long as it doesn’t incur additional taxes. These tweets were deleted after pressure to do so, but you know twitter is forever and thank goodness it is so that we have evidence to back up the reasons for actual leftists to steer clear of these #AntiWarSoWhite people.

Let Mises Caucus Libertarians tell it, though, they are merely carrying on Ron Paul’s Revolution. But more evidence of their true ideology can be seen when they succeeded in deleting the line from the Libertarian Party’s long-time platform plank condemning bigotry as “irrational and repugnant.” Heise says that the anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he called a "woke," or "cultural Marxist" agenda. He said, "What is happening nowadays with the 'wokeism' is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends," says Heise. "So back in the day…the Marxist revolutions, they had the dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker. And they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It's the same ideology that's happening now, but they're pitting cis versus straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever." Look at that, it’s the old communist gay/trans collectivist agenda trope!

And although they added a new line stating in their party’s plank stating that the party would "uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity," it hard to see how that can be done when the Mises Caucus is shaping the L.P. environment to drown out discussions about people’s identity and how policies impact them differently from the majority. Amazing how allegedly freedom-loving Libertarians sound hauntingly like rights-stripping bigoted Republicans.

Then there’s the fact that The Mises Caucus also succeeded in removing the party's pro-choice plank, which McArdle said was called for because abortion represents "an irreconcilable difference" within the libertarian movement and they didn’t want to keep alienating Trump and socially conservative voters. "We tend to push out people who are a little bit more socially conservative," says McArdle. "And I think that there's room in the party for people who are libertine and socially conservative. And I would like them to feel that way."

Let me get this straight…there’s enough room in the party to protect women’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy and enough room for the people who want to take it away from them? What’s the floor plan in that big tent look like because I’m not seeing how you arrange enough room for both. You’re going to inevitably drive one group out, and that will always be the group that feels threatened, that IS threatened, by the other.

And old guard Libertarians agree, which is why many of them have been very vocal in their opposition to the Mises Caucus and its takeover of the L.P. One old-guard Libertarian elected official who quit her post in protest to the Mises Caucus takeover in New Hampshire said, "...we are a big tent party, but no tent is big enough to hold racists and people of color, transphobes and trans people, bigots and their victims.."

If a Libertarian can understand that there is no unity to be had between people who are fighting for their rights and people who want to deny them, what is wrong with so-called white Leftists who don’t get this? I know the answer, but I’ll get to that in a minute, because there is more to consider when examining why this #AntiWarSoWhite rally is such a problem.

There’s the fact that if the Libertarian Party and anyone else who sponsored and organized this event were serious about building the “anti-war movement,” why didn’t they reach out to the very visible and very active Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led anti-imperialist organizations and invite their representatives to speak? As many white leftists, or at least anti-war activists, are really dollar store Latte Leftists peddling vapid and narrow anti-war rhetoric without actually dealing with imperialism have told me, “...we all need to come together to stop this war in Ukraine because it presents an existential crisis for all of us!! ALL OF US WILL DIE FROM NUCLEAR WAAAARRRRR!!!!” they scream.

True enough. But considering the people most impacted by US imperialism and imperialist war have been organizing against it long before these Mises people came along, why haven’t I seen most of these white Latte Leftists engaged in organizing with us? I mean, Black, queer, trans, disabled, Global South, African people will certainly all die should there be a nuclear war, so why not include representatives of ALL OF THE PEOPLE who would be impacted if this war is not stopped on your platform?

And the organizers of this rally didn’t even have to reach out to real anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist organizations like the Black Alliance for Peace or ANSWER Coalition or the like. They could have been less obviously racist had they reached out to even a liberal formation like the Poor People’s Campaign.

But nope! The organizers looked at their speaker’s lineup and nobody said, “Dang this is mighty white up in here we need to get some legit Black anti-war speakers and really build a solid anti-war coalition.” But since that’s not who they want to build their base with, they didn’t.

And I’m not making this up. The new Mises Caucus-backed chair of the L.P. McArdle made it clear who the party wants to grow their base with in another Reason Magazine article where she says, “Mises Caucus supporters say they want to ‘make the Libertarian Party libertarian again,’ that it should no longer be concerned about offending progressives or Beltway types and shouldn't be afraid to reach out to the coalition that elected former President Donald Trump.” That’s right, their bold action to rejuvenate the Libertarian Party is not to reach out to the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist (they would never because private-property-loving Libertarians are NOT anti-capitalists) formations and activists, but to the right and alt-right young podcast edgelord personality-loving Trump voter. And to get unprincipled white Latte Leftists to give them public legitimacy by speaking at their opportunistic recruitment event they call an anti-war rally, or course, which too many are happy to oblige.

And despite how much some of the speakers now publicly whine about some others backing out because they succumbed to “the woke mob” or favored an LGBTQ+ agenda over participating in their little #AntiWarSoWhite rally, the truth is that people probably hadn’t looked into what the Libertarian Party has become with the Mises Caucus now leading it, and when they found out decided it wasn’t worth damaging their formations’ reputation associating with them, and ultimately decided that betraying the marginalized people within their formations and coalitions was also not worth the limited visibility their participation would have given them. Especially when you factor in that for the Libertarian Party, the purpose of this rally is really to seize the political moment to raise their flailing political party’s profile and gain some legitimacy from the speakers they invited.

Because it is worth noting that the money is drying up for the Libertarian Party because of this rightward shift the Caucus has created. Long-time significant donors to the L.P. have said that the Mises turn made them stop funding L.P. candidates. At the time the Reason article was published in March 2022, the number of active donors to the LP including several major ones, had been falling for seven straight months following the four-year battle for control of the party between the old-guard Libertarians and the Mises Caucus. And now that the Mises Caucus has won, this rally is part of their strategy to win and expand their party’s political power.

And here I have to go back to the folks who choose still after all that has come to light about the Libertarian Party and the Mises Caucus. I wonder if they are asking themselves what the Mises Caucus-led Libertarian Party will do with the political power they win if they are able to cash in on the legitimacy they are looking for with this event. And if they are asking themselves that, who do they think they would wield that political power against?

Of course, they will use that power against the people they have already told us with their own words and actions that they want to use it against, to disenfranchise the marginalized the way the GOP that they are actively courting to grow their ranks are already attacking. The Libertarian Party under Mises Caucus control will help the GOP do it, and what will these white Latte Leftists do then? Despite the delusional assurances of some who have engaged me, they will not change the minds of these people because the L.P. is not interested in changing their ideology. And these white Latte Leftists are not demanding that they do.

Among many of the white alleged leftists who challenged my analysis of this L.P.-backed #AntiWarSoWhite rally, I seem to recall none of them engaging with other anti-imperialist groups for nationwide protests against a potential war in Ukraine as far back as the beginning of February 2022. Facebook reminded me that I was at such a rally. You see, we anti-imperialists have been protesting imperialism, war, and THIS war in particular for quite some time, even before this war with Russia using Ukraine began. We saw it coming and were protesting against the possibility, if not the inevitability of the US/EU/NATO coalition pushing it. But let these alleged white veterans of the anti-war movement tell it, a real powerful anti-war coalition couldn’t have been built until the L.P. rally came along, so if we value our lives we’d better hop on that bandwagon.

The truth is, however, that if they ever valued our lives, they would have been organizing with us all along, but too many white so-called anti-war veterans have not been, and that’s why much of what is considered the anti-war movement - as much of it as there is left - is also an #AntiWarSoWhite formation.

Because I must point out that much of this discourse around defending these bigots and transphobes in the new Libertarian Party among white anti-war veterans looks, sounds, and feels like plain ol’ liberal racism, where the allegedly nice white people gaslight us for pointing out that the people they want to do business with would just as soon see us wiped out, so we cannot - for our own safety and that of our comrades - align with those forces and people. In response, the allegedly nice white people dismiss our concerns, tell us that we’re making too much of nothing like we always do, and that we’re the reason no change can happen because we don’t want to work with anybody. We’re too stuck on “ideological purity” or worse, “identity politics” rather than building a broad coalition. That’s racist gaslighting y’all and there is really no other way to call that. Especially when they try to support their flimsy arguments against us by using quotes by Frederick Douglass or the example of the original Rainbow Coalition led by the Black Panther Party to prove to us that we should unite with racist white people. Except that they, once again, remove all context from their examples, and have not done anything close to what those freedom fighters did to challenge racist domination. Hell, these white leftists won’t even ADMIT that the folks organizing this rally have a bigotry problem, let alone require them to repudiate it as the Black Panther Party did with the members of the Young Patriots who may have been racist, as Frederick Douglass did in challenging the system of white supremacist domination. No, these white Latte Leftists are not making ANY demands of the organizers of this event for their party’s bigotry and that of some of the speakers aligned with their party, but they are making all the demands of US to capitulate to them, So the misuse of our own history against us is an additional racist insult committed by the #AntiWarSoWhite crowd on the so-called left.

Further, there is also the very uncomfortable truth that too many white people on the so-called left do not want to be in coalition with people who aren’t like them. They don’t want to have to deal with conversations about their racism and white supremacist tendencies, their patriarchy, their homophobia and transphobia, their ableism, their superior attitude as if they know All Things Organizing, and their resistance to being led by nonwhite non-men. They want to organize with people who only want to talk about how war and maybe capitalism affect our class as a whole, but they do not want to talk about the additional oppressions that are heaped on those of our class because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. There, I said it out loud for you - too many so-called white people on the so-called left who claim to be anti-war do not want to be led by people of color because they’re tired of talking about racism, and they want to continue to call the shots.

And look where that’s gotten us, a bunch of people who claim to be anti-war activists tripping over themselves to give a bunch of bigots legitimacy because western chauvinism and American exceptionalism has them really believing that a movement ain’t right unless it’s led by whites. The resistance to focusing the anti-war effort on the people who are and always have been most impacted by imperialist warmongering is something they refuse to confront, struggle with and overcome. So they don’t want a real anti-imperialist coalition, they want their own #AntiWarSoWhite movement.

My observations here are less of a condemnation of any of these groups - organizers or participants - and more an honest analysis of the factors that lead me to see this Rage Against The War Machine rally of the L.P. as a dangerous distraction from true anti-imperialist coalition building and organizing. People and formations must make decisions about who they align with based on their own principles of unity and shared interests, but there should also be principles of solidarity with the most marginalized to bring no harm to them with the alliances we make.

I just know that the interests of the working class, poor, oppressed, and colonized people who are marginalized additionally by racial oppression, gender oppression, ableist exclusion and other intersectional points of struggle are not served by aligning with people who would continue those oppressions should they ever win enough power to be able to do it.

We cannot afford to lend those groups legitimacy now, only so they can win the power to use it against us later. It is a grave betrayal of our humanity to demand that we do.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation , an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here  and here ) and on Facebook ; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary” .

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How Black Americans view the path to overcoming inequality


By: Diane Duenez
Posted Feb 14, 2023

Black Americans have long articulated a clear vision for the kind of social change that would improve their lives.

The Pew Research Center recently explored Black Americans’ views about how to overcome racial inequality. The 2022 report found Black Americans “have a clear vision for reducing racism but little hope it will happen.”

“Most African Americans know their history,” said Spelman College professor Cynthia Neil Spence. “We know that from the stories that our grandparents have told us, our great-grandparents have told us. And those stories have always, in fact, been centered around the disenfranchisement of us based on who we are and based on how we were born.”

That same Pew report stated nearly 70% of Black adults see racial discrimination today as the primary obstacle to success.

“We still have the highest maternal mortality rates. We still have the highest rates of poverty,” Spence said.

“The systems that we currently have in place are not developed in a way that would meet the needs of most Black business owners and entrepreneurs in this country," said Alex Camardelle, vice president of policy and research at the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative.

The Pew report stated that after George Floyd’s death in 2020, more than half of Black adults said the increased attention on racial equality would lead to meaningful change. In a survey one year later, nearly two-thirds said it hadn’t led to change.

“America is having to really just take an inventory of itself and look in the mirror and decide how are we going to be equitable and equal moving forward," said
Kyle Walcott, president of the Emerging 100 of Atlanta.

“I’m really a bit tired of hearing what the problems are. We have a George Floyd bill that yet has not been approved. We have a John Lewis Voting Rights Act that has not been approved. We have individuals who are serving at the federal government and the state governmental level, who have demonstrated behaviors that suggest that they don’t really care," Spence adds.

According to the Pew report, just 13% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is very likely.

“It’s difficult, you know, as a Black person to think about, ‘When is that change going to come?’” Walcott said. “Things don’t happen overnight, and so how long are we going to wait, you know, on the government, the structures, the leaders who are in charge? We need the people that are in charge of the changing, the regulatory frameworks and the policies to be on the front lines.”

“I’m born and raised in the South. So, I’m in a community that’s hard-wired to believe that things won’t change or that the pace is just going to outlive me," Camardelle said.

“It’s time now for us to sit around tables and to build out sustainable strategies for addressing inequalities in our society,” Spence added. “This is what works, and let’s do it. Let’s make a difference.”
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Biden to name Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard as new head of National Economic Council: source

February 14, 2023

Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard.
AP PHOTO/SUSAN WALSH, FILE

President Joe Biden plans on Tuesday to name Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard as the new director of his National Economic Council, making the Ph.D. economist a key point person for coordinating policy, talking with business leaders and negotiating with Congress.

Biden also plans to nominate longtime adviser Jared Bernstein to be chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, according to a government official familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because there has been no public announcement.

Brainard and Bernstein would be moving into top spots at a crucial juncture for the U.S. economy. Unemployment is at 3.4%, near a 54-year low, but inflation remains persistently high at 6.4% and has contributed to fears of a coming recession.

Brainard would be succeeding Brian Deese, who helped handle several key legislative wins for Biden, including coronavirus relief, infrastructure spending and investments in computer chip production.

Brainard, 61, holds a doctoral degree in economics from Harvard University. During the Clinton administration, she worked as a deputy director for the National Economic Council. She was also under secretary for international affairs at Treasury during Barack Obama’s presidency. Brainard joined the Fed in 2014 as a governor and Biden nominated her to become vice chair.

She also forms half of an administration power couple, with her husband, Kurt Campbell, serving on the National Security Council as the administration’s “Asian czar.”

Bernstein is already a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, where he would succeed current chair Cecilia Rouse, who is returning to Princeton University. With an interest in labor markets and income inequality, Bernstein worked as a vice presidential aide for Biden during Obama’s presidency.

Brainard’s departure from the Fed comes at a fraught time, as the central bank seeks to balance its fight against inflation without going so far as to cause a worse recession than necessary. Brainard has been a leading “dovish” voice, meaning she typically supports lower interest rates to bolster employment. (“Hawks” are more likely to push for higher rates to combat inflation).

In a speech last month, Brainard argued that taming inflation might not require the job market “pain,” in the form of widespread layoffs, that other Fed officials, including Fed Chair Jerome Powell, have warned about. Instead, she said that companies may be forced to reduce prices and cut their profit margins as consumer demand slows, which would help bring down inflation.

However, President Biden has appointed three other members of the Fed’s governing board, so Brainard’s departure will not deprive the central bank of dovish voices.

Brainard has also supported tougher financial regulations than Powell. When Randal Quarles was the Fed’s top financial regulator — appointed by President Donald Trump — Brainard cast about 20 dissenting votes on regulatory issues.

She has also expressed support for the idea that the Fed could do more to push banks to consider the risks posed by climate change to their financial health. Climate activists warn that increased damage to homes, commercial buildings, and other property will impose greater financial losses on banks and should be considered when evaluating their safety and soundness.

Under Powell, who is not a trained economist, the Fed vice chair has typically been someone with a deep background in monetary economics, such as Richard Clarida, Brainard’s predecessor. Clarida was an economics professor at Columbia University and an adviser to PIMCO, a bond trading firm.
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