#deregulatory

[clavainov]

Only in horror cinema could I find a reflection of myself. These people, in extreme life-or-death situations, displayed the same kind of emotions I experienced in brief intense lightning-flashes when talking to a cashier in the supermarket. It was relatable and enviable, because their situation was grave enough that they were allowed to wail and thrash as much as they liked. I felt like that, like dying, like I couldn’t breathe, and I had to push it down and pretend it didn’t exist or otherwise I would lose the few human relationships I had. I wanted to be allowed to scream and cry. I wanted my bottomless sadness to be caused by something people could understand and observe. So, I found myself relating more to the characters in horror movies. Not in an empowering way – not about being a ‘final girl’ – I understood best those who ended up dead. I saw my desperation reflected back at me and I wished I was strapped down to a table being cut apart, because then my feelings would make sense.

[mariacallous]

The Federal Communications Commission has voted—once again—to assert its power to oversee and regulate the activities of the broadband industry in the United States. In a 3-2 vote, the agency reinstated net neutrality rules that had been abandoned during the height of the Trump administration’s deregulatory blitz.

“Broadband is now an essential service,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said Thursday in prepared remarks. “Essential services—the ones we count on in every aspect of modern life—have some basic oversight.”

The rules approved by the agency on Thursday will reclassify broadband services in the United States once more as “common carriers” under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, subjecting broadband to the same public-utilities-style scrutiny as telephone networks and cable TV.

That distinction means that the agency can prevent internet service providers from blocking or throttling legal content, or letting online services pay ISPs to prioritize their content with faster delivery speeds. But it’s difficult, particularly in an election year, to say whether net neutrality is here to stay or whether the FCC’s vote is just another inflection point in a regulatory forever-war.

“Net neutrality rules protect internet openness by prohibiting broadband providers from playing favorites with internet traffic,” Rosenworcel says. “We need broadband to reach 100 percent of us—and we need it fast, open, and fair.”

This reclassification was first attempted by the Obama administration following a lawsuit by Verizon in 2011; the ruling pointed to reclassification as a necessary hurdle in efforts to bring broadband under scope of the FCC’s oversight. The outcome of that case prompted the introduction of the Open Internet Order of 2015, which not only reclassified the industry in line with the court’s suggestion but imposed a slate of new rules with “net neutrality” serving as the FCC’s guiding philosophy.

Two years later, those rules were overturned by the Trump-appointed FCC chair at the time, Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer. Back in the private sector now, Pai derided the FCC’s efforts this week as a “complete waste of time;” something, he said, “nobody actually cares about.”

The rules put forth under Rosenworcel are somewhat different than those previously introduced. Past FCC orders pursing net neutrality have been repeatedly challenged in court, giving the agency today a fair idea of which policies will be defensible in the onslaught of lawsuits definitely to come.

Though banning the creation of “pay-to-play internet fast lanes” remains a priority, the reasons for reclassifying broadband are not limited to warding off the industry’s well-documented predatory practices. The new order also gives the FCC the ability to more closely examine industry behavior; how, for instance, companies respond (or fail to) in the event of widespread network outages.

“Net neutrality” was not originally devised as a set of rules but rather as a principle by which regulators seek to strike a balance between the profit-motivated interests of megalithic broadband companies and the rights and welfare of consumers. It is often summed up simply as the practice of ensuring that “all internet, regardless of its source, must be treated the same.”

While the Trump FCC asserted that it had no authority to regulate ISPs, it paradoxically claimed—in a failed effort—the power to crack down on states working to create regulation for themselves. Still, in 2018 California successfully banned broadband companies from engaging in a host of anti-consumer activities, from digital redlining and data discrimination to zero-rating schemes, which enable ISPs to funnel consumers toward particular websites or services by exempting them from arbitrary data caps.

Net neutrality advocates typically credit laws like California’s with preventing “virtually lawless” service providers from going haywire over the past half-decade. Industry associations offer a counter-history: Net neutrality protections must have been pointless all along, since the sky didn’t fall once they disappeared.

State-level protections, however, haven’t prevented cable and satellite TV companies from pushing a menu of anti-consumer policies nationally. The industry has threatened to hike monthly subscription prices if ever prevented from charging early-termination fees to customers locked into yearlong contracts. It has opposed rules proposed by the Federal Trade Commission designed to “make it at least as easy to cancel a subscription as it was to start it.”

Rosenworcel and other net neutrality proponents point to the growing reliance on broadband as successive generations of Americans increasingly eschew forms of communication that traditionally fell under the FCC’s blanket. Broadband is undeniably a telecommunications service today—even more so now than when the FCC first sought to adopt net neutrality as its guiding principle.

“Today's action brings back moderate rules that have already passed court muster and are essential building blocks for a consumer-friendly and citizen-friendly internet,” says Michael Copps, a former FCC commissioner. “Our communications technologies are evolving so swiftly, affecting so many important aspects of our individual lives, that they must be available to all of us on a nondiscriminatory basis.”

Consumer reliance on digital platforms and tools for communication is only increasing: Teenagers today notoriously loathe—some say fear!—talking on the phone, while the landscape of communications dynamics shifted violently for US workers in the post-pandemic era. Nevertheless, Americans today have little agency on their own to combat predatory-pricing schemes and lopsided usage restrictions. Consumer advocates note that Americans cannot simply vote with their wallets while locked into receiving services from a de facto monopoly.

While having evolved far past its original conceit, net neutrality is at heart a policy of "non-discrimination," as Tim Wu explained in the 2002 white paper coining the phrase.

“The point of the neutrality principle is not to interfere with the administration of the internet-protocol side of a broadband carrier’s network,” wrote Wu, then an associate professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “It is, rather, to prevent discrimination in that administration.”

[racefortheironthrone]

In response to criticism of Pete Buttigieg, someone sarcastically asked if they had strong opinions on other Transportation Secretaries. That got me wondering whether there have been particularly bad or good Secretaries of Transportation. Even if they have good or bad policies, isn't that more down to the president rather than the Secretary themselves? Is it different for more established Departments?

This is pure recency bias. Buttigieg hasn’t been the best, but a lot of the problems he’s been dealing with were caused by the deregulatory spree that his predecessor Elaine Chao went on, so he’s not even the worst recent secretary.

[azspot]

There’s a reason why apocalyptic frameworks have in the last decade become so popular among the MSNBC set: they allow the cadre of liberal elites who at the very least helped the right wing make the world we live in today to maintain a basic innocence at odds with the actual history of liberal governance. For liberals, it is easier to blame “fascism” (or “white rural rage,” or “deplorables,” or “Christian nationalists”) for causing our country’s problems than the deregulatory, financialized, and militarist neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Those liberal priorities helped give rise to the modern right — but to admit that, liberal elites would have to reexamine the premises of their politics, and soul-searching is far less enjoyable than rallying against an unambiguous enemy.

Liberals’ Heated Fascism Rhetoric Sidesteps Self-Reflection

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Under Threat

The Brazilian Amazon is home to the largest concentration of uncontacted Indigenous communities in the world. These communities live in extremely remote parts of the Amazon and on designated reservations throughout the extensive rainforest. Environmental protection police have historically served as allies to these communities. However, since President Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2019, the government has weakened environmental protection agencies, leaving Indigenous communities under threat and having to police the region themselves in certain instances. This reduction in environmental policing along with deregulatory legislation instituted by Bolsonaro’s administration is a coordinated effort to increase economic output from the region. Deforestation efforts are now rampant while the largest federal agency aimed at advocacy for Indigenous populations, FUNAI, has seen a substantial decrease in employees and funding.

Continue reading.

[robbothepeasant]

Argentina and Never Ending LIES of Privatization

Of all the things that infuriate me about Western coverage of Latin America, none are so angering than the way the West and the Neolib bootlickers across the world talk about every U.S.A backed anti-Communist, Neoliberal despot as if any of their violent, greedy, economically destabilizing "Reforms" are in any new.

Around 10:50, the Ghoul on the right asked Ramiro Tosi, Economist, ex-Argentina Undersecretary of Finance, if Milei's "Fiscal Responsibilty" (Social Mass Murder) is even possible in Argentina. As if overwhelming neoliberalism has not been the defacto economic policy since the Junta took control in 1976.

Not a single Peronista that has been able to win an election has even had the courage to undo any of the damage that the deregulatory regime of the Martinez De Hoz. A man with connections to David Rockefeller and Henry Kissenger and U.S business ties, who was given carte balance to reshape the Argentine economy after the Military took over.

The Ghoul then, corroborates Milei's schizo-speech about "The fall of the west" to "orientalism" and "Weakness" tip-toeing around his nationalist warmongering, to focus on his statements about *his kind of government being a rare species in the West and In Europe.

Psychotic lies, all of it.

Are we operating under the assumption that in a decade that has brought about monstrously unpopular rightist economic restructuring in just about every polity, from France to Brazil, that Milei is some sort of lone wolf?

Are we not seeing a Internationalized class realestate exploiters destroy the housing market of every Liberal nation on earth, while the Politicians just continuously pass legislation to make it easier for them to continue this murder? Aren't European Farmers on strike due to "economic restrucuring" that includes removal of tax credits and subsidies for agriculture, but completely keeps subsidies for Coal barons and Financial Speculators under the guise of, "incentivizing innovation"

The ease with which Liberal institutions simply shift their language into one that implies that we're all living under a Socialist Bloc, you'd think Gorbachev's reign was still just a glint in the Pizza Hut's wet dreams.

It is important to note this rant is about the coverage from Deutsche Welle, a German State News organization with that often Hosts American/ British news anchors when covering international topics. (to sucker in the yankees, and feed them their slop)

Side Track==>

I have long since stopped paying attention to American News outlets, since the veil of strategic disinformation is so transparent, media coverage is closer to dinner theatre than journalism. Anyone watching and engaging with anything that comes out of an American Journalist's mouth has to have suspended their disbelief in order to enjoy the show.

Much like how a Superman fan knows that Superman's disguise being easily seen through is something done for the audience's benefit; and thus they willing ignore it's unbelievability in order to enjoy the show, Informed News watchers willing engage with the blatant lies and doublespeak of their preferred News source in order to enjoy the slow dissent into hell that Fox and NYT narrate over. Ultimately European News agencies are no different. But their priorities are slightly different, and thus are able to things like "socialized healthcare is an undeniable good" and "Not every immigrant is a criminal rapist" without being sent before the House of UnAmerican Activities.

Side Track over==>

The "Economist" (Monetary Astrologer) ecchos the Ghoul's statement.

The ready made liar, as images of labour strikes and bread lines appear, says that there has never been economic deregulation in Argentina.

A BOLD FACE LIE, Anyone living in reality can discredit.

So often we are forced to put up with stories about right wing dictators in the Global South who are willing to give the people "Tough Love" and make "harsh decisions", as if everyone living south of the United States is a child who needs a parent to spank them.

But all of these stories are deliberately divorced from any reality or history that has actually happened in the Global South.

The Financial Astrologer, those German Ghouls propped up to sell out his people, likely for more money than the Union leadership who are so desperately trying to prevent this catastrophe, make in a years worth of Union dues, happens to have been Undersecretary of Finance (keynesian make-work for pathological exploiters) in a previous government.

Let's see what policies his party spearheaded when it was power.

What kind of blind Utopianism has he spearheaded that lead Argentina down such a decline.

The First result for his name is some kind of Think tank he directs. There doesn't appear to be a wikipedia article on him so we'll go with this as our first insight.

To save you all some scrolling all you need to know is that this man is currently the "independent Director" of Banco Macro, which is the

"the second largest domestically-owned private bank in Argentina, and the sixth-largest by deposits and lending"

Naturally is a graduate of Applied Capitalist Thought from a Prestigious University in Argentina so this man has always been a professional profiteer, but what about his tenure in government?

Surely directing a massive bank didn't interfere with his duties, carrying out the Marxist agenda of the pre-Milei Argentine government?

Westerners have created in their mind this idea of the whole of Latin America socialist dystopias that haven't learned about the greatness of the Free market.

When in reality the FIRST PLACE that those PSYCHO CHICAGO BOYS set up a government was in Latin America under the auspices of a military dictatorship funded by the United States.

None of this is new, none of this has worked, and yet the show continues. The slow dissent is lovingly guided by a friendly voice.

[workersolidarity]

Watch "Hazardous waste expert tells Tucker Ohio town was 'nuked'" on YouTube

Don't pay attention to the messenger, in this case, listen to the guest's message

What happened in East Palestine, Ohio is the tragic logic of the market at its worst.

The systemic neglect of critical infrastructure through Neoliberal austerity, deregulatory dogma and an obsessive drive for commerce over any concerns for human lives has led to a disaster of what must seem like biblical proportions to the residents of East Palestine.

After the train derailment on February 3rd spilled tens if not hundreds of thousands of gallons of Vinyl Chloride into the community of East Palestine, officials chose an unthinkable solution with the goal of returning commerce to the rail line as quickly as possible.

On February 6th, after evacuating everyone within a 2 mile radius of East Palestine, authorities released the rest of the chemicals into a ditch and burned them off into the air. Enormous plumes of toxic black smoke that could be seen from space rained chemical fallout over countless miles of Ohio neighborhoods and farmland as the smoke drifted into neighboring states.

As quickly as Federal and State authorities could clear the tracks and return commerce to the rail line, the evacuated residents were given the all clear to return to their homes and lives.

Authorities claim to be diverting clean water from outside town into the drinking water of the residents and that no danger persists.

Yet, within hours of the burn off, many miles away, people claim to have felt effects from chemicals in the air and people felt burning in their eyes and lungs. Then animals and fish began acting strangely and dying off.

Now, nearly two weeks on, videos are surfacing of what appears to be a toxic chemical sludge that has settled at the bottom of local streams (and presumably into the ground as well) that when disturbed, causes a noxious smell and an obvious sheen of chemical slick rises to the surface of the water.

As can be seen in a video clip in this news report:

And to top it all off, the Biden Administration refuses to bring FEMA into Ohio to help residents because this doesn't fall neatly into the category of natural disaster, a choice they are making.

This disaster didn't happen by chance. It's a byproduct of Market logic over everything. It is a direct result of a ruling Capitalist Class that thinks nothing of bombing an entire region of their own country with deadly chemicals, known carcinogens, in order to avoid any significant loss in profits for a handful of giant Corporations who give dictates to the government.

[collapsedsquid]

whenever you get some sort of deregulatory battle you get people who go "you know the rich are manipulating this regulation for their own ends, this shows how regulation is always bad." That's why I always conclude that we need to de-regulate murder.

[trutown-the-bard]

A recent Netflix documentary series called Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street by Emmy Award–winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger tells the story of the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

Besides the infamous character mentioned in its title, the series' other villain is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which received complaints about Bernie Madoff starting in the early 1990s, and yet, it not only failed to catch him but helped enable his fraud. During one investigation, all SEC investigators had to do was check an account number to verify trades had actually occurred, which they hadn't, of course, because all of Madoff's trades were fake.

The Netflix series acknowledges that the SEC was complicit in Madoff's scam and that he could have been caught if one investigator assigned to the case had done about 30 minutes of checking. But then it also blames deregulation and free market capitalism for making the fraud possible.

"Resources that had been in New York City, on Wall Street's doorstep, devoted to white-collar crime, to fraud, were being steered away [from Wall Street]," says Henriques of the George W. Bush administration era during which Madoff's operation reached its peak. "For the SEC, this was an exacerbation of an existing problem, as a result of a deregulatory campaign that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980."

Instead of making lazy allusions to the evils of free market capitalism, to better understand the lessons of the Madoff saga, director Joe Berlinger should have consulted the work of the free market economist George Stigler, who won the Nobel Prize in part for his work on "regulatory capture." 

 In a 1971 paper, "The Theory of Economic Regulation," Stigler argues that while many people believe that "regulation is instituted primarily for the protection and benefit of the public," in fact, it mainly serves the purposes of the largest companies being regulated, which form a symbiotic relationship with their regulatory overseers.

"My thesis is that the industry body in the long run must act by and for the industry," said Stigler in a 1971 speech before the American Enterprise Institute. "The political realities of life dictate that the regulatory bodies become affiliated with and help in what it believes to be the necessary conditions for the survival of its industry." 

Stigler's essay focuses mainly on how regulators help existing companies by protecting them from competition, but his theory can also be used to better understand the SEC's failure to catch Madoff. In a 1972 essay, Stigler writes that "the regulating agency must eventually become the agency of the regulated industry…. each needs the other." That's because the career lawyers at the SEC making the decisions have much more to gain personally from having a positive relationship with big industry players than antagonizing them.

What if Harry Markopolos' warnings hadn't been filtered through the SEC? The average person might be better equipped to spot a con man than we give him credit for. But the myth that regulators are primarily motivated to protect the interests of the public causes many to suspend their better judgment. 

"The individual consumer, if he is not hampered, is in general capable of a large measure of self-defense against fraud, mishaps, bad luck, and the like," said Stigler in his 1971 speech. "Not all consumers are intellectually competent and well-informed, but most consumers know how to build up defenses against the many vicissitudes that lie in real life. And it is primarily because we have socially so often hampered these effects that we have injured the consumer."

The big takeaway from Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is that regulators unwittingly facilitated his fraud, just as they may have done with Sam Bankman-Fried and his alleged con. As you watch the Netflix series, think about whether we should really be giving these regulators more time or power. Are they helping us or themselves?

[starborncthulhu]

With all these FDA recalls, I wonder why they are all happening right now?

Its almost like a few years of deregulatory business practices have caused severe cases of food and pharmaceutical poisoning.

[mariacallous]

On Friday, June 24th, Justice Clarence Thomas got something he’s sought his entire adult life: recognition. Writing in support of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Thomas recommended that the Court, as a next move, strike down a half century’s worth of “demonstrably erroneous” precedents establishing the right to contraception, the right to same-sex sexual conduct, and the right to same-sex marriage. On television and across the Internet, commentators took notice.

Insiders have long known that Thomas is the right’s pacesetter on the Court, laying out positions that initially seem extreme yet eventually get adopted. For years, Thomas pulled Justice Antonin Scalia—even, on occasion, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice William Rehnquist—to the right on issues of crime and punishment. His opinions on campaign finance, once seen as recklessly deregulatory, now command a majority. In 1997, Thomas signalled his belief that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms, a fringe position that the Court would come to accept, eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller. Even Thomas’s extraordinary claims, in a concurring opinion three years ago, about the racist foundations of abortion and birth control, found their way into a footnote in the Court’s recent abortion decision.

Despite this track record of stealth and success, liberals have often dismissed Thomas as stupid or a sellout, a patsy and a puppet, the Justice who cannot speak. That era is over. Yet Thomas’s significance far outstrips his captaincy of the Court’s war on liberalism. The most powerful Black man in America, Thomas is also our most symptomatic public intellectual, setting out a terrifying vision of race, rights, and violence that’s fast becoming a description of everyday life. It’s no longer a matter of Clarence Thomas’s Court. Increasingly, it’s Clarence Thomas’s America.

Like so much else in this country, the largeness of Thomas’s vision hinges on the smallest of claims: two clauses, all of thirty-eight words, in the second sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment. One is the due-process clause, which Thomas believes has been misread. In Thomas’s view, that misreading is a stain on the nation—and the reason for its fall.

The due-process clause, which prohibits the state from depriving anyone of “life, liberty, or property, without the due process of the law,” is the basis for the constitutional right to contraception, same-sex sexual conduct, same-sex marriage, and, until a few weeks ago, abortion. To some, it might seem strange that the clause contains an affirmative right to anything. Doesn’t it simply require that the state declare the law, set out a punishment for violating the law, charge a suspect for its violation, try him in court, and so on? That, as it happens, is Thomas’s view.

But there’s a second, more expansive, interpretation of the clause, which holds that certain rights are so intrinsic to “liberty,” so fundamental to what it means to be free, that they may never be abridged without a vital reason. It’s not enough for the state to dot its “i”s and cross its “t”s before it takes those rights away. The state should not take them away at all—unless it must. Among those rights is privacy, from which derive the rights to contraception and so on.

Most liberals and conservatives accept some version of this second interpretation—which is called “substantive due process”—but argue over which rights it protects. Liberals say abortion; conservatives say guns. Thomas rejects the entire idea of substantive due process. In his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Thomas calls substantive due process an “oxymoron” and a “legal fiction.” The due-process clause “guarantees process” only. Because it “does not secure any substantive rights,” he writes, “it does not secure a right to abortion.” The same goes for birth control, same-sex sexual conduct, and gay marriage.

Thomas’s argument against substantive due process is more than doctrinal. It’s political. In a speech before the Federalist Society and the Manhattan Institute which he gave in his second year on the Court, Thomas linked a broad reading of the due-process clause, with its ever-expanding list of “unenumerated” rights, to a liberal “rights revolution” that has undermined traditional authority and generated a culture of permissiveness and passivity. That revolution, which began with the New Deal and peaked in the nineteen-sixties, established the welfare state, weakened criminal law, and promulgated sexual freedom. The result has been personal dissipation and widespread disorder. Workers lose their incentive to labor. Men abandon wives and children. Criminals roam and rule the streets.

Today, the left ties itself into knots over whether it should defend sexual minorities, dismantle the carceral state, or fight for social democracy. For Thomas, these are three fronts of the same war. To reverse the downward spiral of social decadence and patriarchal decay, conservatives must undo the liberal culture of rights, starting with the unenumerated rights of substantive due process.

Thomas has never made a secret of his belief that the rights revolution hit Black people especially hard, destroying the Black patriarch whom Black women, children, and communities need for protection and instruction. “The salvation of our race,” he declared in 1985, depends upon “the strength and the will of black men.” But welfare “takes your manhood away,” as his grandfather told him. Sexual freedom takes husbands and fathers away, he told the students at a Black college in Savannah. Liberal criminal-justice policies take sons and brothers away: “The people who will suffer from our lofty pronouncements,” he writes in a dissent from a liberal Court opinion defending the rights of gang members, are those who live in Black neighborhoods. Because of their vulnerable position in American society, Black people have the greatest need of the stern patriarchal authority from which self-discipline and communal strength derive. Black fathers must become “the lion of children’s safety” and “the sheep of their peace.”

If misreading the due-process clause has caused the dissolution of Black men, another part of the Fourteenth Amendment offers their rehabilitation. For Thomas, the privileges-or-immunities clause, an obscure and mostly discarded provision that he has sought to resurrect for decades, promises the restoration of both his community and the country.

The privileges-or-immunities clause has its roots in the battle over slavery and emancipation. Before the Civil War, many Americans, particularly Southern slaveholders, argued that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government, leaving the states free to deny basic rights like the freedom of speech. With the privileges-or-immunities clause, which declares that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the United States,” the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment hoped to abolish the distinction between the rights of national and state citizenship. From now on, all Americans, especially Black Americans, would enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms—“privileges or immunities”—which would be secured by the federal government. “No general assertion of human rights can be of any practical value,” Frederick Douglass declared, while “there remains such an idea as the right of each State to control its own local affairs.”

A persuasive argument, but it was never accepted. In a series of cases during Reconstruction and its aftermath, the Court gutted the meaning of the privileges-or-immunities clause, forcing later activists and lawyers to rely upon the equal-protection clause and the due-process clause to advance the claims of Black people, women, and queer people. Thomas believes that this was a crucial mistake, and that the Court’s precedents on the privileges-or-immunities clause should be revisited. The clause “gives us a foundation for interpreting not only cases involving race,” he writes, “but the entire Constitution and its scheme of protecting rights.”

Lest we think that Thomas imagines anything like the rights that contemporary liberals defend, he made clear, in Saenz v. Roe (1999), that his interpretation of the privileges-or-immunities clause would protect only a narrow range of rights. Abortion is not one of them; neither is same-sex marriage. But he does include the right to bear arms, which he views as the right that precedes all others. Citing Justice Joseph Story, Thomas calls the right to bear arms “the palladium of the liberties of a republic.”

Liberals often claim that there is something hypocritical, if not perverse, about conservatives enshrining the right to bear arms without enshrining the right to abortion. Conservatives have an easy response: one right is found in the Constitution, both as tradition and text; the other is not. That’s what Justice Samuel Alito argues in Dobbs and in his concurrence, the day before, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., et al. v. Bruen, which struck down part of New York’s concealed-carry law.

Bodily autonomy is so foundational to contemporary understandings of freedom, however, that it’s hard to imagine a reason for denying it to women other than the fact that they are women. The fetish for guns, meanwhile, can seem like little more than a transposition of America’s white settler past onto its white suburban present, a reading Alito suggests at the end of his concurrence in Bruen:

In 1791, when the Second Amendment was adopted, there were no police departments, and many families lived alone on isolated farms or on the frontiers. If these people were attacked, they were on their own. . . . Today, unfortunately, many Americans have good reason to fear that they will be victimized if they are unable to protect themselves. And today, no less than in 1791, the Second Amendment guarantees their right to do so.

It’s worth comparing this passage with Thomas’s reading of the right to bear arms. Alito argues that the Second Amendment can be enforced, over and above state law, because of the due-process clause. Thomas roots his justification in the privileges-or-immunities clause, and in its backstory of slavery and abolition. Not only does that free Thomas from Alito’s white frontiersmen of yore but it also allows him to conjure the history of Black slaves arming themselves against their masters, and of Black freedmen protecting their families during Jim Crow. In his concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), a landmark guns case, he concludes with this resonant image:

One man [in 1919] recalled the night during his childhood when his father stood armed at a jail until morning to ward off lynchers. . . . The experience left him with a sense, “not ‘of powerlessness, but of the “possibilities of salvation” ’ ” that came from standing up to intimidation.

Thomas tells some of this history in Bruen. He dedicates a paragraph to the horror Chief Justice Roger Taney expressed—in the infamous Dred Scott decision declaring that Black people, enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States—at the prospect of Black citizens having the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Mocked and misunderstood on Twitter, the paragraph reprises a longer story, which Thomas narrates in McDonald, of how terrified whites were of Black slave revolts in antebellum America. Citing the work of Herbert Aptheker, the Communist author of a pioneering history of slave rebellions, Thomas notes that white fears of Black revolt would be “difficult to overstate.” Those fears “peaked” during Reconstruction, to which Thomas devotes even more attention in his McDonald and Bruen opinions.

If there is any rational basis to the Court’s claim that people have the right to carry guns because they fear violence at the hands of a generalized other, it is in Thomas’s account of Black arms and Black history. Of the four pro-gun opinions in Bruen, Thomas’s is the only one in which we find an empirical example of a people’s justifiable need for armed self-defense in the face of violent enemies and government indifference. “Seeing that government was inadequately protecting them” under Jim Crow, he writes, Black people took up arms “to defend themselves” against white terrorists. The only history that can make sense of the Court’s position on guns, in other words, is that of race war.

In his second year on the Court, Thomas said that he was “proudly and unapologetically irrelevant and anachronistic.” Almost thirty years later, he has become what conservatives of every era seek to be: anachronistic and relevant.

Under Thomas’s aegis, the Court now assumes a society of extraordinary violence and minimal liberty, with no hope of the state being able to provide security to its citizens. In his Bruen concurrence, Alito extends Thomas’s history of Reconstruction to all modern America: “Many people face a serious risk of lethal violence when they venture outside their homes.” Like the Black citizens of Reconstruction, he argues, few of us should expect the police to protect us. “The police cannot disarm every person who acquires a gun for use in criminal activity,” Alito writes, “nor can they provide bodyguard protection for [New York] State’s nearly 20 million residents.”

Once upon a time, Alito’s claims of systemic danger and state incapacity would have been dismissed as the rantings of a mountain survivalist. But, after decades of mass shootings, his assertion that the cops can’t protect you reads as a corollary to the left’s warning that the cops won’t protect you. What makes both beliefs plausible is the failed state that America has become, with no small amount of help from Thomas, the right-wing Court, and elected officials from both parties.

Today’s felt absence of physical security is the culmination of a decades-long war against social welfare. In the face of a state that won’t do anything about climate change, economic inequality, personal debt, voting rights, and women’s rights, it’s no wonder that an increasing portion of the population, across all races, genders, and beliefs, have determined that the best way to protect themselves, and their families, is by getting a gun. A society with no rights, no freedoms, except for those you claim yourself—this was always Thomas’s vision of the world. Now, for many Americans, it is the only one available. ♦

[notwiselybuttoowell]

If Liz Truss believes wholeheartedly in one thing, it’s that nobody likes being told what to do. People don’t want to be nagged about their weight, or nudged to eat less and move more. They don’t want to be told what they can say on social media. And above all, businesses want to be free to make piles and piles of money, unhindered by regulation and red tape and what David Cameron famously called “green crap”. But when she said she didn’t mind making herself unpopular in the process of unleashing all that growth, she didn’t mean with the people doing the growing.

What to make, then, of the fact that this week more than 100 big corporate names from Ikea to Amazon, Coco-Cola and Sky signed an open letter urging the government not to backtrack on net zero, following hints that Truss might be considering doing exactly that? This wasn’t in the script, either for the deregulatory right or arguably that part of the left convinced that capitalism loves nothing more than warming its rapacious hands over a bonfire of crackling red tape, while watching the planet burn. What, exactly, is going on?

For some, like a water industry enduring its driest summer in 30 years, the climate crisis already represents a direct threat to their operations; others, like renewable energy providers, have built their businesses around decarbonisation. But what has really changed, following the conflict in Ukraine, is that big business is now significantly more worried about rocketing fossil fuel prices. Cheap, secure, renewable energy looks increasingly key to their ability to keep turning a profit.

That said, it would be naive to imagine that big polluters aren’t already lobbying this new government to water down some net zero policies, or that plenty of companies didn’t have tweaks they’d like to make. But there is a surprisingly big swathe of business that would be rattled by a sudden change of direction now.

The letter was organised by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), whose recent poll of 700 senior business leaders found nearly 70% already had their own company net zero plans (some doubtless more convincing than others, but that’s another column) and 80% had earmarked funding. Telling them at this late stage that actually they needn’t have bothered spending the money seems more exasperating than liberating.

The same is true of scrapping the sugar tax now, after companies have already been through the pain barrier of reformulating snacks and fizzy drinks to avoid the tax. Sometimes red tape isn’t just about protecting the public but creating stable and predictable conditions in which to make money, plus a level playing field of obligations where well-run companies aren’t undercut by bad ones or made to feel like suckers. Almost three-quarters of respondents to the CISL poll, tellingly, said that far from being a drag, regulation mattered to their company’s business model.

If even Amazon is telling you you're behaving irresponsibly, you know you've gone too far.

[azspot]

But the real problem is that this gift to a handful of extremely wealthy people will blind everyone as to how we got here. The first premise of this action—that small businesses with over $250,000 in the bank shouldn’t bear the cost of a bank failure—is rendered irrelevant with just the simplest understanding of risk management. The second premise, that regulators must invoke a systemic risk exception to preserve depositors, is also laughable, considering that SVB expressly lobbied to have the systemic risk label taken off of their bank, and is now facing the consequences. Members of Congress—from both parties—agreed to do so, and bank officials used that deregulatory freedom to abuse the trust of their customers.

The Silicon Valley Bank Bailout Didn’t Need to Happen

[scott67michaels]

Don't like what Biden says? Here's few rants Trump had over the years;

On the night that the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump, he delivered a two-hour campaign rally speech that took a detour — into the bathroom. His long riff about plumbing, household appliances and lightbulbs had the crowd in Battle Creek, Mich., cheering and laughing along.

"I say, 'Why do I always look so orange?' You know why: because of the new light," Trump said in a complaint about energy-efficient lightbulbs. "They're terrible. You look terrible. They cost you many, many times more. Like four or five times more."

Trump has long railed against clean-energy-producing wind turbines, but recently he has added lightbulbs and other household items to his repertoire. It's an unusual political rallying cry, but it's one that fits with Trump's deregulatory agenda.

If you like your lightbulbs, you can keep your lightbulbs! The Obama Admin tried to limit Americans to buying more-expensive LED bulbs for their homes—but thanks to President @realdonaldtrump go ahead and decorate your house with whatever lights you want.

The tweet inaccurately blamed the standards on the Obama administration. In reality, they date back to Republican President George W. Bush's time in office. All of Trump's complaints relate to efficiency standards phased in over many years and multiple administrations.

"Remember the dishwasher, you'd press it. Boom — there'd be like an explosion. Five minutes later, you open it up, the steam pours out," Trump said reminiscing about dishwashers that used more energy and water to wash and dry dishes. "Now you press it 12 times. The women tell me, again. They give you like four drops of water."

Setting aside his assumption that women are the ones who do dishes, Trump also shared his thoughts on faucets and shower heads. He even turned "toilets" into a call-and-response line, asking the crowd, "What goes with a sink and a shower?"

Pantomiming a flushing motion, Trump brought his frustrations with low-flow toilets to life. "Ten times right, 10 times. Bah bah," Trump said, before pointing at some poor soul in the crowd and accusing him of requiring a lot of flushes. "Not me, of course. Not me. But you. Him."

Former President Donald Trump delivered a speech at a rally in Summerville, S.C., on Monday, saying that windmills are driving whales "crazy” and causing environmental damage.

“There has only been, listen to this, one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years,” he said. “But on the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up onshore.”

Trump went on to say he “saw it this weekend,” adding three whales “came up.”

“You wouldn’t see it once a year. Now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think a little batty.”

I truthfully don't care for either one, however, beings that it IS going to be one of them in the Whitehouse, I prefer Trump over Biden

[newstfionline]

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Journalism’s biggest problem (The Hill) It is rare when university research has application in the real world. But a highly relevant study out of Syracuse University should be mandatory reading for executives in the journalism industry, not to mention Americans who consume news. The researchers, led by Syracuse professor Lars Willnat, gathered survey data from 1,600 journalists across the country. The result that seemed to draw the most attention was that only 3.4 percent of American journalists say they are Republicans, while 36.4 percent say they are Democrats. Right-leaning media outlets were quick to point out this imbalance. This raises the question of whether a wide range of perspectives can be found in the news agendas being paraded in front of news consumers. Fewer moderate or right-of-center working journalists also likely means search committees tend to leave out prospective hires who don’t share accepted newsroom views, further squeezing out the viewpoint diversity needed in media organizations. It is probably no coincidence that media credibility has noticeably declined as newsrooms have lost political balance. Audiences just can’t trust news outlets that are perceived as biased and ideologically unbalanced.

Some Americans have become saddled with credit card debt as rent and everyday prices remain high (AP) While the U.S. economy is broadly healthy, pockets of Americans have run through their savings and run up their credit card balances after battling inflation for more than two years. Experts worry that members of these groups—mostly lower- and middle-income Americans, who tend to be renters—are falling behind on their debts and could face further deterioration of their financial health in the year ahead, particularly those who have recently resumed paying off student loans. “The U.S. economy is currently performing better than most forecasters expected a year ago, thanks in large part to a resilient consumer,” wrote Shernette McLoud, an economist with TD Economics, in a report issued Wednesday. “However, more recently that spending is increasingly being financed by credit cards.”

The death toll from Chile’s wildfires reaches 131, and more than 300 people are missing (AP) The death toll from wildfires that ravaged central Chile for several days increased to 131 on Tuesday, and more than 300 people were still missing as the blazes appeared to be burning themselves out. The fires in Valparaiso are said to be Chile’s deadliest disaster since an earthquake in 2010. Officials have suggested that some could have been intentionally set.

Milei's controversial economic reforms stalled in Argentine Congress (AFP) Argentine President Javier Milei's controversial deregulatory reforms faced a major setback in parliament when the package was prevented from advancing and sent back for a rewrite, legislators said. Initially containing 660 provisions covering the economy, trade, culture, criminal law, even football clubs, the bill has since been whittled down to around 300 articles.

Spanish farmers blockade roads for second day against EU policies (Reuters) Spanish farmers blocked major highways with their tractors for a second day and disrupted access to port terminals as anger spreads in Europe’s countryside against high costs, bureaucracy and competition from non-EU countries. Fed up by the market situation and encouraged by similar protests in other European countries, Spanish farmers took their tractors out of their barns on Tuesday, two days ahead of protests scheduled by the country’s main farmers associations. Around a dozen major highways were blocked on Tuesday morning all over the country, traffic authorities said.

Lufthansa strike hits air travel as German disruption mounts (Reuters) Ground staff at German airline Lufthansa walked out at major airports on Wednesday, raising the pressure in wage talks and piling misery on travellers in Europe’s biggest economy already hit by strikes on railways and public transport. Some 100,000 passengers will be affected by the industrial action. he Verdi union targeted the Frankfurt and Munich airports, where Lufthansa says only 10%-20% of flights will operate, as well as Berlin, Hamburg and Duesseldorf.

Russian Strikes Hit Ukrainian Cities at a Tense Time for Kyiv (NYT) Missiles streaked into Kyiv early Wednesday in a Russian attack that killed at least five people, according to local officials, jolted residents awake with air alarms and explosions, and ignited a fire that sent plumes of smoke billowing over the Ukrainian capital. The barrage, which directed missiles and drones at cities across the country, coincided with a moment of heightened uncertainty for Ukraine. Russian forces are pressing assaults in towns and villages along the front, American aid is in doubt, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is preparing for what he has hinted will be a major shake-up in his government and the army’s leadership. Since the end of last year, Russia has stepped up its large-scale aerial bombardments in a bid to exploit dwindling supplies of critical Western air defense munitions and inflict maximum damage.

Earthquake survivors in Turkey struggle to rebuild their lives one year on (CNN) Five days after a devastating earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria last year, the world witnessed a miracle: Sezai Karabas and his 6-year-old daughter Sengul were pulled out of the rubble of his collapsed apartment block in Gaziantep province without a scratch. He may have looked like the luckiest man on earth, but he didn’t feel that way. His wife Rukiye and 4-year-old son Mehmet had died. “Even we don’t know how we survived,” Karabas said. As he tried to explain his miraculous survival to CNN, Sengul played with her cousin atop the partially cleared rubble of their former home in the city of Islahiye. “It was cold, we had no food, or water, but God gave us strength. We didn’t feel hunger, thirst or exhaustion even for a minute.” The initial earthquake on February 6 was 7.8 in magnitude; a second, 7.5 magnitude quake came hours later. The shaking lasted for only seconds but, a year on, it’s clear the impact will be felt for generations. According to official figures, 14 million people in Turkey were impacted by the earthquake. More than 850,000 housing units were either destroyed or badly damaged. Even a year later, there are at least 145 people missing, 38 of whom are children, causing continued anguish for their families.

Pakistan stages another unfair election (Washington Post) History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. A bit more than a half decade ago, Pakistan staged national elections in a cloud of controversy. The eventual winner was boosted by the tacit support of the South Asian republic’s long-meddling military, which put its thumb on the scales in favor of its chosen candidate. The opposition saw its chief leaders sidelined on criminal charges that their supporters claimed were trumped up. They decried the result as “rigged.” Fast forward to this week, as Pakistan holds its latest general election on Thursday. A similar dynamic prevails, though the cast of characters has been flipped. Former prime minister Imran Khan, who surged to victory in 2018, languishes in prison on a slew of charges that make him ineligible to contest the election himself. Meanwhile, three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif stands a strong chance of winning a fourth mandate. The corruption cases that kept him out of the running in 2018—and sent him into self-imposed exile the following year—have been waved away by military authorities now more amenable to his return. The reversal of fortunes is part of the sad seesaw of Pakistani democracy, forever tilting through crises and interruptions. According to a new Gallup survey, 7 in 10 Pakistanis “lack confidence in the honesty of their elections.”

Foreign investors migrating from China to India (Bloomberg) A momentous shift is under way in global markets as investors pull billions of dollars from China’s sputtering economy, two decades after betting on the country as the world’s biggest growth story. Much of that cash is now heading for India, with Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley endorsing the South Asian nation as the prime investment destination for the next decade. That momentum is triggering a gold rush. The $62 billion hedge fund Marshall Wace has positioned India as its biggest net long bet after the US in its flagship hedge fund. Even Japan’s traditionally conservative retail investors are embracing India and paring exposure to China.

What Israeli Soldiers’ Videos Reveal: Cheering Destruction and Mocking Gazans (NYT) An Israeli soldier gives a thumbs up to the camera as he drives a bulldozer down a street in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, pushing a battered car toward a half-collapsed building. “I stopped counting how many neighborhoods I’ve erased,” the caption reads on the video posted to his personal TikTok, accompanied by a militaristic anthem. Since Israel’s invasion in October, soldiers have shared videos from Gaza on social media, offering a rare, unsanctioned look at operations on the ground. Some have been viewed by small circles of people; others have reached tens of thousands. The New York Times reviewed hundreds of these videos. Some show unremarkable parts of a soldier’s life—eating, hanging out or sending messages to loved ones back home. Others capture soldiers vandalizing local shops and school classrooms, making derogatory comments about Palestinians, bulldozing what appear to be civilian areas and calling for the building of Israeli settlements in Gaza, an inflammatory idea that is promoted by some far-right Israeli politicians.

Inside A Gaza Shelter, The Catastrophe Of War (Daraj/Lebanon) At the heart of southern Gaza, about 775 displaced families squeezed in a makeshift shelter amid rapidly deteriorated conditions. The shelter is one of many camps set up recently to house the growing number of displaced families who fled their homes during Israel’s war on Gaza. Tents are overcrowded, with an average of nine people in each one, but some host up to 20 squeezed together. That’s the case of Nourhan Yassin, a 22-year-old mother of two, who is living in a tent along with her husband’s family and other relatives. Life in the tent is extremely difficult especially in the cold winter. Yassin’s family sleeps on the ground, except for her husband’s aged parents who use two blankets. Yassin is concerned about her two children who are sick “because of this cold weather”. Clean water is no longer available in much of Gaza since Israel shut down pipelines that deliver water to the besieged strip at the start of the war. Yassin said her two children didn’t bathe for a long time. “The bathroom is very far from the tent, so I just wiped them with a cloth,” she said. Yassin sought help for her children, but the only response she received was: “We cannot provide anything.” Obtaining milk for her children is her daily concern—the same as for thousands of war-weary mothers in devastated Gaza. UNICEF has warned about the deteriorated nutrition of more than 135,000 children aged two or younger.