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The Guardian tells us that austerity has meant that we're seeing the stunting of British children again: Children raised under UK austerity shorter than European peers, study findsAverage height of boys and girls aged five has slipped due to poor diet and NHS cuts, experts sayThe average height of British children has risen slightly. British children who grew up during the years of austerity are shorter than their peers in Bulgaria, Montenegro and Lithuania, a study has found.In 1985, British boys and girls ranked 69 out of 200 countries for average height aged five. At the time they were on average 111.4cm and 111cm tall respectively.Now, British boys are 102nd and girls 96th, with the average five-year-old boy measuring 112.5cm and the average girl, 111.7cm. In Bulgaria, the average height for a five-year-old boy is 121cm and a girl, 118cm.See? That's a rise in height. Not a fall, a rise, in the height of British children.And now the poltroonery.Experts have said a poor national diet and cuts to the NHS are to blame.What, cuts to the NHS make kids grow taller? Really? said Henry Dimbleby, the former government food adviserWell, at least we have been given the usual sign that the rest of this is nonsense.The actual paper is here. And so to the truly interesting part:But they have also pointed out that height is a strong indicator of general living conditions, including illness and infection, stress, poverty and sleep quality."They have fallen by 30 places, which is pretty startling," said Prof Tim Cole, an expert in child growth rates at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London. "The question is, why?"OK, so British children aren't shorter, they're taller. But if we rank kiddies by country then British children have fallen 30 places in such a ranking. A ranking of 200 countries by the way.So, what has happened? The most glorious thing, the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of our entire species. This past 40 and 50 years has indeed been exactly that, as idiot socialism died off and free market capitalism roamed the globe. Meaning that children in formerly poor countries are now in places not so poor. Those children are also now, as ours have for a century, getting three squares and some milk a day and are now growing up big and tall. As the actual paper in Nature points out. And laments isn't happening in those areas like sub-Saharan Africa where this joy is not, as yet, happening.Globalisation means kids formerly so poor they were stunned from hunger grow up tall now. And this gets turned into a whine about the NHS? Poltroons, there's no other explanation for it.Except Dimbleby, of course. No one's going to accuse him of understanding this enough to twist it.

From Theodore Zeldin's "The French" (1983):Almost one in every six families has access to a second residenceTranslate that into British, we've some 25 million households, there should be 4.25 million second homes. According to George Monbiot we have rather fewer:Before the pandemic, government figures show, 772,000 households in England had second homes. Of these, 495,000 were in the UK. The actual number of second homes is higher, as some households have more than one; my rough estimate is a little over 550,000.We are, thus, short some 3.75 million second homes. If we wish to be like the French that is. This is more than just snark - tho' snark is always fun. The important thing to understand about housing across cultures is that each is a technology. A machine for living in. And those cultures, technologies, which have people living in dense urban cores, in apartments, also have the wide ring of summer places surrounding them. This is true - from personal experience of people here - for Germany, of the Czech lands, or Russia (to the point that one of us has endured a lecture from a Soviet car factory manager on the importance of providing dachas for the workers. And it was important, growing your own was the only way you'd get vitamins, let alone vegetables.) No, an allotment is not the same thing - it is illegal to even think about staying overnight on an allotment. All these country places will have at least a shack with bunks.The Southern European towns tend not to have gardens attached even to the houses, let alone the flats. But they have different inheritance practices (real property must, by law, be divided equally among all kids) and are also several generations closer to the land. At least a part share in Granny's hovel out in the country is near universally available.Those stack-a-prole worker flats that our UK urban planners think we should all live in are only part of that whole housing technology. By observation that works only with that addition of the second place in pulchra agris. The British solution to the same idea, that housing technology as a whole, has been the des res with front and back garden and on that quarter acre plot of land. Exactly the thing that is now illegal to build given required densities of up to 30 dwellings per hectare.They're technologies. Suburbs of housing with gardens, or flats with second houses. They're integrated technologies, things where you need both parts to make them work. Our British planners have decided to go off half-cocked with only half of either technology. They'll allow the house but not the garden, the flat but not the shack in the country.We might have mentioned before that we really don't like planners or planning. This is one of the reasons why - the planners we actually get are ignorant.

In his press conference with President Zelensky on Tuesday evening, President Biden made one statement that was both entirely true, and is the potential basis for a new U.S. approach to the conflict in Ukraine. He said that Ukraine has already won a great victory in the war — by defeating the initial Russian plan to subjugate the whole of Ukraine.If the Biden administration and Washington establishment could recognize the implications of this, they could craft a new narrative that would allow them, and the Ukrainian government, to present a compromise peace as a Ukrainian victory (albeit a qualified one) and a Russian defeat — though not a complete one.In fact, the Ukrainian victory in 2022 was even greater than that. As things stand today, by preserving the independence and Western orientation of 80 percent of former Soviet Ukraine, the Ukrainian forces, with Western help, have reversed more than 300 years of history during which, in one way or another, Ukraine has been ruled from Russia.As the distinguished Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy told the Quincy Institute on Tuesday, this achievement echoes that of the Finns during the Second World War, when their heroic resistance convinced Stalin that conquering the whole of Finland and turning it into a Communist state would be more trouble than it was worth. Finland was therefore the only part of the former Russian empire that was not incorporated into the Soviet Union or turned into a Communist client state.Given the strength and unity of Ukrainian nationalism that this war has demonstrated, it is impossible to imagine that the whole of Ukraine could ever again be ruled for long by Moscow. However, Finnish survival as a democratic state did come at a price. Finland had to surrender a portion of its territory (including the historic city of Vyborg) and sign a treaty of neutrality. It should be obvious though that this was a vastly preferable alternative to sharing the fate of Poland, let alone the Baltic States.In his own remarks to the press conference, President Zelensky categorically ruled out any cession of territory to Russia. Indeed it is very hard to imagine any Ukrainian government formally and legally agreeing to Russian annexation. On the other hand, bowing to military reality and the advice of his military commanders, President Zelensky has now ordered the Ukrainian army to go on the defensive and fortify its existing positions.If this remains Ukrainian strategy, then by default the territory now held by Russia will remain under de facto Russian control; and given the disproportion of forces and resources between Ukraine and Russia, it is very difficult to see how a future Ukrainian offensive would succeed any more than this year's has done. Even if the Biden administration does persuade the Republicans in Congress to agree to another massive aid package for Ukraine, can anyone seriously think that future administrations will be able to procure such U.S. aid next year, and the year after that, indefinitely? Yet that is what will be required if Ukraine is to sustain its fight. And when the aid stops, Ukraine will be defeated. The Biden administration and its NATO allies have declared that their goal in the war is to help Ukraine achieve a better position at the negotiating table. But the truth is that Ukraine is unlikely ever to be in a better position than it is today. It could be much worse.Finally, Biden said something that was probably just evasive phrasing, but could be spun into a new diplomatic approach. Asked about NATO membership for Ukraine, he said that "NATO will be part of Ukraine's future." NATO, for better or worse, will be part of all our futures. That does not mean that we will all become members of NATO.

In this 300th year after the birth of Adam Smith, much of the focus has been on Smith's economics, as recorded in The Wealth of Nations (1776). But Smith's ethical thinking was no less profound. Indeed, it was The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that made him famous.Like The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) was a complete break from the thinking of the time. Ethics had until then been widely assumed to be based on God's will, or the clerics' interpretation of it; or something that could be deduced through abstract reason; or even something that could be felt through some 'moral sense' like touch or vision. Smith, by contrast, argued that morality stemmed from our human nature as social beings, and our natural empathy for others. This replaced speculative thinking by scientific method. Smith maintained that by observing ourselves and others, we could discern the principles of ethical behaviour. It was a matter of psychology: how we form judgements about ourselves and others, and the influence of customs, norms and culture upon those judgements. This scientific approach was very much in line with the Scottish Enlightenment, which stemmed in part from the exchange of ideas between Scotland and England following the 1707 Act of Union, and sought to apply observation and scientific method to the study of humankind. Old hierarchies were breaking down, with industrialisation replacing Scotland's old feudal lifestyles, and with religious pluralism, leading to a more active debate on morals and virtues. New thinkers, like Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, were role models for Smith's intellectual radicalism.TMS argues that morality is rooted deeply in human psychology, especially the empathy we have for our fellow humans. By nature we understand, and even share the feelings of others. We want others to like us, and we strive to act so that they do. Even if there is no one else around to see our actions, we are still impelled to act honestly, as if an 'impartial spectator' is judging us at all time, setting the standard by which we judge ourselves and others. Every choice we have to make helps us see that standard more clearly and act according to it more consistently. All of which leads us, as if drawn by an invisible hand, to create a harmonious social order.TMS is primarily a descriptive account of human moral action. It examines how people actually make moral choices, and the pressures on them to do so. But it also provides a guide on how we can cultivate our morality, emphasising the importance of self-reflection and self-improvement.It is no exaggeration to say that TMS laid the foundations for the subsequent development of psychology, sociology and economics, helping establish them as distinct subjects of scientific enquiry. His idea that self-interested actions—wanting to be liked by others, or exchanging things we value less for others' things we value more—had a profound effect on the rise of liberal thought. Smith's approach is just as relevant today as it was in 1759. Through self-reflection, we can make better moral choices. By sharing the feelings of others, we can foster understanding between individuals and groups and create a more peaceful humanity. By understanding our shared interests we can live and work and collaborate together for the mutual benefit of us all, both in economics and in life in general.

Three Baltic foreign ministers gathered earlier this week to make the case for embracing Ukraine's maximalist war aims and pursuing a total defeat of Russia."Ukraine is not fighting for their own freedom; Ukraine is fighting instead of us," Estonian FM Margus Tsahkna proclaimed when he joined the FMs of Latvia,and Lithuania at the hawkish Hudson Institute think tank on Monday to share their perspectives on security issues in Northern Europe.The Baltic officials also argued for the continuous expansion of NATO to deter Vladimir Putin — including eventually allowing Ukraine to join the alliance—and the necessity for "American leadership" in NATO.Yet many of these talking points are detached from actual reality on the ground in Ukraine and will only perpetuate the cycle of violence in Eastern Europe.The three Baltic FMs said that Ukraine's total victory is imperative for peace in Europe and security for NATO. FM Tsahkna's eight-point plan for Ukrainian victory advocates for further sanctions on Russia, utilizing frozen Russian assets for Ukraine's reconstruction, incorporating Ukraine into both the EU and NATO, and relying on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's peace plan as the only way to preserve Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The ministers also agreed that a peace plan without Russia's total defeat would only delay inevitable future invasions from Russia. "Cutting a deal would be great for the autocrats," Latvian foreign minister Krišjānis Kariņš said as he noted that the world is actively observing the war in Ukraine. In the eyes of the Baltic FMs, only a hard power "containment" strategy can deter Vladimir Putin's imperial ambitions. "We will have this Russia problem or challenge for a long time. NATO needs to focus on how to contain them for the next twenty years with strength," Kariņš continued. Peace in Europe depends solely on the threat of force. But Ukraine's prospects of total defeat of Russia are nonexistent. Kyiv has suffered massive losses, as Russia's capture of Avdiivka last month was Russia's most considerable territorial advance since its victory in Bakhmut in May 2023. Furthermore, Ukraine is running out of troops. The Ukrainian military has faced an average personnel shortage of 25% across its brigades and is unlikely to mobilize the required number of men to match Russia's manpower advantage. Draft dodging has become rampant throughout Ukraine as thousands have fled the country. As a result, Ukraine is on the brink of a demographic catastrophe, which would imperil Ukraine's future after the war concludes.Additionally, according to the Baltic FMs, Putin has been the best salesman for NATO expansion, given that both Finland and Sweden ended their many decades of neutrality and joined the alliance. "Russia has erased the idea of a neutral zone. It's either Europe and NATO or Russia," said Kariņš. Therefore, neutrality is not an option for a post-war Ukraine since neutrality serves as a "green light" for Putin to invade as he did in Georgia in 2008. The Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis went as far as to say that "European security architecture will not be whole, secure, or safe without Ukraine."Without a hard power deterrent, countries that have remained neutral, such as Georgia and Moldova, will fall next to Putin's aggression.While the foreign ministers of the Baltic countries made several references to Putin's imperialistic tendencies, they discounted the possibility that NATO expansion fanned the flames of Russian nationalism and expansion. As Dr. Joshua Shifrinson has highlighted, "Russian nationalism and imperialism did not develop in a vacuum." Instead, NATO expansion gave Russian nationalists a cause to rally behind as it reinforced their belief that Moscow's national interests were at stake. The Baltic FMs also insisted that there is no substitute for U.S. leadership. "Without U.S. leadership, I don't think we will have a happy ending," Landsbergis asserted. While the Baltic countries are doing their part by exceeding the 2% spending guideline, the United States must work to defend the "rules-based system" created by the United States following World War II. Russia is actively posing a "direct challenge to U.S. power and authority," as FM Kariņš puts it. Thus, the war in Ukraine is not only a regional problem but a global problem. Additionally, the way of life enjoyed in NATO countries, including in the Baltics, is also under direct threat.Despite NATO's technological and military superiority to Russia, the Baltic FMs worry that Putin expects the West to be politically unprepared. Russia's economy is geared toward war, given that nearly 40% of its budget is spent on defense. Russia's regular army is also expanding, signaling Russia's refusal to end the war effort and its potential to challenge the NATO alliance. Therefore, NATO must get up to speed and unite against the Russian threat. Lastly, the Lithuanian FM proposed that NATO members should restrict themselves when referring to the Russian missile that recently briefly entered Polish airspace. "I'm a proponent of not drawing red lines for ourselves. If we say specifically that we're not going to do A, B, C and make a whole list of things we are not going to do, it sounds like an invitation for Putin to try," Landsbergis said. But adopting an aggressive strategy is not the best path forward for NATO. Expanding the member base will not make its participants safer. Finland and Sweden's ascension into NATO ended many decades of neutrality, under which both countries have become prosperous democracies. It also elongated NATO's border with Russia by 820 miles. Adding more countries to the alliance, including Ukraine, will be more of a liability than an asset.Moreover, an aggressive force posture from NATO spearheaded by the United States is unnecessary to satisfy a "containment" strategy toward Russia. Despite its ability to adapt throughout the war, Russia has still fallen far short of its maximalist aims to subjugate Ukraine as a vassal state. U.S. aims in Europe have historically been counter-hegemonic. The current realities suggest that no European state can establish itself as a regional hegemon. Thus, Russia has little to no hope of defeating NATO through conventional means. There is an alternative option. Washington and Kyiv should pursue a diplomatic path to preserve Ukraine's sovereignty while avoiding a NATO-Russia conflict. There remain reasons for Russia to come to the negotiating table, given that Moscow wants to establish a "demilitarized zone," de facto Western acquiescence to Russian control of Crimea and the Donbas, and a legitimate role to play in Europe's security order. However, Kyiv and its allies should pursue this path urgently, as Ukraine's leverage will inevitably decrease over time.

Yes, yes, some don't think it's happening, others insist that leave be even if it is. But, leaping over those thoughts and to the important point, for we can all see that politics has its head up and the fools are going to do something. It's then a duty to point out that the carbon tax is the cheap way to do it:In 2023, the UK squeezed £52.5bn out of the economy in green taxes, a 4.9pc increase year-on-year, and it is now close to its pre-pandemic high. The revenue raised by green taxes has almost doubled since 2000. Within that, fuel duty is by far the biggest contributor, accounting for nearly £25bn.The UK's Emissions Trading Scheme – which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in energy intensive sectors – now raises close to £6bn. Air passenger duty brings in £3.7bn, and the climate change levy – an environmental tax charged on the energy businesses use – close to £2bn.OK. But what this tells us is that we already more than charge ourselves for climate change. For, UK consumption emissions (no, not merely domestic production, but all consumption) are a shade under 600 million tonnes CO2-e a year. The Stern Review said that the appropriate carbon tax is $80 per tonne CO2-e. $48 billion a year, or £38 billion a year. But we already tax ourselves £52 billion a year for this same thing. Well, OK, allow us just that tad of rhetorical excess in claiming that environmental taxes and the carbon tax are the same thing. But we're pretty sure that £38 of that £52 is indeed upon carbon. And that's before we get to all the other sillinesses like EV subsidy, boiler bans and all the rest. We are already paying more than the cost of the Stern solution. Much more than the Nordhaus one. Very much more than the result from not quite swallowing the arguments about hyperbolic discounting and lower discount rates. But, given the political rhetoric that's shouted at us, we're nowhere near a solution. Paying more than necessary but not achieving the goal? Ah, yes, that's planning then, isn't it? Exactly the thing that we've been told not to do. This is why the economists' answer is that carbon tax - because it's the efficient method of dealing with the problem as presented. Stick the answer into the price system and leave the market to sort out the rest. Perhaps we shouldn't worry all that much about the price when we're out to praise Gaia - religious observance is often not really about costs after all. But that other economists' observation (it's in Stern for example). Humans do less of more expensive things, more of cheaper. Which is the reason that we have to be efficient about dealing with climate change - so that we'll do more, not less, of it.Shifting the UK from that current dog's breakfast of plans to a simple carbon tax would be cheaper, more efficient and we'd end up doing more dealing with climate change. Have we pointed out before that we prefer markets to political plans?

Apparently there's something wrong with the water system: Polluted water is causing 60 per cent more hospital admissions than a decade ago, official figures show.The number of people admitted to hospital for water-borne diseases – including dysentery and Weil's disease – has increased from 2,085 people in 2010-11 to 3,286 in 2022-23, according to NHS statistics.OK. Weil's Disease has been rising in incidence for well over a decade, from 2018: A deadly infection spread by rats has reached record levels in the number of hospital appointments taken up by people suffering from the illness.Hospital sessions for people suffering from Weil's disease, which is spread by rats' urine, are three times the level three years ago and are now at unprecedented levels.We'd like to know why of course. Perhaps more rats, perhaps different rats, perhaps councils aren't controlling rats. And we are also told that dysentery cases are up - perhaps it's just more people going to waters where Weil's and dysentery can be caught?We'd clearly like to know why this is happening - so we can decide what, if anything, we're going to do about it.From the Labour Party: Labour pledged it would put failing water companies in special measures to force them to "clean up their toxic mess and protect people's health".Ofwat, the regulator, would get powers to block the payment of any bonuses until water bosses had cleaned up the pollution, while water company bosses who oversaw repeated law-breaking would face criminal charges.Clearly the blame is being placed upon the capitalist nature of the English water companies. For, as The Guardian of all places points out: Waterborne diseases such as dysentery and Weil's disease have risen by 60% since 2010 in England, new figures reveal.OK.We'd still like to find out what is causing this problem in England. And it's true that England has capitalist water companies in a manner that the other Home Nations do not - Wales, Scotland and NI have variants of state owned water companies performing the job. The other home nations also have NHS organisations that are separate and thus their own statistics on this matter. Which does mean that we can test the proposition. It's possible that there is some, or some set of factors, increasing dysentery and Weil's in these isles. Hand washing to more rats to greater water sports patrticipation to the capitalist nature of water provision. We've also the statistics to be able to at least begin to make the distinction. Compare the rise in infections across the Home Nations' versions of the NHS to the ownership of the water companies across the Home Nations.What has actually been done? Noting the rise in incidence in the one country, England, then blaming it upon the one difference in England, that ownership. Without, ever nor at all, actually testing the proposition. Which is, if we are to be very polite about it indeed, not a proof of anything at all other than the ability to project prejudice.So, why do people urinate in the public information pool in this manner? Because it's politically convenient to do so. Which is why politics is such a bad way of running anything - decisions are always based upon biased and piss poor information.

The conjucture of the first few decades of the twenty-first century witnessed Alex Callinicos usefully mapping the contours of imperialism as set out in his pivotal book Imperialism and Global Political Economy. As somewhat of a successor text, this is now accompanied by The New Age of Catastrophe that seeks to address today's conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis (or polycrisis), the conditions of which are situated as immanent to capitalism as a totality. The creativity of Imperialism and Global Political Economy flowed from Callinicos offering an innovative reading of Nikolai Bukharin to propose a theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power: capitalistic and territorial, or two forms of competition, economic and geopolitical. The book bears repeated revisiting. Indeed, I have done so recently in an article for the pages of International Affairs (see 'Mainstreaming Marxism', International Affairs 99: 3, 2023). There I demonstrate how unique Marxist approaches to both the structural theory of anarchy (drawing from Nikolai Bukharin) and racial capitalism (drawing from C.L.R. James) have been silenced by mainstream imitators (namely, Kenneth Waltz and E.H. Carr). There is also much wider engagement with Callinicos' theorising on capitalism and the state-system in Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-authored with Andreas Bieler.

As an 'antechamber' to the present, the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The New Age of Catastrophe offers a theoretical framing of the argument by recovering and reasserting a discussion of totality as a category in order to overcome the atomisation and isolation-effect of capitalism. Drawing from Lukács and others the method of totality is legitimised in order to constitute capitalism as a comprehensive system of multiple mediations rather than as a set of separate, independent, isolated categories and facts. As Callinicos wonderfully puts it, 'even the best mainstream scholarship tends to fragment the totality' (p. 8). This reader was left wanting more on the methodological standard of totality as emblematic of a dialectical critique of the slicing-up and fragmentation of knowledge by mainstream perspectives.
In The New Age of Catastrophe Callinicos endeavours to engage with the developing totality of the crisis of capitalism through a set of conjunctural moments that encompass the destruction of the biosphere (concentrating on the metabolic rift with nature); economic stagnation (converging in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall); geopolitical conflict (focusing on inter-imperialist rivalry); political reaction (addressing contemporary right-wing populism); and ideological contestation (questioning gender and race as intersecting or interweaving forms of agency with class antagonisms). The book offers individual chapters on each of these five moments in the present conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis of capitalism.
The main theme to pick up on for the rest of this review is the recognition of the conjuncture as a fusion of different moments of crisis within the totality of capitalism and how contemporary right-wing populism and far-right politics is treated in the book. Throughout The New Age of Catastrophe the long-term trend of neoliberal authoritarianism is addressed, whether it be through some of the earlier work on authoritarian [...]
The post The new age of catastrophe appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Hello friends! Welcome to another episode of Fully Automated!



Our guest for this episode is none other than James A. Smith, co-host with David Slavick of The Popular Show. Smith is also the author of Other People's Politics: Populism to Corbynism (Zer0 Books, 2019) and coauthor with Mareile Pfannebecker of Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the end of Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2020).







Smith is a defender of the idea that the 2016-2020 "Bernie moment" was a real opportunity to advance the cause of socialism. While it can be tempting today to look back and think that it was doomed from the start, Smith argues that the failure was largely self-inflicted. This means there are lessons that can be learned from the failure. However, he notes, the left today "seems worryingly uncurious about the regressive influence earlier defeated lefts have sometimes inadvertently had."



Smith believes that the left needs to rethink its approach to political freedom. Following up on our recent episode with Efraim Carlebach on the 10-year anniversary of Mark Fisher's famous essay, "Exiting the Vampire Castle," we chat with Smith about his recent Sublation essay, "Capitalist Realism All Over Again" (3.17.2023).



As he puts it, the left has "struggled to apply the book's insights," all too often succumbing to political correctness and "anti-political moralism." Meanwhile, as evidenced in the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, capitalist elites are claiming that crises that are "too important to be hazarded to democratic oversight or protest." When the left abandons this fight, the right will try to fill in the gap, claiming that only it can stop the power grab.



We also ask Smith about some of his recent episodes, including his interview with Matt Taibbi, one of the main journalists behind The Twitter Files. Like Taibbi, Smith believes that capitalist elites today are leveraging state powers to censor social media activity, essentially constituting a strategy of "revenge against both left and right populism."



We also discuss a number of foreign policy matters, from the west's war for NATO expansion in Ukraine to the iconoclastic left's bankrupt analysis of Israel's war in Gaza. Concerning the latter, many otherwise insightful critics have suggested that Hamas is essentially a bonapartist organization, seeking to create an islamic state. How does Smith respond to these critics? Moreover, given the difficulty of imagining the construction of a working class party in Gaza today, what should be the left position on this terrible war?



Smith can be followed on Twitter/X @thepopularpod. Curious listeners can also follow up on Smith's work on Jacobin, where he has published numerous articles on the state of the British left:




"The Labour Party Is Ignoring Britain's Muslims. A Judge-Led Inquiry Won't Change That" (12.12.2023)



"Labour's Left Needs to Regain the Insurgent Spirit That Made Jeremy Corbyn Leader" (07.31.2023)



"The Labour Left's Fatal Contradictions Are Still Unresolved" (11.04.2021)




NOTE: This is a re-post of Episode 13 of Class Transmissions, which was posted on Feb 4, 2024. I want to thank Class Unity for letting me share this work with listeners of Fully Automated.



Please check out Class Unity's website: here



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We're going to do that unattractive thing again. Prance our egos around as we say we told you so. Core Lithium has stopped mining and has warned of a big write-down on the value of its assets as the collapse in the battery material's prices takes a heavy toll on Australian producers.The Northern Territory's only lithium producer told investors on Friday that it would revert to processing stockpiled ore and suspend operations at its Grants open pit mine.There's nothing particularly wrong with this Finniss mine. New, well made, decent deposit, they've been producing, the material is up to specification. It's a fine lithium mine in fact. It's also, as you can see, now closed. For the lithium price is now below production costs. Which is one of those really pretty big signals that there's no lithium shortage. As we said back in September in fact. There's a list out there of some 300 would be lithium mining companies. For that's what the market response has been - the lithium price rises, men with hammers go out to tap the world. And, amazingly, given that lithium is not in short supply, only in currently short extraction, they find it. The value of lithium in the ground falls further and faster than this 75% fall in the purified stuff too. The share prices of those would be lithium miners are falling - globally and near in unison. Because we've found enough and it only took a couple of years. It was also done without politics or even subsidy.And a year ago. And 18 months ago.It simply is not true that there's a shortage of these critical minierals - not in any real sense of there not being enough atoms around. Nor in the sense of there not being enough mineable atoms around. There can be, sometimes is, a shortage of open holes in the ground that people are currently extracting them from. But we've a system to deal with that - prices. Prices go up more people dig holes. Supply increases, prices come back down. As the man said, the cure for high prices is high prices.Now, if that were all then it wouldn't be worth remarking upon. But every government and non-government is mithering about supplies of critical minerals. The UK govt, the one you and we pay for, has taskforces and ministerial reports about them. Of less than, as one of says elsewhere, sensible activity. The US, the EU and everyone else we've noted have similar wastes of bureaucratic egghead time and effort. The WEF and any number of NGOs have teams working on this same non-existent problem. There is no shortage of minerals and the shortage of holes is cured by prices. There, we're done.So, could we please disband all these task forces? Gralloch the bureaucracies and ignore the NGOs? We don't have a problem and we've solved it anyway - with that old one of liberty, markets and prices. As so many problems can be and as so many bureaucratic structures adamantly fail to recognise.That last is at least understandable, you know, Upton Sinclair. But that's no reason for us all to allow them to get away with it. So, let's not.

Now, of course, this is a boss complaining that the bureaucracy won't allow him to do what he wants to do: The UK competition regulator is stifling innovation and entrepreneurship by taking too long to make decisions, according to a senior Adobe executive who is overseeing its $20 billion takeover of Figma.In an interview with The Times, David Wadhwani, president of Adobe's Digital Media business, said: "The process should not take 15 months to get to this stage. I think we can all agree that expediting these kinds of decisions is important for innovation and for doing the right thing by consumers and customers to make these decisions faster and move more quickly."In November, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to block Adobe's multibillion-dollar takeover of the app interface design business Figma because it could harm competition in product design, image editing and illustration. A final decision will be made by the end of February next year.We're even prepared to accept, for the moment and for this argument only, that the concerns of the CMA are valid. Maybe it will cause problems in some corner of this market. You know, maybe.But now the point we've made before. There are two types of economic growth, there's simply processing more economic resources into more output. Not very green, it's also how all of the Soviet Union's growth turned up. More iron ore and coal to make the steel for the machines to dig up more iron ore and coal. There's also becoming more efficient at our use of economic resources. This is what produced about 80% of the economic growth in the market economies in that long 20th century. Becoming more efficient is also known as increasing productivity. We can talk about total factor productivity (how efficient we become at using everything) or the one that politics currently whines about, labour productivity. How much more value do we gain from an hour of human labour? This productivity increase - it comes from either doing new things, or doing old things in new ways. As above, this has historically been 80% of total growth. The speed of GDP growth is the speed at which we do those new things or things the new way. This is also the same, in concept, as the speed of productivity growth.So, now we've a bureaucracy taking 15 months to even decide whether they might have a concern about someone suggesting a new arrangement for doing something or other. Sure, that new thing might be bad. Might be good too. But at some rate of bureaucratic cogitation the time spent to think through it causes as much damage to economic and productivity growth as simply allowing a bad thing to happen.We're not getting richer precisely and exactly because we've a bureaucracy deciding how we should be getting richer. The answer is obvious - simply abolish the Competition and Markets Authority. Replace it, perhaps, with something efficient, that doesn't, by definition, make us poorer. Or a coin toss, likely to do less harm.Given that example we have of a sensible political reaction to bureaucracy in Argentina, so, where's that chainsaw gone?

The investor state dispute settlement system courts, ISDS, such a terror to the spread of democracy and all that is good and holy around the world: More than $100bn of public money has been awarded to private investors in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) courts, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet.The controversial arbitration system which allows corporations to sue governments for compensation over decisions they argue affect their profits is largely carried out behind closed doors, with some judgments kept secret. But, according to a global ISDS tracker which launches today, $114bn has so far been paid out of the public purse to investors – about as much as rich nations provided in climate aid in 2022.Fossil fuel companies have been by far the biggest beneficiaries of the corporate panels, raking in $80.21bn since 1998, according to the site. If current trends continue, at least another $48bn will be disbursed to settle cases currently under litigation, the research finds.So, we thought we'd have a look at this claim. And please do note what we're doing - we're using their evidence, following their facts. We're not introducing anything else, not handwaving about how capitalists are always right or anything. These are their examples. From their website the top 5 cases they're complaining about.Veteran and Hulley, two cases stemming from the Yukos case. Mikhail Khordokovsky was an oil billionaire with political ambitions. Vladimir Putin actually had political power. Yukos was driven bankrupt. Ah well, such things happen.Conoco/Venezuela, the Bolivarian state nationalised, without compensation, oil fields. Repsol/Argentina, the Peronist state nationalsed the oil company without compensation.Eureko/Poland. Not one we know much about but apparently about the privatisation of an insurance company. Did government keep to the contract it had agreed? All of these are about whether government kept to a contract that government signed. Might be a contract through a treaty and all that but they really are all about well, did government keep to its word? And if you want to have a court case claiming that a government didn't then not being in a court controlled by that government seems to be a good idea. Which is what ISDS is. Just like when we accuse our own government of breaching our human rights, it's off to the European Court of Human Rights we go - a court not controlled by the government we're accusing.Here the accusation is - in colloquial language, in the sense of "But, but, I just brushed against the table and it fell into my pocket, honest, Constable!" and on up - governments nicked this property. So, which court, why and how, does anyone use to test this proposition that the nicking was illegal? And why would anyone complain about people being able to do so? Our assumption is that some people don't like the idea that anything should stand in the way of governments being able to nick stuff. A very odd idea to hold we think but there we are, part of that glorious human variability.

Yet another insistence that the oil companies are blah blah (cont pg 94). It isn't, of course, the oil companies that create emissions, it's people using fossil fuels to cook their dinner, transport themselves around and keep their homes toasty. Major oil companies have in recent years made splashy climate pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and take on the climate crisis, but a new report suggests those plans do not stand up to scrutiny.The research and advocacy group Oil Change International examined climate plans from the eight largest US and European-based international oil and gas producers – BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – and found none was compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – a threshold scientists have long warned could have dire consequences if breached.The fault is not in our companies but in ourselves, Dear Brutus.But there's another issue illustrated here. Those doing this complaining are not taking climate change seriously themselves.The authors broke the assessment's criteria into three categories: ambition to curb fossil fuel exploration and production, integrity of methods used to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and commitment to overseeing just and "people-centered transitions" away from fossil fuels.What is that "just and people centered" doing there? All eight firms also failed to "meet basic criteria for just transition plans for workers and communities where they operate," and none met "basic" human rights criteria. Though some have human rights policies on the books, none have demonstrated sufficient plans to adhere to them, the authors say.Sure, we think a just society is a good idea. We might - almost certainly will - differ on the definition of just that should be the gaol but still. So too we think human rights are important but we're still hung up on that idea that the only rights are those negative ones, not the positive that are insisted upon by so many. But now think through the climate change pitch itself. This is such an imminent emergency that we've simply got to change everything and right now. No, we don't believe it but accept it as a rhetorical point for a moment. So, OK, that means we've got to do everything right now. Without worrying about those other things - just transitions and equitable societies and so on. As with actually being at war it's necessary to prioritise, obviously. But here we've got the insistence that the "people-centered" part is just as important as the actually beating climate change part. Which is a downgrading of the importance of dealing with climate change. Therefore the people making that claim aren't taking climate change seriously, are they? And, of course, to that same extent nor should we. Another way to approach the same point. If just and people-centered and so on are of equal importance to climate change itself then don't we have to have the debate on what is just and people-centered? Like, say, liberty, freedom, capitalism, markets and the inequity that seem to be associated? Why is it only that one moral view that is being considered?

Political economy seminar
Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on USD Debt
Speaker: Mareike Beck, University of Warwick
When: Wednesday 17 April, 3-4pm, 2024
Where: A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 341, The University of Sydney, and Zoom
About the talk: I will speak about my new book, Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on USD Debt, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. The book offers a new account of the Americanisation of global finance. It advances the concept of extroverted financialisation as an original framework to explain US-led financialisation. The paradigmatic case study of German universal banks is used to demonstrate that the transformation of global banking towards US-style finance should be understood as a response to a revolution in funding practices that originated in US money markets in the 1960s. This new way of funding led to the securitisation of USD debt and rapid globalisation of USD flows, which has fundamentally reshaped the competitive dynamics of global finance as this has empowered US banks over their European counterparts. I argue that this has caused German banks to partially uproot their operations from their own home markets to institutionalise themselves into US money markets. I show that to be able to compete with US financial institutions, German banks had to fundamentally transform the core of their own banking models towards US-style finance. This transformation not only led to the German banks' speculative investments during the 2000s subprime mortgage crisis but also to rising USD dependency and, ultimately, their contemporary decline.

About the speaker: I am an Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Previously, I was Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King's College London, after having finished my PhD at the University of Sussex. My research agenda focuses on the drivers and socio-economic impacts of financialisation at the global and everyday level. My work has addresses this in three inter-related areas. First, I am interested in a social history of global finance. My book project Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on USD Debt (under contract with Cambridge University Press) develops a novel conceptualisation, extroverted financialisation, to frame the US Americanisation of global finance. I am particularly interested in the uneven nature of the USD-based global financial architecture, and how this has shaped financial globalisation, innovations in on- and offshore finance, and financial instability. Secondly, using a feminist political economy approach, I investigate how everyday asset management and global asset management interact to produce various forms of asset-based inequalities in financialised economies. My third area of interest concerns creative and performative methodologies for knowledge exchange and impact. I regularly engage with civil society groups and local communities. For example, in May 2023, I directed and performed in an aerial acrobatics circus show that performed feminist political economy theorising of homes in their dual function as (1) an everyday living space and (2) a global financial asset.
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From Richard Nixon to the Israel lobby, the late Republican Congressman Paul Norton "Pete" McCloskey Jr. challenged the most powerful elements of the ruling class on the American people's behalf.On September 29, 1927, McCloskey was born in San Bernardino, California. He was raised in South Pasadena. After graduating high school in 1945, McCloskey joined the Navy and attended Occidental College as well as the California Institute of Technology. In 1950, he graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor's degree.When the Korean War began, McCloskey joined the Marines where he led a rifle platoon in a bayonet charge to take a strategic hill. He won the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts. He remained a Marine Reserve officer for several years thereafter. In 1953, McCloskey earned his law degree from Stanford and became a deputy district attorney in Alameda County until 1954.Subsequently, from 1955-1967, he practiced general and environmental law in Palo Alto, while giving lectures on legal ethics at the Santa Clara and Stanford law schools. He was inspired to enter politics after he saw President Jack Kennedy give a speech in 1963 during a conference regarding civil rights.In a 1967 special election necessitated by the death of Rep. J. Arthur Younger, McCloskey won his seat representing the San Mateo district in Congress. With the Vietnam War already raging, McCloskey ran as an antiwar candidate defeating the beloved film star and his fellow Republican Shirley Temple Black along with the Democrat Roy Archibald.While serving seven terms in Congress, McCloskey became the first GOP representative to both oppose the war – including by calling for a repeal of the despicable Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which ostensibly authorized the unconstitutional war – and demand Nixon's impeachment.In 1972, he fought a quixotic battle attempting to unseat Nixon for the GOP nomination for President, arguing "I'll probably get licked, but I can't keep quiet." He won 19.7 percent of the vote against Nixon at the New Hampshire primary. McCloskey was emphatic, "To talk, as the president does, of winding down the war while he is expanding the use of air power is a deliberate deception."He was prevented from speaking against Nixon and the war at the Republican National Convention that year as a result of a rule written by John Ehrlichman, his old friend and law school debate partner, stating a candidate could not get to the floor with fewer than 25 delegates. McCloskey only had one.In 1975, he traveled to Cambodia to observe the mass destruction left by the massive US bombing campaign. Yale's Ben Kiernan, a leading historian on Cambodia, estimates the US dropped approximately 500,000 tons of bombs on the country between 1969-1973. According to the BBC, "the number of people killed by those bombs is not known, but estimates range from 50,000 to upwards of 150,000."Then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger approved nearly 4,000 bombing raids on Cambodia between 1969-1970. He infamously stated during a declassified 1970 telephone conversation "It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?"McCloskey condemned the atrocities committed in Cambodia, declaring that Washington had unleashed "greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for our benefit to fight against the Vietnamese."In the early 1980s, McCloskey began criticizing the immense power and pervasive influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. He supported then-chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat. His position was that Palestinian militancy and resistance, including the use of terrorism, was a reaction to the brutality of the illegal Israeli occupation, ongoing since 1967, in the West Bank and Gaza.He vehemently opposed Israel's expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the territory intended by the United Nations as land for a future Palestinian state. He advocated for the implementation of UN resolutions which declared the so-called settlements illegal. McCloskey even put forward a resolution to withhold $150 million in US aid to Israel in order to pressure Tel Aviv to remove the settlements.Facing intense backlash from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), McCloskey ultimately withdrew his amendment. After Israel, under the leadership of Likudnik Prime Minister Menachem Begin, passed its 1981 Golan Heights annexation law, he denounced the move as an "aggressive and imperialistic action." In response to this violation of Syrian sovereignty, McCloskey also implored Congress to rescind the $2.2 billion in US taxpayer money Tel Aviv was due to receive in 1982-1983."Until Congress is willing to stand up to Israel, every time that we step back and deliver them F-16s, or accept the bombing of downtown Beirut, we will accept whatever they want to do," McCloskey thundered. AIPAC poured money into his opponents' campaigns and he was unseated during the 1982 election."In 1982, McCloskey lost to future governor Pete Wilson in a primary election for the U.S. Senate. He told The Times that his controversial positions on Israel might have contributed to his defeat," the Los Angeles Times reports. "He has been supportive of the Palestinian people's plight since the late 1970s," Helen McCloskey, his longtime press secretary whom he married in 1982, told the outlet. "Of course, now that is very relevant," she added.Even after leaving politics, McCloskey continued to oppose the Israel lobby and its depredations against the American people. As Paul Findley, the former Illinois congressman and McCloskey's co-founder of the Council for the National Interest, has written:AIPAC's endeavors did not stop McCloskey from seeking out justice in issues related to the Middle East. In 1993, the district attorney of San Francisco released 700 pages of documents implicating the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, a major Jewish organization that calls itself "a defender of civil rights," in a vast spying operation. The targets of the ADL operation were American citizens who were opposed to Israel's repression of Palestinians and to the South African government's policy of apartheid. The ADL was also accused of passing on information to both governments. After experiencing "great political pressure," the district attorney dropped the charges, prompting victims to file a suit against the ADL for violation of their privacy rights. They chose Pete McCloskey as their attorney.McCloskey and his clients, two of whom were Jews who had been subjected to spying after criticizing Israeli policy in the occupied territories, revealed an extensive operation headed by ADL undercover operative Roy Bullock, whose files contained the names of 10,000 individuals and 600 organizations, including thousands of Arab Americans and national civil rights groups such as the NAACP. Much of Bullock's information was gained illegally from confidential police records. In April 2002, after a nine-year legal battle, McCloskey won a landmark $150,000 court judgment against the ADL.During the second Iraq War, McCloskey also highlighted the heavy influence of the Likud as well as the neoconservatives in spearheading the push for Washington's illegal and disastrous invasion.In a 2005 interview with Scott Horton, host of Antiwar Radio and now editorial director of Antiwar.com, McCloskey rebuked the arguments for the war and excoriated the neocons proliferating throughout the George W. Bush administration,We killed a lot of people [in Vietnam], we killed a million Vietnamese, 55,000 Americans, and wounded four or five times that many in a war we shouldn't have fought in the first place… [And in the case of Iraq,] it's the same problem. I don't know how you earn the love and affection and the minds and hearts of the ordinary Iraqi when you're blowing up his houses and killing his relatives… [Paul] Wolfowitz, and [Douglas] Feith, and this man [Richard] Perle, and John Bolton appointed to the UN [ambassadorship], those men have considered Israel almost as the 51st state. I don't think there's any secret that we've gone to war in Iraq, not to protect against the Iraq threat to the United States, but to stop the Iraq threat to Israel, the same men that have taken us into this policy and this war… [including] Perle [had been] advising the Israeli government in 1996 to take out Iraq [in the "Clean Break" document written for then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]. Of course, now they're pushing to take out Iran. Well why are we wanting to take out Iran? Because it represents a threat to Israel.During the interview, McCloskey continues to rail against the iron grip of the Israel lobby in American politics and warns of the consequences of the extraordinary deference to Israel regarding Washington's relations with the Middle East,And this whole policy over the last 20 years has ignored [UN Security Council] Resolution 242 which… allowed the creation of the state of Israel but said it should be side by side by a Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza. And our refusal to comply with the United Nations and now trying to appoint Bolton as our representative to the United Nations sends a signal to the world that whatever Israel does the United States is going to support, including Israel's known possession of atomic weapons… And the only reason we take these policies is because the [lobby] through AIPAC has scared every congressman into fearing they'll lose their seat if they in any way vote against Israel.In a sense, McCloskey's antiwar career came full circle in 2014 when he visited North Korea. While there, he met with a fellow veteran from the opposite side of the battle, a retired three-star general who had also been wounded. "I told him how bravely I thought his people had fought, and we embraced… We ended up agreeing that we don't want our grandchildren or great-grandchildren to fight, that war is hell, and there's no glory in it," McCloskey said.Last week, the former congressman passed away at his home in Winters, California as a result of congestive heart failure, according to family friend Lee Houskeeper. McCloskey was 96 years old.American congressmen seldomly, if ever, conduct themselves with any honor or courage. Too often we see our supposed representatives in the legislature shamelessly carrying water for the war party, lying to their constituents, regurgitating propaganda from foreign lobbies and arms-industry funded think tanks. With well over $30 trillion in debt, most of our lawmakers happily continue robbing the American people to fund the American Empire.McCloskey's example and legacy is one to emulate if we desire to avoid full-scale war with any of the current White House's favored targets: Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, or Tehran. Given that we already stand on the precipice of nuclear conflict with Russia and soon China, concurrently committing mass slaughter in Palestine, and edging towards war with Iran and its allies across the Middle East, we could use a great man like former California Congressman Pete McCloskey.This article was republished with permission from Antiwar.com