Jerry Brown: Washington's Crackpot Realism -- text only

via the New York Review of Books







The twenty years of war since the September 11, 2001, attacks have killed more than 900,000 people, displaced at least 38 million, and cost the United States an estimated $8 trillion.


During these two decades of intense fighting and killing, the US has been responsible for a quantity of suffering that would have been unthinkable when President George W. Bush, with the near-unanimous backing of Congress, launched his assault on Afghanistan. It is clear now that America’s leaders deluded themselves and failed to ask basic questions about the ultimate goal of the war before invading: its human and financial costs, its benefits, or how it would end.



One might assume that such disastrous results, and the ignominious end of the war in Afghanistan last year, would lead to a period of reflection and soul-searching. Yet no such inquiry has occurred—at least not one that fully grapples with the shocking self-deception, pervasive misreading of events, and powerful groupthink that drove the longest war in American history.

Instead, without missing a beat, Washington power brokers and pundits, in and out of government, have fixed their gaze on a new foe: China. Think tank specialists and defense insiders are churning out books and articles on how to contain China and engage in what they have called a “great power conflict,” a vague description encompassing all manner of hostile interactions—ideological, economic, political, and military. Last year, Admiral Philip Davidson, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that China is accelerating its ambitions to supplant America’s leadership in the world, and that it could invade Taiwan within “the next six years.”

The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby well exemplifies this new confrontational and Manichean zeal. Colby’s book clearly, but perhaps unwittingly, exposes the extreme peril we face, as he and others like him lay the intellectual foundations for yet another war thousands of miles from our shores, and one that is more treacherous than those we fought in the Middle East.

Colby worked under Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and helped write the 2018 US National Defense Strategy, which proclaimed that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern.” His book reflects a growing perception throughout the country that China poses a mortal threat to America and its Asian allies. A Gallup poll in March 2021 found that the share of Americans who see China as our greatest enemy doubled in just one year, from 22 percent to 45 percent.



Colby’s focus is not on human rights or democratic values, ours or anyone else’s, but rather on how to deter China and “wage war” against it to prevent it from dominating Asia—and ultimately the entire world. He emphasizes relentless military competition among states, while omitting any discussion of how we might compete economically with China or what part international institutions could play. He considers Asia the most important region in the world because it produces 40 percent of global GDP. There are, in his view, stable balances of power in Europe and the Persian Gulf, leaving the Pacific as the primary theater of conflict between America and China.

Colby believes that if China were ever to achieve what he calls “hegemony” in Asia, it would have substantial incentives to use such power to exclude the US from the region and “compromise Americans’ freedom, prosperity, and even physical security.” To contain China, he proposes a “binding strategy” that would enmesh the military of the US with those of our Pacific allies, such as Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. This, he believes, would force China, if it invaded Taiwan, to attack these countries as well—resulting in a much wider war. The US position would thus be stronger because more countries would be fighting alongside us in an “anti-hegemonic coalition” against China.

He also looks to what he calls “thumotic impulses”—spiritedness or passion—to spur on the coalition to fight with greater resolve. Colby takes the concept from Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles, driven mad by his anger (θυμός, thumos) at the killing of his friend Patroclus, slays Hector. In recent years this theme has been articulated by a number of conservative scholars, such as Harvey Mansfield in his book Manliness (2006); Michael Anton, who served on President Trump’s National Security Council, in his essay “The Flight 93 Election” (2016); Robert Kagan in The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008); and the political science professor Carson Holloway, who published an essay on thumos in which he described Trump as “a preeminently thumotic being.”

Colby acknowledges that war with China over Taiwan could lead to the “limited” use of nuclear weapons and that as a last resort, “selective nuclear proliferation”—which is to say, providing nuclear weapons to allies—might be necessary. He adds:


Selective nuclear proliferation to such states as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and even Taiwan might help bridge the gap between regional conventional defeat and US willingness to employ its nuclear forces, especially at scale.

Colby tries to assure us that China would be deterred from escalating to a broader nuclear exchange because of America’s retaliatory power.


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Confident about his strategy and markedly unconcerned about its catastrophic implications, Colby seems cavalier about the fog of war and the possibility of errant intelligence. He blithely ignores how much can go wrong. For evidence, consider the recently declassified video footage of a US drone strike during the final days of our withdrawal from Afghanistan that mistakenly killed ten innocent civilians, including seven children. In its subsequent review of more than 1,300 documents from a hidden Pentagon archive, The New York Times found that this wayward bombing was no aberration, but rather part of a pattern of airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan over the past eight years that were “plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.”

These are just the latest examples of shocking intelligence failures stretching back to the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the US totally missed the fact that Russian missiles in Cuba were already loaded with nuclear weapons and would have been launched before any disabling US strike.

The danger here is not this specific book, but that Colby is not an outlier in Washington. In The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Rush Doshi, currently Biden’s director for China at the National Security Council, writes from a similar zero-sum perspective but focuses more broadly on what he sees as China’s decades-long determination to become the world’s new hegemon. Citing voluminous Communist Party documents, he carefully traces the emergence of what he believes is China’s grand strategy to drive America out of Asia and displace its paramount influence in the world.

Writing in scholarly, sometimes jargon-laden prose, Doshi presents the US–China contest as “a competition over regional and global order, as well as the various ‘forms of control’ that sustain it.” According to him, the US cannot maintain its preeminent position unless it blunts China’s worldwide military, economic, and political “order-building” and simultaneously reinvests in “the foundations of American order.”

With respect to military engagement, this will entail deploying and sharing with allies a number of advanced weapons systems throughout the Indo-Pacific and conducting joint training and war exercises. On the political and economic front, Doshi calls for expansive industrial policies and innovative initiatives to keep America at the forefront of the vital technologies of the future. Though he recognizes the country’s polarized political environment, he believes that there is enough bipartisan consensus on the threat from China that America can rise to the challenge.

Despite this unrelenting competition, Doshi envisions cooperation with China on what he calls “transnational challenges,” such as nuclear proliferation and climate change. Unfortunately, he does not explain how cooperation on these threats would ever be possible in view of the mutual hostility and deep mistrust inherent in his grand strategy.

It’s worth noting that “political realism,” the school of thought that Colby and Doshi in their different ways represent, has genuine value. Such an approach can sharpen our understanding of the way nation-states have historically acted as they jockey for advantage over competitors. The doctrine explains why the competition between China and the US is so dangerous, and how diplomacy and human judgment can be overwhelmed by the powerful forces of nationalism—even more so when exacerbated by historical grievances and rapid weapons innovation.

World War I is the classic example of how nations move from competition to miscalculation to war, even though it results in mutual catastrophe. In his 2012 book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, the historian Christopher Clark diagnoses self-reinforcing “processes of interaction” that led to the unforeseen and unwanted war, inducing each state to repeatedly react to the other in an attempt to gain an advantage.


So it could be, too, with respect to the current “great power competition” between the US and China. Few want war, but highly competitive actions are fostering increasingly hostile perceptions based on profoundly different histories and social systems.



Compounding the danger is a long history of self-assured but mistaken—even delusional—thinking in Washington. More than sixty years ago, the sociologist C. Wright Mills coined the phrase “crackpot realism,” referring to leaders who he believed were making incredibly reckless decisions with little understanding of the consequences, while believing themselves to be exceptionally rational.


In The Hell of Good Intentions (2018), Stephen Walt describes countless blunders made by the foreign policy elites in the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. He convincingly demonstrates that very bright people with the best of intentions, no matter their party or ideology, get caught up in “rational” processes that lead to disastrous outcomes.



This is what makes current groupthink on China, based almost exclusively on zero-sum assumptions, so alarming. General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described China’s recent testing of a hypersonic missile as “very close” to a “Sputnik moment,” referencing the technological advantage that US planners perceived the Soviet Union to have achieved with its satellite launch in 1957. Such statements reinforce the notion that China or America must subordinate the other and engage in a new cold war, rivaling the contest between the US and the USSR. But this one would be, in many ways, far different.

First, China, unlike the USSR, has an enormous and growing economy. Second, it is a major trading partner with neighboring countries and is tightly integrated with the rest of the world, including the US. Third, it is making huge investments in research and development and driving technological innovations of all kinds. Finally, China is intensifying its nationalistic fervor with repeated invocations of its victimhood during a “century of national humiliation.”

This nationalistic fervor is on display in China’s efforts to threaten and pressure even ordinary people if they dare to criticize Chinese policies. In China Unbound: A New World Disorder, Joanna Chiu, a reporter for the Toronto Star, provides a powerful, heartfelt account of Chinese immigrants and their fraught encounters with Beijing’s United Front Work Department, a lavishly funded government agency that works with the Ministry of State Security. Chiu tells gripping stories of influence operations in such disparate places as Australia, Canada, the US, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Russia. Chinese agents are sent throughout the world to intimidate international students and others of the far-flung Chinese diaspora. Chiu’s stories demonstrate in human terms just how formidable a task it will be to put the US and China on any kind of cooperative path.

The most telling example of China’s nationalism is its deep and pervasive conviction that Taiwan is a part of China. This is an area where compromise seems inconceivable. I can’t imagine China accepting defeat, ever, in a conflict with the US over Taiwan.

Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia and a Mandarin speaker, recognizes this stark reality in The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping’s China. Rudd directly confronts the growing possibility of war and offers well-thought-out proposals to prevent that catastrophic outcome and the “global carnage” it would cause.

Rudd is undaunted by the fact that, in his view, for both Washington and Beijing, “the question is no longer whether such confrontation can be avoided, but when it will occur and under what circumstances,” and he rejects “decoupling, containment, confrontation, and perhaps ultimately the unthinkable itself.” Instead, he sketches out “a joint strategic framework” that would allow China and America to (1) agree on procedures for navigating each other’s strategic red lines, which if inadvertently crossed would lead to military escalation; (2) identify acceptable areas of “nonlethal” but “full-blown strategic competition”; and (3) define those areas where cooperation would be recognized and encouraged, such as on climate change. All of this would be anchored in negotiation, verification, deterrence, and mutual respect. Rudd calls this “managed strategic competition.” He sees a military conflict between China and the US as a catastrophe “beyond imagining” and therefore makes the case for “all necessary precautionary measures” to reduce the risk of war.

Like Rudd, several leading scholars envision a future where both China and the US, despite their radically different systems, learn to coexist and even cooperate without waging a new cold war. In Limit, Leverage, and Compete: A New Strategy on China, a 2019 report from the Center for American Progress, Melanie Hart and Kelly Magsamen (who now hold senior positions at the US Departments of State and Defense, respectively) detail a “new strategic framework” for the US–China competition, which they call the “central contest of this century.” Hart and Magsamen grant that China is “actively undermining US interests around the world,” but they diverge from the more hawkish China hands in their strong emphasis on policies that would rejuvenate and strengthen America, “regardless of how China acts.”

In plain language, the writers explain what America must do to reassert global leadership and rectify a “pattern of serious missteps” and “decades of strategic inertia.” Hart and Magsamen emphasize the dramatic investments needed to transform American education, specifically calling for debt-free undergraduate education for all students; tuition assistance for postgraduate science, technology, engineering, and math degrees; federal funding for state and local colleges; a redesigned workforce development system; and a substantial commitment to research and development, and public infrastructure. It all sounds plausible, but the politics of getting it done seem remote. The unrecoverable trillions spent on fighting terrorism could have paid the bill; alas, this is not how official Washington sees America’s challenges.

Looking outward, Hart and Magsamen are concerned about China’s efforts to obtain sensitive US technology. They recommend a variety of preventive measures aimed at curbing “operations that threaten US prosperity or national security,” though the consequences of these measures remain unclear. They also suggest finding ways to “leverage” Chinese investments in development projects, such as those in its Belt and Road Initiative. The idea here is for America to invest, along with others, to make development projects more transparent and sustainable. This will require the US to work with countries in the Belt and Road target areas and provide competitive financing so that recipient countries are not solely dependent on China. Additionally, they call for partnering with China on such public goods as disaster relief, ocean protection, climate initiatives, and combating pandemics.

Focusing on global economic and financial structures, The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic Leadership by C. Fred Bergsten makes an even more urgent case for US–China cooperation: work together to stabilize the world economy or risk a disaster on par with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Bergsten doesn’t ignore the deep differences between our political systems, but he says that the world economy will encounter dangerous disruptions unless the US and China ensure orderly functioning of trade, currencies, lending, and investment. He categorically rejects decoupling the two economies and asserts that if America follows this path, China will just continue to rise and America will falter. He notes that the tariffs imposed by Trump failed to slow China’s growth and adds that most other countries will not follow America if it goes its own way.

Bergsten calls for “conditional competitive cooperation,” with both strenuous competition and substantive cooperation on global economic issues that are vitally important to both countries—and to the world. He acknowledges that China has engaged in currency manipulation, theft of intellectual property, and forced transfer of technologies, but he argues that these problems are best confronted through global institutions and skillful diplomacy. Like Hart and Magsamen, Bergsten sees the absolute need for America to straighten out its own economy; make serious investments in research and development, and infrastructure of all kinds; and enact policies that reduce its gross inequalities and wage stagnation.

Framing the China threat as irredeemably antagonistic, as many “political realists” are currently doing, misses the reality that both countries—to prosper and even to survive—must cooperate as well as compete. While competition is inevitable, the US and China do share common interests, which could help form the basis of what I would call “planetary realism.” This is an informed realism that faces up to the unprecedented global dangers caused by carbon emissions, nuclear weapons, viruses, and new disruptive technologies, all of which cannot be addressed by one country alone. Both America and China recognized such planetary realism when they pledged, albeit loosely, at the Glasgow climate summit in late 2021 to work together to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The stakes for the world have never been higher, and there has never been a greater need to see the world as profoundly interdependent.

It would be foolish to minimize the military dangers that China poses, but it would be even more foolish to act in ways that actually exacerbate them. The better path—in fact, the only path that avoids the horror of war—is to accept that China’s system is different from ours, get our own house in order, and seek a decent modus vivendi. Given America’s recent history of ill-conceived and disastrous wars, we should be skeptical of any other course—especially of loud calls for potentially catastrophic confrontations. Rather than thumos and grand strategies, America desperately needs clarity about the perilous predicament in which it now finds itself, and the courage to think and act anew.

It is difficult to overstate the hostility of the Roberts court to organized labor and the rights of American workers.

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist, NYT

It is difficult to overstate the hostility of the Roberts court to organized labor and the rights of American workers.

Under John Roberts, who became chief justice in 2005, the court has made it harder for workers to bring suit against employers collectively, limited the power of workers to hold employers responsible for discrimination on the job, ended the ability of public sector unions to require dues from nonmembers who benefit from collective bargaining and struck down a California law that allowed unions to recruit workers on the property of agricultural employers.
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In pretty much any given conflict between an employer and a group of workers, you can count on Roberts and his Republican allies on the court to side with the employer.



We saw this dynamic at work last week when the court issued its decision in Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union No. 174. The case involves a struggle in Washington State between workers represented by the Teamsters and their employer, a concrete manufacturer.

In its lawsuit, Glacier alleged that its workers timed a 2017 strike so that it would begin after some of the company’s mixing trucks were already filled with wet concrete, a perishable material. Glacier’s non-unionized workers were able to remove the concrete before the trucks were significantly damaged, but the company sued the Teamsters in state court anyway for damages relating to lost revenue from the wrecked concrete.


The union countered, citing the right to strike. It also noted that the damaged concrete was essentially spoilage of a product, for which unions have not generally been held liable. The Washington State Supreme Court dismissed the suit on the grounds that the dispute was “pre-empted by the National Labor Relations Act.”

The Supreme Court took Glacier’s appeal. And in an opinion joined by Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Amy Coney Barrett held that unions are liable for damages during strikes under federal labor law when they take “affirmative steps to endanger” the employer’s property rather than “reasonable precautions to mitigate that risk.” She also sent the case back to the Washington State court for further litigation.

In a separate concurrence joined by Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should reconsider its 1959 decision in San Diego Building Trades Council v. Garmon, which held that state courts are barred from handling claims concerning conduct that is “arguably” covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Under Garmon, employers must first receive a favorable ruling from the National Labor Relations Board if they want to sue a union for striking in state court. Tossing Garmon would bring labor law much closer to its pre-N.L.R.A. status quo, when conservative judges treated union actions as little more than criminal conspiracies to harm employers. Justice Samuel Alito also filed a concurrence in support of the majority.




The divide among the liberal justices was especially striking. The sole dissent came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who argued that the ruling would “erode the right to strike” and undermine the oversight of workplace law by the N.L.R.B. “Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master,” she wrote. “They are employees whose collective and peaceful decision to withhold their labor is protected by the N.L.R.A. even if economic injury results.”

It is possible that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor joined Barrett’s opinion in a strategic move meant to foreclose a more expansive decision from Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito. If so, it may ultimately prove a short reprieve in the face of a conservative majority that is eager to undermine a set of interests (labor’s interests) and a set of rights (workers’ rights) that it does not respect.

One point that must be emphasized is how, with its war on workers, the Roberts court is only acting in the Supreme Court’s historical capacity as an agent of capital. At times, the court has taken an expansive view of the civil and political rights of the American people. But it has rarely been a friend to the right of workers to organize and act in their own interests.

In the decade before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, for example, the Supreme Court under William Howard Taft issued rulings constraining the ability of unions to act and organize, subjecting union actions to antitrust law and upholding restrictions on speech that targeted unions and other pro-labor organizations.

In other words, the Supreme Court is first and foremost the leading defender of property within our political order. And how could it be otherwise? The Constitution itself was written, in part, to protect the rights of property in the face of democracy and the spirit of egalitarianism. Even a more liberal Supreme Court than the one we have now would eventually find itself acting against labor, for the simple reason that the American political system was not built with the interests of workers in mind.





This means, as our actual court has again made clear, that the struggle for the emancipation of labor does not, as Samuel Gompers once wrote, take place in an “ideal world.” Instead, “we are in the bitter struggles of an unjust society.” If labor is ever going to get what it needs, it probably won’t be with the helping hand of a judge or a justice.

Baker: Note on Debt Burden and the Burden of Patent and Copyright Monopolies

 via Patreon

Quick Note on the Debt Burden and the Burden of Patent and Copyright Monopolies

The debt whiners are out in full force these days as we face the risk of default at the start of next month. We hear them complain endlessly about the burden we are imposing on future generations. If we imagine for a moment that any of these people actually care about the future (anyone hear of global warming?), we should ask why none of them ever says anything about the burden of patent and copyright monopolies?

This may be too simple for great minds, but the granting of patent and copyright monopolies is a mechanism that the government uses to pay for innovation and creative work. It is an alternative to direct government spending. The government could directly pay companies for innovating and producing movies, writing books, and performing music, but instead it gives these companies monopolies that allow them to charge far more than the free market price for the duration of a patent or copyright.

In the case of prescription drugs, pharmaceutical companies will often charge ten or even 100 times the free market price of a drug for the period in which it holds a patent monopoly. This means that a drug that might sell for $10-$20 a prescription, instead sells for hundreds or thousands of dollars per prescription. There is a similar story with a wide range of other items, like medical equipment, seed, fertilizers, and pesticide. Patent monopolies make items expensive, that would otherwise be cheap.

The same is true of copyright. We could costlessly copy and transfer books, music, movies, software and many other types of creative work over the web, if it were not for the copyright monopolies granted by the government.

We can debate the merits of patents and copyrights as government mechanisms for financing innovation and creative work, but we can’t deny that they impose a large cost. Arguably, the higher prices we pay as a result of these monopolies comes to over $1 trillion a year, close to half of all after-tax corporate profits.

In the case of prescription drugs alone, patent monopolies and related protections will likely cost us over $400 billion this year. We will spendover $550 billion for drugs that would probably cost us less than $100 billion in a free market without government granted patent monopolies (National Income and Product Accounts, Table 2.4.5U, Line 121). By contrast, we are projectedto spend $663 billion in interest payments on the debt. If we added in the higher costs due to patent and copyright monopolies on other items, it would almost certainly dwarf the interest payments on the debt.

It is bizarre that people who endlessly obsess about the burden of the debt literally never talk about the burdens created by government-granted patent and copyright monopolies. This failure to address this massive burden created by government policy might cause one to question the sincerity of their concern about the burden of the debt.

Dean Baker: Will Biden Pull It Out in the 14th?

 I'm betting Dean is right on this......I think PK is having an elite-downer attack this week.

Will Biden Pull It Out in the 14th?

Like everyone else, I have been following the negotiations between the White House and House Republicans over the debt ceiling. I know that many of my comrades are worried that Biden is being played and will have to give up the store to save the economy. Paul Krugman laid out this case in his columntoday.

I understand their concerns, but remain an optimist on this. First, Biden has been around the block on this one more than anyone. He may well have been expecting respectable types to act a bit more respectable and to lean on the Republicans to reach a deal.

But, Biden also knows that these respectable types are totally willing to deal with Donald Trump, a vicious anti-Semite and racist, who has open contempt for American democracy and the rule of law. The elites in the media and the business community will not stick their necks out for the good of the country. He had every reason to expect that they would take the cautious route and do the “both sides” routine we see them doing now.

Surely Biden recognized this was a real possibility and was prepared for it. What does that mean? To my view, it means that after engaging in negotiations with Republicans, who are asking for absurd concessions based on their four-seat advantage in one house of Congress, he says that he will spend the money Congress told him spend, whether or not this means crashing the debt ceiling.

I don’t have any legal analysis to add to the work done by Lawrence Tribe and others. I do have to say that I find it delicious that the wording on the debt in the 14th Amendment was put there to deal with pretty much exactly the situation we face today: a gang of former confederates gain control of Congress and look to wreck the economy to avenge their defeat in the Civil War.

So, is Biden also thinking of invoking the 14thAmendment and saying that the government is not constrained by Republican efforts to default on the debt? I can’t say. I also can’t say what the Republican Supreme Court will do.

But many of us have underestimated Biden before. He managed to get an amazing amount of important legislation through a 50-50 Senate, and with only a narrow Democratic majority in the House. It doesn’t seem likely that he would walk into negotiations with a Republican Speaker indebted to the party’s biggest loons without a backup plan.

I guess we will know the answer on this one soon enough.

Flush With Federal Money, Strings Attached, a Deep South Factory Votes to Unionize

Flush With Federal Money, Strings Attached, a Deep South Factory Votes to Unionize

Friday’s victory by the United Steelworkers at a factory building electric school buses was a test for Democratic hopes that clean-energy funding from Washington could bolster organized labor.

Workers at a rural Georgia factory that builds electric school buses under generous federal subsidies voted to unionize on Friday, handing organized labor and Democrats a surprise victory in their hopes to turn huge new infusions of money from Washington into a union beachhead in the Deep South.


The company, Blue Bird in Fort Valley, Ga., may lack the cachet of Amazon or the ubiquity of Starbucks, two other corporations that have attracted union attention. But the 697-to-435 vote by Blue Bird’s workers to join the United Steelworkers was the first significant organizing election at a factory receiving major federal funding under legislation signed by President Biden.

“This is just a bellwether for the future, particularly in the South, where working people have been ignored,” Liz Shuler, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said Friday evening after the vote. “We are now in a place where we have the investments coming in and a strategy for lifting up wages and protections for a good high-road future.”

The three bills making up that investment include a $1 trillion infrastructure package, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy to combat climate change.




Each of the bills included language to help unions expand their membership, and Blue Bird’s management, which opposed the union drive, had to contend with the Democrats’ subtle assistance to the Steelworkers.


Image
Banners appeared outside the Blue Bird plant in the period leading up to the union vote.Credit...Jonathan Weisman/The New York Times



Blue Bird stands to benefit from the new federal funds. Last year, it hailed the $500 million that the Biden administration was providing through the infrastructure bill for the replacement of diesel-powered school buses with zero- and low-emission buses. Georgia school systems alone will get $51.1 million to buy new electric buses, but Blue Bird sells its buses across the country. Still more money will come through the Inflation Reduction Act, another law praised by the company.

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But that money came with strings attached — strings that subtly tilted the playing field toward the union. Just two weeks ago, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the Clean School Bus Program, pushed a demand on all recipients of federal subsidies to detail the health insurance, paid leave, retirement and other benefits they were offering their workers.

They also required the companies to have “committed to remain neutral in any organizing campaign and/or to voluntarily recognize a union based on a show of majority support.” And under the rules of the infrastructure bill, no federal money may to be used to thwart a union election.




The Steelworkers union used the rules to its advantage. In late April, it filed multiple unfair labor practice charges against Blue Bird’s management, citing $40 million in rebates the company had received from the E.P.A., which stipulated that those funds could not be used for anti-union activity.


“The rules say if workers want a union, you can’t use any money to hire anti-union law firms, or use people to scare workers,” Daniel Flippo, director of the Steelworkers district that covers the Southeast, said before the vote. “I’m convinced Blue Bird has done that.”

Politicians also got involved. Georgia’s two Democratic senators and southwestern Georgia’s Democratic House member also subtly nudged the plant’s management, in a union-hostile but politically pivotal state, to at least keep the election fair.

“I have been a longtime supporter of the USW and its efforts to improve labor conditions and living standards for workers in Georgia,” the Democratic congressman, Representative Sanford Bishop, wrote of the United Steelworkers in an open letter to Blue Bird workers. “I want to encourage you in your effort to exercise your rights granted by the National Labor Relations Act.”

Blue Bird’s management minimized such pressure in its public statements, even as it fought hard to beat back union organizers.





“Although we respect and support the right for employees to choose, we do not believe that Blue Bird is better served by injecting a labor union into our relationship with employees,” said Julianne Barclay, a spokeswoman for the company. “During the pending election campaign, we have voiced our opinion to our employees that a union is not in the best interest of the company or our employees.”

Friday’s union victory has the labor movement thinking big as the federal money continues to flow, and that could be good for Mr. Biden and other Democrats, especially in the pivotal state of Georgia.

“Workers at places like Blue Bird, in many ways, embody the future,” Mr. Flippo said after the vote, adding, “For too long, corporations cynically viewed the South as a place where they could suppress wages and working conditions because they believed they could keep workers from unionizing.”

The Blue Bird union shop, 1,400 workers strong, will be one of the biggest in the South, and union leaders said it could be a beachhead as they eyed new electric vehicle suppliers moving in — and potentially the biggest, most difficult targets: foreign electric vehicle makers like Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, which have located in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina in part to avoid unions.

“Companies move there for a reason — they want as smooth a path toward crushing unions as possible,” said Steve Smith, a national spokesman for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “But we have federal money rolling in, a friendly administration and a chance to make inroads like we have never had before.”

Deen Baker defends the Biden Economy

via Patreon

We now have the greatest economy ever. I'm saying that because President Biden won't and everyone knows damn well that if Donald Trump was in the White House, and we had the same economic situation, he would be boasting about the greatest economy ever all the time. Every Republican politician in the country would be touting the greatest economy ever. And, all the political reporters would be writing stories about how the strong economy will make it difficult for the Democrats to beat Trump in the next election.[1]

Incredibly we are seeing stories about how the economy is a liability for Biden and the Democrats. We don't know what is in people's heads and how they think about the economy, but the basic points are very straightforward.

Starting with unemployment, the current unemployment rate of 3.4 percent is the lowest in more than half a century. More than any time in this period, people who want a job are able to get one. The unemployment rate for Blacks is at 4.7 percent, the lowest number on record. The unemployment rate for Black teens stands at 12.9 percent, which unfortunately, is the lowest on record.

We can flip this over and also talk about the good news with people getting jobs. Many people left the labor market during the pandemic, but we are now seeing comparable or higher rates of labor force participation and employment for most demographic groups.

The overall employment to population rate (EPOP) for prime age workers (ages 25 to 54) stood at 80.8 percent in April, 0.2 percentage points above its pre-pandemic peak. For prime age women the EPOP stood at 75.1 percent last month. This is not just higher than its pre-pandemic peak, it is the highest EPOP for prime age women ever.

Not only are people able to get jobs, but they have had unprecedented ability to leave jobs they don't like. The percentage of workers quitting their job in a month increased to 3.0 percent In October of 2021 and again last April. Its prior peak was 2.4 percent. It is now down to 2.5 percent, which is probably a more sustainable rate, but still above the previous peak.

There also was a huge boom in mortgage refinancing since the pandemic. Before interest rates began to rise last year, more than 20 million people were able to refinance their mortgages. The average interest savingfrom refinancing was over $2,000 a year.

We have also seen an explosion in the number of people working from home. Before the pandemic, roughly 5 percent of the workforce worked from home. Now the figure is closeto 30 percent. That comes to more than 45 million people. These people are saving themselves thousands of dollars a year in commuting costs and related expenses. In addition they are saving hundreds of hours a year they would have otherwise spent commuting.

While working from home is a benefit largely restricted to more educated and higher paid workers, lower paid workers have also been doing well in the recovery. Research by Arin Dube, David Autor, and Annie McGrew shows that much of the wage inequality we have seen grow in the last four decades has been reversed in the last three years. While there is still far to go, workers in the bottom 20 percent of the wage distribution are seeing their pay grow far more rapidly than those at the middle or top of the wage distribution.

The broader wage picture is more mixed. Workers were hit by the worldwide inflation resulting from the pandemic, but are again coming out ahead of inflation. For all workers, the average hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, just reached its pre-pandemic level last month, but over the last six months it has been growing at a 0.9 percent annual rate. In keeping with the Autor, Dube, and McGrew findings, the average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers, a category that excludes roughly 20 percent of mostly higher paid workers, is 1.3 percent above its pre-pandemic level. It has been rising at a 1.9 percent annual rate over the last six months.

We also have seen a large increase in homeownership from the period just before the pandemic. The overall rate of homeownership stoodat 60.0 percent in first quarter of this year, up from 65.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019, just before the pandemic. For people under age 35 the increase was 1.6 percentage points, from 37.6 percent to 39.3 percent in the most recent quarter. The homeownership rate for Black households increased by 1.8 percentage points from 44.0 percent to 45.8 percent.

The homeownership rate for Hispanics increased by 1.6 percentage points, from 48.1 percent to 49.7 percent. And, for households with incomes below the median, the homeownership rate increased by 2.0 percentage points, from 51.4 percent to 53.4 percent.

We are also seeing a hugely accelerated transition to clean energy. Electric car sales in the U.S. are up more than 70 percent from their year ago level. Solar energy installations in 2023 are expected to exceed their previous peak in 2021 by 40 percent. Wind power generation capacity is also increasingrapidly.

These are all really good stories that we can tell about the economy. They are especially impressive given that we have gone through a worldwide pandemic and are seeing the largest war among wealthy countries since World War II.

Does this amount to the greatest economy ever? That's a tough call. We expect living standards to improve over time as technology improves, people become better educated and we get a larger and better capital stock.

The real question is the rate of improvement. By that score, it would be hard to beat the decades of the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. We saw a quarter century of generally low unemployment and rapid economic growth, from which the gains were widely shared.

Also, while we have seen some gains for those in the bottom half of the income distribution, we are still seeing falling life expectancies for this group. That is not due to strictly economic factors, but clearly economics does play an important role.

But these realities would not have stopped Donald Trump from proclaiming the "greatest economy ever." They certainly didn't before the pandemic. So, grading on a curve, we can declare Biden's economy the greatest ever.

[1] Of course, Trump would not be eligible to run for a third term, but again, this is a hypothetical.

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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

Enlighten Radio

Socialist Economics

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The Economic Costs of America’s Conflict with China

 via Project Syndicate: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-costs-of-china-america-conflict-by-stephen-s-roach-2023-04

The Economic Costs of America’s Conflict with China
Apr 24, 2023STEPHEN S. ROACH


In a wide-ranging speech on the US-China relationship, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reversed the terms of engagement with China, prioritizing national-security concerns over economic considerations. The US case, however, rests not on hard evidence but on the presumption of China's nefarious intent.


NEW HAVEN – Five years into a once-unthinkable trade war with China, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen chose her words carefully on April 20. In a wide-ranging speech, she reversed the terms of US engagement with China, prioritizing national-security concerns over economic considerations. That formally ended a 40-year emphasis on economics and trade as the anchor to the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Yellen’s stance on security was almost confrontational: “We will not compromise on these concerns, even when they force trade-offs with our economic interests.”

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Yellen’s view is very much in line with the strident anti-China sentiment that has now gripped the United States. The “new Washington consensus,” as Financial Times columnist Edward Luce calls it, maintains that engagement was the original sin of the US-China relationship, because it gave China free rein to take advantage of America’s deal-focused naiveté. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 gets top billing in this respect: the US opened its markets, but China purportedly broke its promise to become more like America. Engagement, according to this convoluted but widely accepted argument, opened the door to security risks and human-rights abuses. American officials are now determined to slam that door shut.

There is more to come. President Joe Biden is about to issue an executive order that will place restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI) by US firms in certain “sensitive technologies” in China, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The US rejects the Chinese allegation that these measures are aimed at stifling Chinese development. Like sanctions against the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and those being considered against the social-media app TikTok, this one, too, is being justified under the amorphous guise of national security.

The US case rests not on hard evidence but on the presumption of nefarious intent tied to China’s dual-purpose military-civilian fusion. Yet the US struggles with its own security fusion – namely, the fuzzy distinction between America’s under-investment in innovation and the real and imagined threats of Chinese technology.

Significantly, Yellen’s speech put both superpowers on the same page. At the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress last October, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s opening message also stressed national security. With both countries equally fearful of the security threat that each poses to the other, the shift from engagement to confrontation is mutual.

Yellen is entirely correct in framing this shift as a tradeoff. But she only hinted at the economic consequences of conflict. Quantifying these consequences is not simple. But the American public deserves to know what is at stake when its leaders rethink a vitally important economic relationship. Some fascinating new research goes a long way toward addressing this issue.



A just-published study by the International Monetary Fund (summarized in the April 2023 World Economic Outlook) takes a first stab at identifying the costs. IMF economists view the problem through the lens of “slowbalization”: the reduction of cross-border flows of goods and capital, reflected in geostrategic strategies of “reshoring” (bringing offshore production back home) and what Yellen herself has called “friend-shoring” (shifting offshore production from adversaries to like-minded members of alliances).

Such actions result in “dual bloc” FDI fragmentation. The IMF estimates that the formation of a US bloc and a China bloc could reduce global output by as much as 2% over the longer term. As the world’s largest economy, America will account for a significant share of foregone output.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde recently stressed a different channel through which an escalating US-China conflict could adversely affect economic performance. Drawing on research by ECB staff, she focuses on the higher costs and inflation resulting from supply-chain disruptions implied by conflict-driven FDI fragmentation. The ECB study concludes that geostrategic conflict could boost inflation by as much as 5% in the short run and around 1% over the longer term. Collateral effects on monetary policy and financial stability would follow.

Collectively, these model-based calculations of the costs of conflict imply a stagflationary combination of lower output and higher inflation – hardly a trivial consideration in today’s fragile economic climate. And they dovetail with economic theory. Countries trade with others to reap the benefits of comparative advantage. Both inward and outward flows of foreign investment seek to achieve similar benefits, offering offshore efficiencies for multinational corporations that face higher costs in their home markets and attracting foreign capital to support domestic capacity expansion and job creation. Regardless of their different political systems and economic structures, this is true for both America and China. It follows that conflict will reduce these benefits.

Yet there is an important twist for the US: a chronic shortfall of domestic saving casts the economic consequences of conflict with China in a very different light. In 2022, net US saving – the depreciation-adjusted saving of households, businesses, and the government sector – fell to just 1.6% of national income, far below the longer-term 5.8% average from 1960 to 2020. Lacking in saving and wanting to invest and grow, the US takes full advantage of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s dominant reserve currency and freely imports surplus saving from abroad, running a massive current-account and multilateral trade deficit to attract foreign capital.

As such, the economic interests of saving-short America are tightly aligned with its outsize imbalances of trade and capital flows. Barring a highly unlikely resurgence of domestic US saving, compromising those flows for any reason – say, security concerns over China – is not without meaningful economic and financial consequences. The research cited above suggests those consequences will take the form of slower economic growth, higher inflation, and possibly a weaker dollar.

This is hardly an ideal outcome for a US economy that is already at a precarious point in the business cycle. The tradeoff for national security should not be taken lightly. Nor should the US penchant to over-hype the security threat be accepted on blind faith.