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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 25, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In Delaware, Corporations Are Dangerously Close to Acquiring the Right to Vote 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 6-22-2023]

Again He breaks the law and his cult members have to pony up to pay his expenses: Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees. The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch. When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America. But internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America.

From Amy Walters at The Cook Report: For a while now, political prognosticators and armchair campaign analysts have mused that the GOP presidential primary is almost a carbon copy of the 2016 contest. A crowded field of candidates, few of whom are willing to confront Donald Trump directly, will once again ensure that Trump will roll-up primary wins and ultimately capture the nomination in 2024.  Yet it’s also true that things are very different from the 2016 cycle.  First, Trump is a lot more popular among Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters than he was in 2015-2016.  A Marist poll taken in July 2015 found just 41% of Republicans had favorable opinions of Trump compared to 49% who viewed him unfavorably. By July 2016, most Republicans had warmed to the GOP nominee, but a considerable percentage still viewed him unfavorably: 65% favorable to 29% unfavorable. This month, the former president — who has been indicted in two cases, found liable in a battery and defamation lawsuit and faces more potential legal jeopardy stemming from his role in the Jan.

Nobody really knows… The internet is recommending this early analysis from Yaroslav Trofimov in the WSJ of the failed Russian coup over the weekend. I thought I would share some of it: One widely shared conclusion in Russia, however, was that none of the key players in the power struggle that began when Prigozhin seized the southern city of Rostov on Saturday morning has been strengthened by the ordeal that brought the country to the edge of civil war. Putin, who earlier in the day demanded his security forces crush what he described as a treasonous mutiny, ordered amnesties for Prigozhin and his men by the evening, after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko negotiated a face-saving compromise. Prigozhin, who showed Wagner’s strength by marching two-thirds of the way toward Moscow with little opposition, ended up aborting the rebellion and accepting, at least for now, exile in Belarus. The Russian army and security forces, meanwhile, displayed little glory as their troops proved reluctant, if not outright afraid, to try stopping Wagner. Flying Russian flags, large Wagner columns on Sunday were driving south on the Moscow-Rostov highway.

You’ll be shocked You know you want one. Now there’s a study to support why: Millions of Americans who had never owned a gun purchased a firearm during a two-and-a-half-year period that began in January 2019, before the pandemic, and continued through April 2021. Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during that period, 5.4 million had until then lived in homes without guns, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University estimated. The new buyers were different from the white men who have historically made up a majority of gun owners. Half were women, and nearly half were people of color (20 percent were Black, and 20 percent were Hispanic). “The people who were always buying are still buying — they didn’t stop. But a whole other community of folks have come in,” said Michael Anestis, the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “The real question I wanted to answer was, What do people get out of having a gun?” said Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Det är inte lätt alltid att vara PK …

Ah, the good ol’ days! Do you remember #SecondCivilWarLetters? When in 2018 Alex Jones announced a Second Civil War starting on the 4th of July? Twitter erupted in mockery with Ken Burns-ish “letters” from the front? Nikki Haley touched off a sort of reprise (though much less fun) on Saturday with one tweet It was blowback a go-go! Seriously? Medhi Hasan: It was so simple when she was growing up that, per her own memoir, she wasn’t allowed to be in a child beauty pageant because it was divided into Black kids and white kids and she was neither. The good ol’ days! That memory probably makes Nikki smile now. Roger Sollenberger: When Nikki was growing up, she sure had it simple — the president of the HBCU where her father was a professor was shot by cops in the Orangeburg massacre while protesting racial segregation Ted Lieu: Dear @NikkiHaley: I remember growing up, when folks called me Chink. Threw eggs at our house. Slashed our tires. Called the police on us because they thought Asians like us were stealing wild ducks for food. And no one in government looked like me or you. Jeff Sharlet: 1970s?

Flamman (F): Först och främst, vad är MMT? Lars Pålsson Syll (LPS): I grunden är det en reaktion på sättet som pengar och hur de skapas beskrivs i den traditionella ekonomiska litteraturen. Där beskrivs pengar som något som man sparar genom att  in dem på banken, och som banken i sin tur kan låna ut […]

The ranting about “communism” from Trump and the right is unsettlingly familiar.

The post Trump’s “Final Battle” appeared first on The Intercept.

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: WGA/DGA/SAG-AFTRA/AMPTP, Rick and Morty, Superman & Lois, Justified: City Primeval, Doctor Who, and more!

Some of Doctor Who's most emotional moments all share a common thematic thread: the fear of being forgotten after one's gone.

Suppose there is a series of Bernoulli trials, that each trial has the same probability p of success, and that the trials are independent—like the standard model of coin tossing, treating ‘heads’ as ‘success.’ Then the Law of Large Numbers guarantees that the rate of successes converges (in probability) to the probability of success. If […]

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“Without TCM, classic movies will die and with them, part of our culture.” -from the “TCM Mantra” In 1994, media mogul Ted Turner launched Turner Classic Movies, a commercial-free subscription channel dedicated to airing uncut classic and deep-catalog films ranging from the silent era to the early 80s. At the time of its inception, TCM’s only real “competitor” in the cable market was American Movie Classics, which operated under a very similar programming philosophy. However, by the early 2000s, AMC (for assorted business reasons) was interrupting film presentations with commercial breaks; and once the channel went down that road, they were soon kowtowing to ad agency and sponsor demands – e.g., being pressed to incorporate more contemporary films into their programming. By default TCM was now the sole haven for classic film buffs on cable TV. Consequently, over the ensuing years TCM has built a sizeable, passionate, and fiercely loyal coterie of fans (myself among them), as well as a (mostly) genial social media community (we’re not unlike the Deadheads; albeit more Ty Power than tie-dyed).

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Aaaaaand… a view from a Real American:

Lot’s of palm trees and sunshine in both states but that’s where the similarities end: Florida Governor and floundering presidential candidate Ron DeSantis traveled to California’s Bay Area this past week to fundraise and to cut a new ad. He stands on a San Francisco street corner and portrays the city as a lawless, drug-infested hellhole that people are fleeing, in favor of Florida, because of “leftist policies.” But he offered no statistics to back up his claims. Here’s one stat he should know, from the CDC: Drug overdose mortality by state, per 100,000 residents, for 2021 Florida: 37.5 (18th worst state) California: 26.6 (35th worst state) It’s really galling to have most of the country subjected to this calumny about California every single day by assholes like DeSantis when their own states are actually much worse off. I really wish that Democrats would start fighting fire with fire on this stuff.

Well said. It’s been a year and we are seeing the ramifications of the repeal of Roe v Wade. It’s as bad as we could have anticipated. As she says, women are dying, families are in crisis, lives are being ruined. By the way, don’t rest on your laurals if you live in a blue state. Yesterday at the faith and Freedom convention, Mike Pence backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a 15 week national abortion ban. Graham was there and proclaimed, “we’ll be saving babies in California.” “Fucking angry” doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to that.

Putin may yet suffer the fate of many czars before him: a military uprising fueled by the blowback of a failing war.

The post Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Threatened Uprising Against Putin Echoes Russia’s History of Wars Gone Bad appeared first on The Intercept.

Could history repeat? In his speech, Putin kept referencing 1917, which stuck many people as … bizarre. Here’s Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic on how apt it might be: The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real. Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

The public deserves to know who our Ministers are meeting with. The news today that former Cabinet Minister Stuart Robert met consulting firm Accenture to discuss a $111 million federal project, triggering probity concerns, shows it’s time we publish Ministerial diaries. The public should know who Ministers are meeting and why, and they should know Continue reading »

A plan for Africans to take control of Africa and make it prosperous, fair and low carbon. Price of solar panels falling again. Protection for Macquarie Island’s wildlife. Creating a prosperous future and a just transition for 1 billion There’s a large landmass south of Europe. It’s call Africa. You may have heard about it. Continue reading »