Book Review: “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” by T.J. Stiles
“ Alexis de Toqueville later would observe that the ‘respect, attachment, and service’ that held men together in aristocratic societies had disappeared in America; now they were bound by 'money only' "
T.J. Stiles’ Pulitzer Prize winning biography is a great story of Vanderbilt the man, but an equally engaging portrait of the seismic changes that America went through from the revolution through the nineteenth century. When Vanderbilt was born the US was an agrarian nation largely dominated by a hereditary elite transplanted from the old world. Most people worked on independent farms or ran their own stores and few had really heard of a “corporation”. The early American market was essentially crony capitalism - some important family was given a legal monopoly to handle all the passenger boats on the Hudson, for instance. Competition just wasn’t really a thing in many major industries.
Into this old money world strode Vanderbilt, a half-literate rough guy who grew up on the shipping docks, a world where disputes were regularly settled with fistfights. Stiles describes him as epitome of the “commercial man,” with a complete disregard for any human niceties if they didn’t make dollars and sense. He even made his wife pay for their (ten!) kids’ food and education out of her own purse, despite his growing wealth, and rarely saw his family at all. In fact he lived on his boat so that he could make passenger runs seven days a week, his life and business inseparable to such an extent that when his ship was destroyed in a fire, the news reported he had literally lost every article of clothing he owned.
Vanderbilt didn’t give a crap about the monopolies, they were in his way; “law, rank, the traditional social bonds -- these things meant nothing to him. Only power earned his respect”. Soon he met William Gibbons, a plantation owning aristocrat who was to play hero to the common man and the common market, because he developed a profound grudge against the (identical) old money family that commanded New York’s shipping monopoly, and decided he would dedicate his fortune to destroying them. Vanderbilt ended up being his chief in this battle, running competitor ships at rock bottom rates to force the monopolists to lower their own rates past what they could afford.
Stiles takes pains to illustrate what an unusual idea this was, for two businesses to compete with one another in a way that resulted in things being cheaper for customers. Again and again he quotes intellectuals and leading families describing how aghast they are at this ungentlemanly practice. The battle raged on with hilarious twists and turns, such as Gibbons lobbying the New Jersey government to pass a law that said he could impound any rivals ships if they impounded his own under New York monopoly law, or Vanderbilt escaping the New York police by having his men cut the ship loose from the dock as soon as the police boarded, and then explaining to them that they had lost their jurisdiction after floating into New Jersey waters.
All this culminated in the Supreme Court ruling Gibbons vs Ogden, which largely spelled the death knell of old families being simply given monopoly rights by a certain state over a major industry. For the first time raw competition was a major dynamic being introduced into the American market, seismically changing the culture and economy from sclerotic aristocratic fiefdoms into a frenzy of hustlers, producers and entrepreneurs. The elites losing their economic privilege is spelled out over a backdrop of them losing many of their political and cultural privileges as well. Martin Van Buren’s Bucktails oversaw the expansion, against the screams of the conservative aristocrat families, of the right to vote to almost all white men, and soon Andrew Jackson ushered in the “era of the common man”.
While the Jacksonians shared Vanderbilt’s hatred of an elite given special favors by the government, they differed in a general distrust of the emerging, advanced, “artificial” economic arrangements. They considered banks no different than shipping monopolies, and the practice of lending in excess of reserves to be no better than a ponzi scheme. As for the defining economic innovation of the era: “the implications were frightful. Since [corporations] ‘live forever,' fretted Massachusetts governor Marcus Morteon, their property was 'holden in perpetual succession' - unlike individuals, whose estates were divided upon death. Eventually corporations would own everything”.
T.J. Stiles describes here America on the precipice of great change, of a “real” world of builders and farmers, of the self-employed, of money linked to hard gold, into a world of abstractions, of corporations, finance, and fiat currency, of men divided into capitalists and laborers. And herein lies the beginning of the end of Vanderbilt as hero of the common man, because while he shared their love of competition, he became master of these new economic instruments.
Vanderbilt’s steamboat lines multiplied many times over and he became an incredibly rich man. After the establishment of the Oregon territory, to integrate the nation, mail and people had to be shipped down to Nicaragua, transported overland and then sail back up to California. Here Vanderbilt competed directly with government subsidized shipping lines and came to provide an essential part of the modern American infrastructure of expansion and gold rush settlements. When filibuster William Walker conquered Nicaragua, Vanderbilt out of his own pocket financed the Costa Rican effort to overthrow him.
From ships to horses to trains, of course trains. One by one Vanderbilt bought up train lines and turned them into one gigantic, interconnected system that was to form the backbone of the exploding postwar economy. Up until then, corporations were still thought of as being created for some specific public service, commissioned by the government, and given a temporary lifespan with a clear ending. It was railroads that truly pulled corporations out of this mold and established them as enterprises owned wholly by private individuals, for profit, and able to continue on forever. Railroads became the largest single industry in America by far, the first real industry (along with telegraphs) that crossed state lines and directly knit together different corners and markets of the country. Their vast, complex nature necessitated the creation of workers entirely dedicated to managing the endless staff and bureaucratic needs of the era’s new behemoths. Likewise, the rise of a mass of workers who would now work their entire life as wage laborers, rather than as independent farmers, shopkeepers or artisans, became complete as well, and with the modern battle lines of capitalists and laborers now made real, the rise of mass unionization and labor conflict soon emerged as well.
As Vanderbilt went from being hero of the common man to villain, his arc paralleled the seismic changes of the broader era. When elites of old were dividing the economy into their personal fiefdoms, his competition was hailed as populist and radical, finally bringing down prices and proving that ordinary folk could take a stab at the market and make something of themselves. However, as he and the tycoons become more and more powerful, till their market dominance allowed them incredible sway over the economy, the free market came to be seen as the conservative tool of the new elites, and populist forces demanded regulation. Did the end result end up replicating the old order of the aristocrats? Well, I’ll let you be the judge. I’ll close by quoting at length:
It was clear that the forces he helped to put in motion were remaking the economic, political, social, and cultural landscape of the United States. There was the transparently obvious: the dramatically improved transportation facilities that allowed Americans to fill in the continent, the creation of enormous wealth in new business enterprises; and the railroads’ economic integration of the nation, bringing distant farms, ranches, mines, workshops, and factories into a single market, one that both lowered prices and dislocated communities (The new availability of western foodstuffs, for example, uprooted New England farmers.) And there was the less obvious, such as the emergence of a new political matrix in which Americans struggled to balance the wealth, productivity and mobility wrought by the railroads and other industries with their anxiety over the concentration of vast economic power into the hands of a few gigantic corporations...
Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence - what scholar Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation of America,” a cultural dimension of “managerial revolution” or “visible hand” that business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. identified. More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household; the young Jay Gould, for example, had helped families determine when the sun was at its height so they could set their clocks to noon. But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883, writes Trachtenberg, these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”...
At the forefront stood Cornelius Vanderbilt, child of the eighteenth century, master of the nineteenth, maker of the centuries to come.
Transnational Thursdays 4
Thanks to @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola for the name. As before, all folks are encouraged to add to any of these or to add coverage of any countries they’re interested in, the more the merrier.
Argentina
Despite recent polls showing the libertarian Javier Millei in a three way tie with mainstream parties for the presidential election, 60% of voters oppose his proposal of dollarization and no candidate of his scored above 15% in the provincial elections. Juntos por el Cambio, the Center Right opposition party, scored big in the long time Peronist stronghold of San Luis and otherwise the mainstream parties consolidated their holds on the provinces they already governed. They are supposed to formally announce coalitions this morning so I may edit that in later.
The government has announced another debt swap as part of their ongoing effort to restructure debt obligations. Inflation continues to climb at breakneck speeds from 100% a few weeks ago to 149% this week.
Colombia
President Gustavo Petro has successfully negotiated a six month cease fire with the rebel group ELN*, starting in August. This is a major victory for internal stability and fulfills one of Petro’s central campaign promises. Unfortunately he doesn’t have much time to celebrate as the conservative Attorney General continues his investigations into corruption in the Petro’s Administration, this time looking into alleged illegal campaign financing.
- A previous edition of these said Petro was formerly part of ELN, that was my mistake; he was a member of M19
Guatemala
Guatemala’s high profile persecution of a journalist critical of the regime has ended in a widely criticized sentence of six years. Elections are Sunday the 25th (though they will likely go to a runoff in August). After banning the three most popular anti-establishment candidates, the remaining candidates are all different flavors of establishment, frequently literally the children of previous Presidents. Most noticeable is Zury Ríos, daughter of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, famous for his (US backed) genocide of the indigenous Mayans. Ríos is a controversial figure for her defense of her father, and has run twice before and never finished better than third. However, she is currently the front runner (following Carlos Pineda being banned), running on a campaign of imitating Salvadoran President Bukele’s security approach for the gangs in Guatemala. She is trailed by Sandra Torres of the Social-Democrat party, former First Lady and runner up in the previous two elections, possibly headed for a third.
Turkey
JP Morgan estimates that Erdogan will kick off his new term by finally raising interest rates possibly up 25%. They predict a recession in the short term, but hopefully the pain needn’t be long if they can restore the confidence of international investors. Foreign Policy expects his new term to be defined by a continually assertive foreign policy, especially as a broker in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and now the Balkans as well. NATO continues to largely be at Turkey’s whims with regards to Sweden’s accession.
Iran
Three months after the Saudi-Iran Peace Accords, Iran has yet to deescalate on any front. The war in Yemen rages on, Iranians have repeatedly targeted Americans in Syria, interfered with sea trade (1,2), and continued to direct their proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine to shell Israel. The Biden Administration, long having given up on resurrecting a nuclear deal and unwilling to go full force against Iran, has listed towards steady de-escalation, foregoing retaliation against Iran for its attacks or build up of uranium reserves, and allowing it to skirt some sanctions and access previously frozen funds.
India
45,000 people have been evacuated from India’s Gujarat State (and 60,000 from neighboring Pakistan’s Sindh Province) in anticipation of Thursday’s Biparjoy Cyclone. Ethnic violence in BJP dominated Manipur State has reached highly serious levels: “More than 130 people have died in the state, and another 60,000 displaced from their homes. People have ransacked 4,573 weapons from police armories and destroyed 250 churches. So grave is the situation that many residents have chosen to escape to neighboring Myanmar, where the ruling military junta is conducting aerial bombing campaigns against its own citizens.” @self_made_human any details to add?
Eritrea
Eritrea is pretty much never in the news because of its extreme political isolation under the thirty year dictatorship of Isiais Afwerki, who looks like your friendly neighbor over the fence but who actually turned Eritrea into one of the least free countries in the world, frequently coming in dead last for freedom of press and recently hitting a three way tie with North Korea and Mauritania for prevalence of slavery. However, after sixteen years of absence, Eritrea has decided to rejoin the East African regional block, Inter-Governmental Authority on Development. This will restore trade ties as well as security collaboration channels.
Sudan
The latest 24 hour ceasefire ended and violence began again immediately, with fighting increasingly growing more in the RSF home base of Darfur. “More than 1.6 million people to leave their homes for safer areas inside Sudan, according to the International Organization for Migration. About 530,000 others fled to the neighboring countries of Egypt, South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic, and Libya.”
Nigeria
Nigeria’s Progressive new leader Bola Tinubu officially took the Presidency two weeks ago and started things off with a bang by ending a fuel subsidy that strained Nigeria’s finances. This caused fuel prices to immediately spike, sending off significant unrest throughout the country. Bloomberg reports that an internal government committee has recommended Nigeria continue to sell off its state assets in oil, killing two birds with one stone by raising finances and boosting efficiency in the petroleum sector, thus ideally helping to fulfill Tinubu’s ambitious campaign pledge to triple oil production.
Tinubu has also suspended and has now arrested the head of the Central Bank Godwin Emefiele. The charges are vague and based around economic mismanagement, specifically around a controversial policy that caused a currency shortage. However, it’s worth noting Emefiele was Tinubu’s opponent in his party’s primary so is something of a political rival.
Jihadist attacks have spiked recently as well, which does not bode well for Tinubu’s campaign promise to restore peace. However, the new National Assembly has now been sworn in with Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress party holding majorities in both chambers, so he can begin to appoint a cabinet and make use of his mandate to address the twin maladies of the economy and terrorism.
From Institution Building to Identity Building and Back Again
Tanner Greer’s “Lessons from the Nineteenth Century” is the latest in a series on the decline of American self-governance and institution building.
He offers a comparison between the reaction to the Spanish Flu and Covid-19. In 1918 Americans sprung into action, organized committees on sanitation and medical care, delegated responsibilities, held regular meetings. When the crisis was over these committees had stern handshakes all round and then disbanded, not to burden America with ever more bureaucracy.
In contrast, during the early months of Covid no one seemed to know who was responsible, the major agencies all gave contradictory information that varied week-to-week, grassroots initiative was scattered and weak.
Seemingly we've forgotten how to do what our recent ancestors easily could. Nowadays Americans largely don’t practice addressing problems by creating their own organizations with formal structures and set goals. But back in the day if you were in one of America’s countless settler communities and there was a problem with bandits, or fallen trees covering the road or whatever, there was generally no higher authority to appeal to. If you wanted irrigation, you got together with your friends and you dug some darn ditches.
consider the situation faced by the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager. If he had settled near the frontier, he would had been involved in creating and manning the government bodies that regulated aspects of communal life—the school board, the township, the sheriff’s department, and so forth. Even if he was not a frontiersman, he was a regular attendee at the town, city, county and even state government meetings most relevant to his family’s concerns. Between his wife and he, his family participated in a half dozen committees, chapters, societies, associations, councils, and congregations.
In the last century these self-governed settlers have had their local autonomy worn away by the twin forces of modern bureaucracy and late stage capitalism, rule from the capitol beltway and the corporate boardroom. Greer speaks ably to how bureaucracy's distant web of control weaves through our lives from thousands of miles away. I’m more interested in what capitalism and wage labor have done to the American psyche, taking us from a world of self-employed farmers, builders, artisans, and shopowners, to a nation of people who show up when we’re told, eat during designated breaks, and ask permission to go to the bathroom. I’ll quote one of my favorite passages from T.J. Stiles' biography of Vanderbilt:
Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence ... More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household...But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883...these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”
The collapse of bottom-up institution building into the modern age of subjects-rather-than-citizens is Greer’s answer both to dilemmas raised by the left, but even more by the “New Right” (notice how different the portrayal of the self-actualized American settler is from the reactionary trope of the idealized beach bum-citizen, unconcerned with his distant dictatorial government). No, Greer says, the malaise in modern society didn’t start in 1776, or with the Enlightenment, or with the reformation. It started when people lost the ability to have a say creating their own world and had to turn solipsistically inward to feel any agency at all:
This week I finished listening to an episode titled “Hellenism and the Birth of the Self.” The parallels between the Hellenistic trends Metzger describes and the problems of the current moment are worth pondering...
Destroyed: a world of cohesive, tradition bound city states whose citizens were joined together by shared loyalty to a polity whose fate was set by these same citizens’ own sweat. In its place: a tangle of marauding empires whose political outcomes were decided by the machinations of the distant few in the despot’s court or the mercenary’s camp...Men who led small and bounded worlds now found themselves the playthings of inconstant forces operating on imperial scales.
The intellectual response to these developments was to turn inward...New faiths were focused less on public goods than private salvation...No longer did great thinkers squabble over the form of the ideal polity, or ask what political communities must do to foster good character in their citizens. Hellenistic philosophy was not focused on citizens. It was obsessed with individual ethics...Like the new religions, their focus was on the soul within a man, not the community of men outside him...
To explain this all Metzger quotes historian Peter Green: “The record we have… speaks with some eloquence to the dilemmas that faced a thinking man in a world where, no longer master of his fate, he had to content himself with being, in one way or another, captain of his soul.”
The modern obsession with “expressive individualism,” whether it be gender-bending woke idpol, or right wingers joining neo-paganism or contrived versions of internet catholicism, is what happens when people have no influence over the outside world and instead must turn inward to the only place they have control over: their own identities. It's all just a desperate screaming attempt to regain a semblance of control in a world that has taken that from us. Everyone could win their modern culture war wishlist, but you still won’t have addressed the root issue that’s driven us from the real world and inward down endless black holes.
To end on a positive note, I’ve been a tiny cog in other machines my entire life, but I’ve tasted the kind of self-governance Greer describes. A long time ago I helped run a campaign for a local politician; the whole team was me and my friends, if we needed more staff we had to convince people to work for us, if we wanted people to vote we had to meet them face-to-face and make our damn case. It wasn’t an important race or anything, but the giddy feeling of having a tangible influence on the world around you, of creating something from scratch with your own willpower, has stayed with me ever since. Not so long ago this was just American life. America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice. As the shocked Toqueville said of the people he met in the United States:
there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.
Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here? You can read the report here, an executive summary here, and a transcript of the report being discussed on the Ezra Klein Show here.
Released in June, it’s a statewide study on homelessness in California, the largest of its kind in some thirty years. It’s built on “nearly 3,200 participants, selected intentionally to provide a representative sample, and weighted data to provide statewide estimates. To augment survey responses, we recruited 365 participants to participate in in-depth interviews”. No question as to the state of focus: California is just over a tenth of the American population but nearly a third of its homeless population and nearly half of the unsheltered homeless population.
Approximately one in five participants (19%) entered homelessness from an institution (such as a prison or prolonged jail stay); 49% from a housing situation in which participants didn’t have their name on a lease or mortgage (non-leaseholder), and 32% from a housing situation where they had their name on a lease or mortgage (leaseholder)...Leaseholders reported a median of 10 days notice that they were going to lose their housing, while non-leaseholders reported a median of one day.
Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot. This also aligns with the finding that only about a third of the homeless even sought out government services, suggesting that most people are not taking advantage of whatever unique government services for the homeless California offers (which aren't good anyway). This overall makes some common sense imo - if you’re so broke you don’t have somewhere to live then your options for travel are likely limited as well.
The paper is interesting as a resource in its own right, but I think it’s most useful combined with the claims made in a book referenced in the Ezra Klein discussion of the report: “Homelessness is a Housing Problem.”
The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness. For those who claim that homelessness is mostly a reflection of insanity and addiction, researchers point out that those things are frequently worse in other states with less severe homeless problems (correlations available in the hyperlink).
For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%). The only thing California performs worse than West Virginia on is, predictably, housing costs. Or why does San Francisco, with a poverty rate of 11.4%, have such a worse homelessness problem (0.95%) than much poorer cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, all of which have poverty rates more than twice as high around 23% and homelessness rates around only 0.27%? The clearest answer is the most straightforward: San Francisco is simply twice as expensive to live in (a studio apartment in SF is little over $2k vs a little over 1k for the other three cities). This also lines up with the survey responses, with 89% of respondents saying housing costs were a barrier to them finding housing.
This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens. Jerusalem Demsas compares this to a game of musical chairs: as you take away chairs one by one steadily the slower and weaker kids will find themselves without a place to sit. But if you don’t have enough chairs / are going through a severe housing shortage, of course you’re gonna have a worse chairlessness problem then elsewhere, even if their kids are slower and weaker.
And once you’re out, it can be very hard to get back on your feet. Your credit history is gonna be terrible, as is your appearance. Maybe you live in your car for a while but then it gets impounded because you have nowhere legal to park it and can’t pay for the tickets. Then you’ve lost your shelter as well as your ability to go to a job. From there you’re really in the streets, which is scary - some people may take uppers due to fear of being asleep in public where people can hurt you or steal from you, and thus pick up addictions. Things spiral very fast from bad to worse.
Taken together, these suggest early intervention and a clear policy prescription to build more housing and do what can be done to lower costs - not because every disheveled person on the street is a fresh-faced suburban homeowner waiting to happen, but specifically the opposite - that every poor or unstable person living on the cusp of not being able to afford where they stay bears the risk that it’ll be much harder for them to bounce back from a fall than to sustain where they are.
Interested to hear what other people thought.
Thucydidean Thursdays (International Updates) 3
Are there synonyms for international or global that start with “T”? If people think it’s a good idea I’ll make these their own separate thread. I worry about it getting less engagement than in the main thread, but it would be cool to have a dedicated international relations day.
As before, please feel free to add updates from any countries you're interested in.
Ecuador
A cheeky near-dictator moment was evaded with President Guillermo Lasso, having previously disbanded the National Assembly after being accused of embezzlement, allowing himself to rule by decree, announced yesterday that he would not run for re-election. Coincidentally or not, the US has ben talking about investigating some of his assets in Florida. Surprisingly, his party has said they’re not going to run anyone either. Unfortunately, the nation has also been hit with some nasty floods…
Haiti
…As has Haiti, along with earthquakes. This country can’t catch a break. The US continues its ill fated search to get somebody, anybody else, to lead a regional intervention into Haiti, and is demonstrating its commitment by putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the search. Jamaica will host a meeting of the Caribbean countries next week to plan out further steps.
Colombia
Colombian President Gustavo Petro is in Havana to hopefully sign a peace agreement with his former rebel group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or the ELN. Tensions have been rocky with them throughout his term, and after being buffeted by a series of corruption scandals in his cabinet, this would be a major victory. Other leftists think the supposed crusade against corruption is partisan, and several former and current (ie Lula) Latin American leaders, plus Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon for some reason, have all signed a letter warning of a “soft coup”.
Argentina
Argentina will now formally join the BRICS New Development Bank (Egypt, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabi will probably join as well).This should open up Argentina for more access to financing, mainly via China, who has come to play a larger role funding in Latin America in general. Related: “Taylor Swift Argentina Tickets Are a Bargain With Inflation Over 100%"
The DRC
After the Rwandan genocide a bunch of Hutus fled to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where then-strongman Mobutu allowed them to stay and stage attacks on Rwanda. The new leader of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, pursued them to eliminate the threat; the conflict that followed is legendary for its brutality. The Congo Wars have been formerly over since 2003, but the Hutu paramilitaries were never fully defeated, and now-old President Kagame, still in power thirty years later, funds and arms a Tutsi paramilitary called M23 to fight them on Congolese soil. This has been going on forever, but has attracted a flurry of attention lately. Things became especially acute last year when rebels almost sieged the main Eastern City of Goma, and the DRC has formerly accused the M23 and Rwanda of preparing to stage another attack on the city, which has already become flush with over a million refugees from the conflict. Ironically, the United Nations (or at least a relevant spokesperson) has been calling for the UN Peacekeepers to withdraw and for the DRC to step up handling the rebels themselves. The DRC is also doing terribly in general, with recent protests over falling living standards met with mass tear gas a few days ago.
Ethiopia
The Ethiopian Civil War has been formerly over since November. However, Human Rights Watch has accused the government of continuing to ethnically cleanse the Tigray minority, accusations the government of course denies. Some 47,000 refugees are estimated to have fled to Sudan; the number internally displaced is unknown but assuredly much higher. Ethiopia is also now dealing with new border issues, having recently repulsed an attack from the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab on its border (the east of Ethiopia is ethnically Somali and has been a source of tension between the two countries in the past).
Iraq
Foreign Affairs offers a retrospective on the Iranian proxies and their long walk through Iraq’s institutions. The Shia party nominally took a beating in the 2021 election to the anti-Tehran Moqtada al-Sadr. However, the Iranian aligned judiciary intervened, ruling that rather than the historical simple majority standard, the Sadrists needed a two-thirds majority to form a government, and barring his junior coalition partner, the Kurdistan Democratic Party's nominee from the Presidency (which would mark the completion of a formed coalition). Within a year Sadr and most of his faction stepped down, leaving no bloc to oppose the Iranian aligned Coordination Framework parties. They nominated the pliant Al-Sudani to prime minister, ensuring that Iranian-friendly faces have dominated the cabinet, and stretching Iranian influence throughout “The Iraqi National Intelligence Service, Baghdad airport, anticorruption bodies, and customs posts…Iraq’s media regulator, the Communications and Media Commission”. Critics accuse them of attempting to replicate an IRGC style of political patronage via welfare, state backed jobs, and by contracting out state assets controlled by the shia paramilitaries.
Libya
The disparate factions in Libya have said they’ve finally hammered out an agreement for how to proceed with their 2021 election, which has been indefinitely delayed, and the UN has offered to help.
Myanmar
Myanmar, still riven with ethnic secessionist groups, is starting to catch the ire of its neighbors. Borders between Myanmar and the neighboring Indian state of Manipur have historically been open, but ethnic violence is starting to spill over into Manipur itself. Thailand also cut off electricity to two Chinese backed, Karen militia-managed casinos over the border in Myanmar that they accuse of “being centres where people from other nations are tricked into taking jobs and then put into virtual captivity and forced to work in call centres conducting internet scams”. Last month a humanitarian envoy from ASEAN was attacked by the militias as well, rocketing up Myanmar on ASEAN’s list of regional priorities.
International Updates 2
You can probably tell which region has been holding my interest lately from the length of these, but I tried to give a good spread. As before, feel free to add your own coverage of anywhere.
Haiti
Things in Haiti are still brutal, with more than half the country extremely food insecure and 60% of Port-Au-Prince controlled by gangs. However, Reuters reports that “Violence by armed gangs has fallen 'drastically' since the emergence of a vigilante justice movement that has seen at least 160 suspected criminals killed in the last month, a report by local human rights research group CARDH said on Sunday . . . CARDH said 'almost no' kidnappings had been recorded in the last month and counted 43 gang-linked murders, down from 146 in the first three weeks of April.”
Brazil
Brazil hosted the Summit of Americas on Tuesday, the first summit of its kind in 9 years and featuring every South American country except Peru. Brazilian President Lula, attempting to harness what remains of the Pink Tide, called for a revival of the region’s 2008 Hugo Chavez-led integration, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). This would include a common currency, and projects like a “ ‘Bi-Oceanic Corridor,’ a transportation artery to enable countries to ship goods across the continent overland instead of by sea.” A cool idea but it’s unclear how seriously anyone takes it, and potential partners across the left and right (ie both Chile and Uruguay) are skeptical of Lula’s warming with Venezuelan leader Maduro.
The Chamber of Deputies, the conservative-controlled lower house of Brazilian Congress, also passed a controversial bill which will limit formally recognized indigenous lands. The bill is backed by Brazil’s powerful farm lobby and looks posed to pass the Senate as well. The bill potentially opens up the areas of the Amazon inhabited by “over a million people” for development, which critics denounce as a betrayal of Lula’s promises of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Indigenous groups responded by blocking a highway outside Sao Paolo and cops gave them the tear gas treatment.
Argentina
Argentina’s Peronist/Kirchnerist ruling party, Frente de Todos, has presided over a deteriorating economy, as is custom, and faces a rough election ahead. Astoundingly, Forbes now reports that polls show a three way tie between them, the standard center right opposition party Juntos por el Cambio (who previously also botched the economy), and the previously fringe ultra libertarian Javier Millei who “promises to burn the Central Bank, eliminate the ‘political caste’ and use a ‘chainsaw’ to reduce a bloated state,” and was “initially discarded as a something of a lunatic.” His party, La Libertad Avanza, was only created in 2021 and surprised everyone by receiving 17% of the vote in the last legislative election. There isn’t a clear leader for the ruling party yet, though the Cabinet Chief has announced his candidacy and the Ministers of the Economy and the Interior are expected to announce as well.
Guatemala
Guatemala’s conservative ruling party Vamos has been listing towards autocracy this past year. A lot of attention has focused upon the high profile arrest on of the Director of one of the major newspaper lines for investigating corruption. His lawyers have now been arrested as well, nine other journalists have been placed under investigation for covering the trial, and El Periodico has shut down completely. There are elections on the 25th and Vamos’ current President Giammattei must step down, but the government has barred the three most popular opposition candidates on both the left and the right, and finally decided to just go ahead and release a list of 200 candidates from the Citizen Prosperity party who they won’t allow to run.
The U.S. has expressed its concerns about rule of law in Guatemala but still relies on the government to restrict migration outflows, so there’s likely a limit to how much pressure America will apply.
Senegal
Speaking of which, Senegal also has an election next year and has also imprisoned the political opposition leader Ousmane Sonko on sexual assault charges. Large protests have been held and repressed in turn. The current President Macky Sall is technically done with his two terms but altered the constitution recently and may run again.
Central African Republic
Faustin Archange Touadera, leader of the CAR since 2008, is also holding a referendum that would allow him to stay on past his term limits.
Uganda
Uganda has passed their draconian anti-gay law, despite international criticism. The US and some European countries have suspended aid and there has been some talk of sanctions, but Mosevembi’s hilariously named National Resistance Movement (actually a forty year dictatorship) has said they will hold strong.
Iran
On May 27 the Taliban and the Iranian security forces held a firefight near the Nimroz District in Balochistan province. The dispute is over water access. The “Iran Meteorological Organization says that an estimated 97 percent of the country now faces some level of drought,” and Iranian President Raisi recently forbid the Taliban from accessing the Helmand River, despite a 73 sharing arrangement treaty. [edit: covered more by @hanikrummihundursvin below]
Sri Lanka
You probably remember Sri Lanka’s recent near total economic collapse, culminating in its President Rajapaksa literally fleeing the country. Some rare positive news: the economy has been steadily recovering and inflation going down, leading the government to finally cut interest rates and reduce fuel prices for the first time since the crisis. India has also recently extended another billion dollar credit line.
Pakistan
The crackdown on Imran Khan’s party has continued in the months following his arrest, with thousands of supporters arrested, over 80 senior members “forced to leave the party at gunpoint,” and now the arrest of one of Khan’s top allies.
Kosovo / Peru Boots on the Ground Bonus
NATO is deploying more 700 troops to Kosovo after protests from the Serbian minority have grown agressive, and Peru is receiving 1000 American troops to train and advise their security forces as they deal with ongoing protests.
Anti-Antiplanner
A week or two ago a commenter brought up Randal O’Toole, an ex-Cato Institute researcher who was kicked out for believing that single family zoning was a valid expression of property rights (or something). While I disagree with most of his shtick, it’s hard not to have a grudging affection someone who’s such an obstinate libertarian that even the other obstinate libertarians don’t want to hang out with him
O’Toole is probably more known for his work on transit, of which his focus on suburbs is kind of a subset. Famously, he’s deeply against public transit of almost all forms and strictly pro-car. Ironically, this is despite the fact that he personally is a train enthusiast and avid cyclist who claims to have never driven a car to work. His research is generally solid and numbers are legit, you can read a good summary of his transit ideas on the charmingly titled “Transit: The Urban Parasite.”
His broad claims are that transit both costs more and is more polluting “per-passenger miler,” or per person moved around, when compared to cars, and that transit ridership continues to fall even when we raise subsidies.
These stats seem basically true, but are they a natural free market outcome, or do they specifically reflect a choice landscape that emerged from the very fact that we spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the interstate highway system and countless smaller road projects, and that single family zoning, parking minimums, and resultant sprawl have purposely built an environment where much of transit is impractical and rendered uncompetitive?
These are massively relevant questions because all O’Toole’s criticisms of trains are not inherent to their engineering, but in very large part contingent on the way the investment in car infrastructure saps away their ridership. Trains are not more expensive and polluting because they lack the capacity to move around more people but because (and this is O’Toole’s argument) most seats are unfilled lately, so a lot of energy goes into moving only a few people. But if ridership was higher the numbers would be completely reversed!
Flush train cars blow actual cars out of the water on every metric we care about: affordability, environmental damage, and efficient use of space. Ranking urban planning based on its contingent worst performance rather than its societal potential feels like bizarrely short term thinking.
Nor should we assume the present situation is irreversible. The strength of O’Toole’s argument about trains becoming obsolete rests on emphasizing a decline in ridership in the last few years, a timeframe that of course did include a global pandemic, a pretty clear reason to invest in a car and stay away from crowds. Critic Jarrett Walker notes that:
When he tells us that ridership “peaked,” he’s confessing that he’s playing the “arbitrary starting year” game. To get the biggest possible failure story, he compares current ridership to a past year that he selected because ridership was especially high then. This is a standard way of exploiting the natural volatility of ridership to create exaggerated trends. Again, the Los Angeles Times article that got O’Toole going made a big deal out of how ridership is down since 1985 and 2006, without mentioning that ridership is up since 1989 and up since 2004 and 2011. Whether ridership is up or down depends on which past year you choose, which is to say, it’s about what story the writer wants to tell.
Likewise, O’Toole’s much cited constant cost overruns and astounding costs per mile of construction on transit projects aren’t written into stone; they’re in large part due to the enormous legal, compliance and consulting costs caused by hopelessly inefficient procurement processes, environmental rules (“the wealthy DC suburb of Chevy Chase have led a decades-long crusade against the light rail project, which will benefit the entire region, by claiming that a ‘tiny transparent invertebrate’ might be at risk”), and land use regulations - government restrictions that O’Toole himself has compared to communism! Further high but unproductive expenses are maintenance backlogs (catching up for previous years of underfunding) and security staff. But O’Toole himself argues that security costs could be massively reduced simply by making turnstiles more secure.
Looking at other countries with less institutional corrosion, the costs of building transit are significantly cheaper:
On a per mile basis, America’s transit rail projects are some of the most expensive in the world. In New York, the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile, in San Francisco the Central Subway cost $920 million per mile, in Los Angeles the Purple Line cost $800 million per mile.
In contrast, Copenhagen built a project at just $323 million per mile, and Paris and Madrid did their projects for $160 million and $320 million per mile, respectively. These are massive differences in cost.
Furthermore, all of the above mentioned lines are profitable (though the Paris subway did record a year of loss in 2020). Which isn’t hard to imagine; if our transit system were 1/6th to 1/8th as expensive as it is now then we’d be profitable as well. O’Toole criticizes endlessly unsustainable transit subsidies, but ignores that absent America’s uniquely high costs, well-managed transit can actually be a boon to municipal coffers.
In contrast, he touts cars’ light subsidy footprint (up to 40% of costs but supposedly as low as a penny per passenger mile) - but of course these figures are depressed by outsourcing the costs of the actual vehicles to the users. [edit: updated from Walterodim pointing out we don't know how many people own new vs used cars] Experian records the average person paying $716 a month on new car payments and $525 on used car payments. Adding data from the AAA on insurance, fuel, and maintenance brings that up to $704 - $894 a month, or $8448 - $10,278 a year. O'Toole cites the total cost of cars in 2017 (with lower numbers than these 2023 costs) as worth $1.15 trillion, or “only” 6.8% of car owner’s incomes.
This is an enormous cost for normal people, and stealth deflates the actual costs of driving infrastructure when compared with transit. In contrast, most subways tickets can be bought for about $2.50, or $1200 yearly across a twice-a-day, five-day-a-week commute - nearly one tenth of the cost borne by the car owner.
Further stealth subsidies include municipal parking minimums that landlords pass on to the public in the form of higher rents, and that also unnecessarily burden business operations: “When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes”. Lest this seem like nitpicking, one pricing estimate, using conservative numbers, finds the total value of parking in the US exceeds the value of even the cars themselves, roughly doubling off-sheet privatized costs.
Tl;dr: Lest this seem overly critical, I actually hold a contrarian’s fondness for O’Toole and respect his work. Still, in every instance O’Toole seems to be taking transit systems that are specifically the worst possible example of their form, out of date, mismanaged, chronically underfunded, their customers drawn away by car infrastructure and their costs artificially inflated by regulations, and then compares them to suburban roadways bolstered by restrictive zoning and generous subsidies, with their costs artificially deflated by outsourcing far higher expenses onto consumers, and then pretends the free market has demonstrated the most efficient mode of travel.
Soriek
9mo ago
Transnational Thursdays 5
Added coverage from other countries is strongly encouraged! The more the merrier, I’m hoping for this to be a collaborative thing.
Colombia
President Gustavo Petro ran on a populist platform that’s been a staple of many parts of Latin America but uniquely absent in Colombia; industrial licensing, reasserting national control in face of fossil fuel multinationals, land redistribution, pension & healthcare form, etc. However, his coalition remains in the minority and while Petro rode a wave of discontent to the Presidency, it now seems to be his turn to grapple with protests against his reforms, particularly a form of Medicare for All and some labor laws that reduce employer flexibility with short term contracts. In light of his corruption scandals the conservative-dominated lower house froze progress of three of his major reforms bills on pensions, healthcare, and labor The latter of the bills, which would have reduced working hours and increase overtime pay, was ultimately rejected.
In a poll conducted in May by Invamer, 73% of Colombians said they believed things were getting worse, compared to just 48% in August of last year. Petro received an approval rating of 50% in a poll conducted in November by the same company, but dropped to 34% in the latest poll conducted in April. The recent poll had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 5 percentage points.
How you feel about Petro’s reforms is up for debate; Colombia has avoided the worst of the Latin American experiences of populism, never enduring a period of hyperinflation and genuine economic collapse, and has made some good progress reducing poverty. However, it remains a seriously poor and extremely unequal country - there is certainly significant progress and reforms to be made.
Argentina
The three Argentinian parties have released their platforms (1, 2). The peronist Frente de Todos renamed itself Unión por la Patria for some reason and will probably be led by either the Interior Minister or Kirchner’s former VP. The neoliberal Juntos por el Cambio (the likely winner imo) will likely be led by either the mayor of Buenos Aires or the former Security Minister. Libertarian La Avanzada is running its founder Javier Millei.
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is about to have elections, which are generally tense affairs. The previous election went to a runoff and one candidate publicly (and falsely) accused the incumbent party of staging Rwanda style genocide against his party/ethnic group, and threatened to not accept the results if he lost. A credible threat coming from a man who overthrew the government twice in the 90s and ran with a campaign slogan of “By Force”! Luckily he won, so I guess we’ll never know what he would have done.
Or maybe we will, because he’s running against the same guy and isn’t popular outside of his ethnic support base. He ran on a campaign of women’s rights and free education for all, but the rollout of the school program has been difficult due to the government’s tenuous control over the rural majority of the country. An IMF fuel subsidy established by his predecessor also expired right after he came to power, rocketing up fuel prices and everything downstream. Falling cost of living has led to several protests throughout his rule which have been put down mercilessly. The opposition party has accused him of rigging the electoral commission, which is probably true but it’s also true that the opposition is probably going to commit electoral fraud in some way as well - let’s just hope it stays peaceful.
Nigeria
Following new President Bola Tinubu’s termination of half a century of fuel subsidies, Nigeria has been wracked with internal protests. His hope is to redirect those funds into progressive priorities like education and healthcare but currently risks large strikes, coming at a time when the government has had to devalue their currency yet again. Fortunately, the government and labor unions have now finalized an eight week timeline for them to negotiate a new minimum wage to make up for rising gas prices, which will ideally avoid that scenario.
Tinubu continues to shake things up, following his arrest of the head of the Central Bank by removing the head of the government’s anti-corruption body ( in fairness, all four of the previous leaders were also removed for corruption themselves) and replacing “all Service Chiefs [the heads of the army, navy, and air force] and the Inspector-General of Police, Advisers, Comptroller-General of Customs from Service.”. National security is one of Tinubu’s largest priorities so it will interesting to see how he reshapes his administration’s security approach.
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan passed a referendum in April with 90% on a new constitution which both (nominally) expanded civil liberties as well as significantly increased the power of the office of the Presidency. The referendum passed with an implausible 90%, expanded term limits from 5 years to 7 and allowed President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to run for an additional two terms in what will likely be similarly controlled elections. Mirziyoyev, himself only the second leader of the country (his predecessor just being the former Soviet secretary who held onto power till his death in 2016), came to power via appointment and a shambolic election, and seems to be quickly moving to reestablish the authoritarianism of his predecessor.
India
More on the ethnic conflict in Manpiur:
The last straw that broke the camel’s back came when the Manipur High Court directed the government to make its stand clear on the Meitei demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status within four weeks. Several protest rallies were organized under the auspices of All Tribal Students’ Union, Manipur on May 3 in various hill towns to impress upon governments in Imphal and New Delhi that the tribals see in the Meitei demand an attempt to secure ST status over and above the three affirmative action benefits they already secured under other categorizations as yet another means to snatch tribal lands.
These protest rallies were peaceful. Yet they were met with counter-blockades by various Meitei civil society organizations in various parts of the valley. Meitei miscreants burned down the Anglo-Kuki War (1917-19) Centenary Memorial Gate at Leisang village and beat up Kuki boys returning from a protest rally. Such incidents escalated into mob fighting. As the Meitei mobs burned down some Vaiphei-speaking houses in Kangvai village later, the ethnopolitical conflict spread like wildfire and transformed large parts of the state into killing fields.
Also, Modi will be visiting the United States today. Observers expect Biden to downplay human rights abuses under the BJP and try to coax India as a meaningful partner in their larger conflicts with China and Russia.
Iraq
Iraq approves its largest budget ever, with the goal of rehabilitating public infrastructure and creating some 600,000 new public service jobs (unemployment was a large focus of the protests over the past few years). Critics accuse the government of running up fiscal deficits irresponsibly, and in denial of projected likely falls in oil revenue, as well as trying to use patronage to secure their power (for instance, the Iranian aligned PMF forces were recently given over a million acres of land that will be distributed in contracts for these development projects). On the flip side, the government also just completed a deal with Qatari companies to help build power plants with Iraq, which would reduce its dependence on Iran (currently 30-40% of energy needs).
Why isn’t anarchism talked about more?
Around the turn of the previous century anarchism probably seemed like the threat to established society. The late nineteenth-early twentieth century saw an enormous amount of intellectual output in anarchist philosophy, producing such famous-to-this-day anarchist thinkers and political scientists as Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and James Guillaume. To many it seemed like just as viable a revolutionary philosophy as socialism, and played major roles in radical, secessionist movements like the Catalan independence fighters and the Paris Commune.
And the violence that emerged from this movement was breathtaking. Anarchists pursued “propaganda of the deed,” or expressing their philosophy through acts of violence. Bombings became standard fare across the western world, claiming scores of victims - up until the 1990s World Trade bombing, the anarchist bombing of Wall Street in 1920 was the bloodiest act of terrorism in the US. The Palmer Raids, often focused on for their anti-socialist agenda, were in just as large part about expelling anarchists following the Galleanist bombing campaigns.
But this was far bigger than just the US - anarchist assassins killed no less than nine (nine!) heads of state across the western world! It happened to William Mckinley of the US, Czar Alexander II of Russia, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, President Sadi Carnot of France, Prime Minister Del Castillo of Spain, Prime Minister Iradier, also of Spain, King Umberto I of Italy, King George of Greece, and King Charles of Portugal. That is crazy. It was so bad that the turn of the century is sometimes called “the golden age of assassination”. There were even international conferences of the major powers in Rome and St Petersburg to form coalitions to fight against international anarchism.
My broad theory of the era is this: prior to the industrial revolution many more people were still functionally “self-employed,” working on their own farm, or as an artisan, or managing their store. Throughout the nineteenth century the modern divisions of capitalists and wage laborers, who would live and die working for someone else, really grew and solidified over time. This brought growth, but I think it was likely also a wrenching, unpleasant experience for most people, and a lot of radical movements since have been a form of response to that sense that something about modern society is deeply unnatural.
Even for countries with recent traditions of serfdom, like Russia and Austria, the changes in day-to-day life everywhere from industrialization were vast. The immense, impersonal scale of capitalism, the constant supervision, workers used to setting their own schedules and working at their own pace finding strict schedules thrust upon them, a shift so significant it came in many places with the literal synchronization of standardized time. At the extremes, capitalist modernity created institutions like company towns, where workers with no rights labored from dawn till dusk under the constant watchful eye of the manager, lived in apartments owned by the corporation, purchased all their goods and food from stores owned by the corporation, and walked on streets patrolled by private law enforcement hired for the corporation to enforce rules set by the corporation. You were stripped of all autonomy and ownership and forced to labor in brutal conditions every day; the slightest agitation could be met with brutal repression and you could at any moment be turned out on the streets because you didn’t even own your home, you lived there at the corporation’s behest.
Anarchism seems to be the first way that sort of visceral reaction to these conditions manifested at large scale, and it's understandable in an era when people found themselves in significantly more servile, managed conditions, that those radicalized would rebel against authority itself. Galleani himself, for instance, was radicalized following the mass arrests in Patterson of factory workers striking for an eight hour work day. He went on to create one of the most dangerous anarchist terrorist groups in America. It's a simple response - if society is rotten then tear it down.
But nowadays almost no one other than teenagers seriously pushes anarchism. Yet little more than a century ago scarcely a year would go by without a head of state being murdered by an anarchist. Where did what once seemed like a global threat just disappear to? Did socialism just suck away anarchism’s energy by speaking to the same people disaffected by capitalism but offering a more compelling vision of society? Or was it wrong to consider it anything more than a sensational but somewhat short lived trend, a little like the way the western world speaks less and less about Islamist terrorism?
International Updates
I think this forum often shines when people talk about foreign affairs or give updates from their own countries, so - in the same spirit as calling for regular coverage and analysis of the Hill - I’d like to try and start a tradition of brief weekly updates on big happenings from around the world. I’m not an expert on most places and will definitely not be able to get everything. People should feel free to spin off of anything they find interesting, to add onto this with coverage of other places that were missed, or to post their own. Unintentionally, this week’s theme is elections and struggles for national power.
Ecuador
In a process with shades of Peru’s ongoing crisis, Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso recently dissolved the National Assembly following their failed attempt to impeach him for (allegedly) mishandling a deal involving the state oil company. This means Lasso is now ruling by decree. Difference being, this seems to be actually allowed under the Ecuadorian constitution; it’s currently being challenged in court but it doesn’t seem like anyone thinks it will be successful. He can govern like this for up to six months, but yesterday announced there will be an election in August, which he is allowed to run in (though he hasn’t announced if he will). In the meantime, he seems to be making the most of his interim by cutting taxes and creating special economic zones to attract foreign investment.
Chile
Right wing parties won a majority in the legislative assembly in Sunday's election, largely due to a deteriorating economy, significant internal instability, and President Gabriel Boric’s failure to make headway on campaign commitments. You probably remember the kerfuffle last year about reforming Chile’s constitution. The current constitution is inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship and there’s large agreement (80%) it should be replaced, but little in the way of common vision for what should replace it. Last year President Boric attempted to pass a more left wing constitution with some built in idpol elements like gender equality and greater indigenous rights, but it failed to pass a referendum, with 62% in opposition. The incoming current right wing coalition is actually led by Boric’s opposition candidate from the last election, Antonio Kast, and they will now have their own shot to pass a new constitution.
Turkey
The Turkish election is scheduled this Sunday for the run off between Erdogan and opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The matchup is a little reminiscent of Hungary, in that six opposition parties have teamed together in a longshot, big-tent coalition to unseat an increasingly entrenched strongman, and also in that they are likely to fail. Despite sky high inflation and the recent tragic earthquakes, Erdogan is favored to win, which would continue his streak in power from 2003. BBC reports that Kilicdaroglu is in a bit of a political pinch in that he needs to court both nationalist and Kurdish parties, which have some incompatible interests (ie, the former wants a harder crackdown on perceived or real Kurdish militantism). Even if he wins the presidency, Erdogan’s AKP and allied MHP have a parliamentary majority, so there’s probably not a ton a new president can change.
El Salvador
In a similar vein, El Salvadoran civil society groups have also formed a big tent coalition with four right- and left-wing opposition parties, including President Bukele's former party FMLN, to mount a unified attempt to unseat the increasingly autocratic leader in next year's election.
Sudan
The US and Saudi Arabia recently negotiated a seven day ceasefire between the Army and the RSF paramilitary in Sudan. Ideally, the ceasefire should give a little time to distribute humanitarian aid, though reportedly bombings have continued in the capital of Khartoum and the nearby cities of Omdurman and Bahri. Over a million people have been displaced so far, with the Red Cross warning it will be incredibly hard to house and provide for the 80,000+ refugees in Chad after the rainy season begins.
Thailand
Thailand’s election on the 14th has been covered as a major upset, with junta-backed Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha only receiving 7% of the vote, and voters overwhelmingly trending towards the anti-monarhcical and anti-military opposition parties, Move Forward and to a lesser extent Pheu Thai. There is a limited extent to how much this matters because since the military coup in 2014 the armed services control one third of the seats in parliament, unelected, and any opposition faces a steep uphill battle to get the 376 votes needed to unseat the PM. Even if they did surmount this threshold, the military can just do another coup whenever; “Thailand has averaged one coup every seven years since 1932 . . . nine years have passed since the last one, so a coup is now overdue.” Still, it speaks to significant discontent with the monarchy-military rule (the previous king was fairly popular, his 2016 successor Vajiralongkorn - say that five times fast - much less so, and the “lèse majesté laws” punishing any criticisms of him have become a sore point).
Iran
Ayatollah Khamenei is 84 and has been battling illness off and on for the past few years, so soon his succession will be an unavoidable issue. Foreign Affairs reports that while the process for this is a well established vote by the “Assembly of Experts,” there is significant disagreement within the assembly and the different elite factions they represent, with interlocking alliances and power politics far more complicated than Iran’s broader Assembly (over 120 elite “parties” vs basically 2 relevant national parties: the moderates and conservatives). If the chaos of the last transition from Iran’s foundational leader is any guide, the upcoming one will be extremely fraught as well, which is a recipe for instability when coupled with Iran’s significant public discontent from the government’s ruthless suppression of the last year of protests.
How much do we actually know about Bronze Age morality?
This is an honest question from someone who doesn’t know a ton about the era.
People here and elsewhere sometimes point out that the Bronze Age Mindset is a bit of a LARP, its followers mostly white collar workers idealizing an unrealistic world they would hate if they inhabited. It’s hard to take people seriously whose main experience with conflict is arguing on Twitter when they exalt the warlike morality of the Iliad or the Odyssey.
My question is: were the actual people writing the Odyssey and the Iliad also LARPing? These are books portraying the height of the Bronze Age civilizations by people who emphatically did not live in them, but rather in their ruins. Today we’re apparently Tanner Greer-maxing because I’m quoting another piece of his to you: “How I Taught the Iliad to Chinese Teenagers.”
I spend about 15 minutes outlining what we know about Mycenaean civilization through archaeological discoveries: the grandeur of their palaces, how they fought, their role in an entire ecosystem of Near Eastern civilizations. But most of all I focus on the mystery of their fall, the “Bronze Age Collapse” that littered the Greek isles with Mycenaean ruins, ruins that would have towered over the humble abodes of “Dark Age” Greece (pictures of Dark Age archaeological finds are included in the slides to drive home this point).
I then have students read Book IV.35-62. Here Hera declares that in exchange for the destruction of Troy, she will allow Zeus to destroy Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae without complaint. These three cities were devastated in the Bronze Age collapse. This gives us another way to think about the Iliad. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a popular genre with high schoolers. But if you actually lived in a post-apocalyptic setting… what would your fiction be about?
Homer’s Greeks lived in the ruins of a golden age. They had forgotten how to write and read, but they still remembered a time when the Aegean was full of great cities, wealthy kings, and enormous armies. The Iliad portrayed that golden world as it was imagined hundreds of years later—and explained why this golden age was no more. It is a true piece of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Do we expect the illiterate, post-apocalyptic Greeks to be the same morally and socially as their highly advanced ancestors? Can we be confident their portrayal of those societies is how the ancients would have portrayed themselves, or could they just be later cultures trying to insert themselves and their customs into that time period? I imagine ancient Greece was a more violent place than modernity, but the portrayal of its inhabitants as people who killed, looted, and enslaved without a second thought - was this really how they felt back then? Or was this the tribal, warlike peoples who came after them back-projecting their contemporary values onto the golden age? When I look up ancient literature in the Bronze Age I don’t see anything from Greece - how much do we really know about these people, how they felt, and what they thought?
Consolidated Markets in Healthcare
In the old place we talked about doing regular analysis of emerging legislation / happenings on the Hill, so this piece is in that spirit. Yesterday the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee had a hearing on “Why Health Care is Unaffordable: Anticompetitive and Consolidated Markets.” This isn’t a major hearing or anything, it’s just a topic I’m interested in so I thought I’d share it here.
If you’ve never watched Congressional hearings I actually recommend it. When I started I was surprised how generally intelligent and reasonable most Congressmen appear, even the ones who act like clowns on social media, how much they tend to ask the kind of questions you would want them to ask, how often Republicans and Democrats actually agree. The panelists are listed below, hyper linked with their written testimonies. Q and A is in the video.
Dr. Barak Richman, Professor, Duke Law School
The Honorable Glen Mulready, Commissioner, Oklahoma Insurance Department
Mr. Joe Moose, Owner, Moose Pharmacy
Mr. Frederick Isasi, Executive Director, Families USA
Dr. Benjamin N. Rome, M.D., M.P.H., Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School
It probably needs no introduction how borked the US healthcare system is, but a few stats from the hearing: according to the Kaiser Foundation 30% of Americans say they didn’t pick up pharmaceuticals because of cost, almost half of all Americans must forego broader medical care due to cost, and over 40% of Americans live with medical debt. Other countries often pay half or less of what we do.
Panelists attribute this to anti-competitive practices coming from consolidation in three interconnected markets: pharmacy benefit managers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and hospitals.
PBMs
Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs, are middlemen companies that represent a bunch of healthcare customers collectively in negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. On net PBMs are believed to decrease drugs costs, but there is no way for PBM customers to see what prices were negotiated, and frequently rebates aren't passed onto consumers. In Ohio for instance PBMs passed on the full difference of what they paid pharmacies to Medicaid managed plans, and in Delaware PBMs overcharged the State by $24.5 million. The latter practice is called “spread pricing” and has become increasingly common as PBMs buy up pharmacies themselves.
Currently three PBMs - CVS Health, Cigna, and United Health Group - control 80% of the market, with zero pay transparency.
Pharmaceutical Companies:
Often drug prices are pretty arbitrary themselves because brand name drugs make up 75-80% of costs, and patenting laws allow pharma companies to raise those prices as high as the market can bear. One panelist cites that in 2015 over $40 million was spent on drugs that big pharma held excessive patents on, and that the top 12 drugs have over 120 patents for 38 extra years of exclusivity.
Clearly some degree of patent protection is reasonable, but I’m not sure why i.e. the 12 year biologic patent period Trump created offered anything better than the previous 8 year period. Also, see one of my favorite old Scott posts, “Busiprone Shortage in Healthcaristan,” for stories of Sanofi protecting nominally off-patent Insulin by issuing 74 patents for the biological processes to create insulin - not to use these processes themselves but just to prevent any competitor from ever using them.
The Inflation Reduction Act changed Medicare’s ability to negotiate prices somewhat, but pharma companies still get their market exclusivity and even then Medicare can only negotiate the 20 highest cost drugs. Giving Medicare greater ability to directly negotiate prices would likely help quite a bit; this is the model practiced in much of the world and by the US Veterans Administration, which also pays about half of what everyone else does.
For context though, pharmaceutical prices are, shockingly, only about 8.9% of healthcare spending...
Hospitals
...with physicians and hospitals making up over 50%. The hospital panelist thought it was funny the PBM folks were complaining about there only being three major market players. Most hospitals don’t even have one competitor!
According to Representative Claudia Tenny from New York, from 1983 to 2014 the percentage of physicians practicing alone has fallen by half, while the rate of physicians joining practices of 25 or more people has quadrupled. Often when hospitals acquire these physicians they charge high facility fees for seeing doctors “off-campus,” even though the services are the same. The very fact that hospitals can get away with doing this only further encourages consolidation, because they know they can mark up prices for any new acquisitions. Representative Kevin Hern from Oklahoma proposed in the hearing a bill that would supposedly combat this practice.
Hospitals typically make physicians sign non-competitive clauses, meaning they can’t leave and work for a competitor, even in areas as large as the entire state. From 2007-2014 hospital prices increased twice as fast as inpatient physician’ salaries and four times faster than outpatient physician’ salaries.
Often hospitals also lobby State Legislatures for monopolist laws. Nineteen state have Certificate of Public Advantage laws allowing hospitals to evade anti-trust laws and merge in already-concentrated markets. Another Thirty-five states (and DC) have Certificate of Need Laws forcing providers to obtain regulatory permission before they “offer new services, expand facilities, or invest in technology”. These laws act as huge regulatory barriers to entry for small competitors trying to challenge major hospital systems, and the DOJ and FTC have long condemned them for their anticompetitive nature.
Interested to hear people’s thoughts and would love if we could get a regular thing going.
What would privatizing Social Security look like?
”No one’s gonna take away your grandma’s pension.” - José Piñera, Minister of Labor and Social Security in Chile, right before he took away your grandma’s pension.
Privatizing Social Security has been a conservative pet issue for as long as I can remember, despite being politically unlikely and unpopular. Even Paul Ryan, who paid for his college tuition with SS survivor funds, still reminisced on halcyon days of planning with his Delta Tau Delta bros to privatize SS at keg parties. If it were possible, what would it even look like?
The Background
Social Security is a defined benefit, "pay-as you-go-system," funded by the $1 trillion Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and $142 billion Disability Insurance trust funds, paid via payroll taxes, plus a $63.78 billion Supplemental Security Income from the General fund.
Before FDR passed SS, senior citizens were the poorest demographic in America. Nowadays it’s one of the most popular programs and everyone wants to preserve it in some way.
Problem is, we’re going broke.
Since 2010, the fund that SSA uses to pay benefits to retirees has been paying out more money than it has been receiving in taxes. At the current rate, the fund's trustees estimate that it will exhaust its reserves in 2033 and be unable to pay full scheduled benefits.
What if Ayn Rand was Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration?
It should be said that the freest of free market solutions here still imagines coercion of mandatory contributions. Still, the position advocates switching to a privately managed, defined-contribution system, which would get a higher returns by investing in the private market instead of government securities.
Because these are personal accounts, hopefully you fix the problem where an increasingly smaller working population pays for swelling retirees. In reality, those old obligations don't disapear:
Social Security has accumulated trillions of dollars in liabilities to workers who are already retired or who will retire soon. To make room for a new private system, policymakers must find funds to pay for these liabilities while still leaving young workers enough money to deposit in new private accounts. This requires scaling back past liabilities – by cutting benefits – or increasing contributions from current workers. Most large-scale privatization plans also involve major new federal borrowing.
Given that this transition would be pretty expensive and the main benefit is getting to invest in the private market, the counter is: why not just let the government invest in the private market? Such a case is made here.
More Consumer Choice?
A privatized system should give individuals more control over their investment decisions. It’s hard to weigh that benefit against the risk of dumb people ending up with less retirement savings than they get under the current system.
Would Management Costs be Lower?
Surprisingly hard to figure out! SS obviously has no marketing costs and boasts astoundingly low administrative costs of >1%. However, some admin work is outsourced, ie employers and the IRS collect the funding.
But hey, the government’s gonna keep doing all that stuff anyway; a privatized system would just have to duplicate them elsewhere, plus means testing, plus marketing costs.
Costs in proposed plans vary a lot:
In some privatization plans, contributions would be collected by a single public or semi-public agency and then invested in one or more of a limited number of investment funds…By pooling the investments of all covered workers in a small number of funds and centralizing the collection of contributions and funds management, this approach would minimize administrative costs, but it would limit workers’ investment choices.
Another strategy is to allow mutual fund companies, private banks, insurance companies, and other investment companies to compete with one another to attract workers’ contributions in hundreds or even thousands of qualified investment funds. This strategy would permit workers unparalleled freedom to invest as they chose, but administrative costs might be high.
But forget all these technical hypotheticals. The question we’re all wondering is, what does this look like in practice what would a South American military dictatorship do?
El Ladrillo
The largest scale example of a country privatizing its retirement system is under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Initially their rollout was a big success with high returns. However, even Niall Ferguson, a prominent advocate for their system, notes many of the downsides I wondered about above:
There is a shadow side to the system, to be sure. The administrative and fiscal costs of the system are sometimes said to be too high. Since not everyone in the economy has a full time job, not everyone ends up participating in the system. The self employed were not obliged to contribute to Personal Retirement Accounts and the casually employed do not contribute either. That leaves a substantial portion of the population with no pension coverage at all…
On the other hand the government stands ready to make up the difference for those whose savings do not suffice to pay a minimum pension, provided they have done at least 20 years of work. And there is also a Basic Solidarity pension for those who do not qualify for this.
That public pension was in fact created by a socialist government specifically to make up for extremely low coverage under the neoliberal system. I find it pretty damning that the most extreme example of a privatized retirement system ran into all the problems its critics said it would, and handled it in the same way every public system does - through backup government funding. If we’re going to end up doing a mixed market system anyway, it might behoove us to keep our publicly managed system but give them leeway to invest privately, rather than pay a ton to transition to a privatized system then pay more later to fix the holes that left:
Chile’s system hasn’t worked as promised or expected. The creators anticipated that the average worker would save enough to earn 70% of their salary in retirement; the reality has been closer to one-third. They thought the new system would expand the number of workers with retirement funds; instead nearly 40% of Chileans have nothing to fall back on. Rather than improve the lives of Chile’s elderly, most pensioners live on less than the minimum wage...
The private system hasn’t let the government off the financial hook either. The transition period was always going to be expensive as the government footed the bill for those retiring on the public dime without receiving payroll taxes (as these contributions all headed to private accounts). But the government has also had to backstop far more of the new system’s retirees than expected. Officials thought less than 10% of wage earners would rely on public largesse for a minimum pension. Today, more than 40% need the government to step in.
A broader review of the other countries that followed suit seems similarly disapointing:
Starting in Chile in the 1980s, and then in Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, and Bolivia in the 1990s, countries turned to systems where contributions would be deposited directly in workers’ individual accounts...
the system has done little to stimulate voluntary savings; few workers have channeled additional resources to their accounts. Further, the market for workers’ individual accounts has been far from competitive. On the demand side, workers as consumers of financial products for retirement had difficulty comparing the various combinations of fees and investment options offered by pension fund administrators, particularly when the “product” that workers were buying (or rather, were being forced to buy) would be delivered many years from today. On the supply side, there were few private firms competing, partly because the presence of economies of scale in the administration of funds naturally led to a monopolistic market structure.
Less Radical Funding Solutions
-
Raise Payroll Taxes - “even a modest change, such as a gradual increase of 0.3 percentage points each for employees and employers (or less than $3 per week for an average earner), could close about one-fifth of the gap.”
-
Raise the payroll cap - The payroll tax is actually regressive, exempting incomes over $160,200. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that subjecting earnings above $250,000 to the payroll tax in addition to those below the current taxable maximum would raise more than $1 trillion in revenues over a 10-year period”.
-
Widen the tax base - “In 1982, 90 percent of earnings were subject to the Social Security tax, but by 2017 the share had decreased to 84 percent.” “Including employer-sponsored health insurance premiums could close over one-third of Social Security’s solvency gap; including other fringe benefits could close one-tenth.”
OSHA Effectiveness: MMTYWTK
In the thread about unions @vorpal_potato linked an excellent Roots of Progress piece on the history of worker’s compensation law. That got me thinking about the history of workplace safety since then, chiefly the top down reform since no-fault compensation: OSHA.
Did OSHA make workers safer?
Since OSHA was founded in 1970 fatal workplace incidents have decreased by 60% according to the Environmental Law Institute (admittedly somewhat confounded by manufacturing employment decreasing by 65%...).
On the other hand, the Mercatus Center has assembled a graph on workplace fatalities from 1933 to 2010 using data from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The results show that while fatalities certainly dropped after 1970, they had been falling long before and the trendline did not change following the creation of OSHA.
But prior to 1970 fatalities weren’t falling in some kind of regulatory no man’s land. In the entire period on the graph we had continuously evolving workplace safety rules emerging from the Bureau of Labor Standards founded in 1934. The BLS regularly met with organized labor to help establish new safety rules under State Labor Departments and played an important role in the passage of labor legislation like the Walsh–Healey Public Contracts Act or the Fair Labor Standards Act. And all of this doesn’t even capture all the state level workplace safety legislation that happened in the following decades (look up New York).
Without this context, Mercatus leaves you to imagine workplace safety incidents prior to 1970 were dropping entirely due to capitalist technological progress, as opposed to OSHA being another in a series of many steps of gradually increasing safety regulations.
And when you drill down into the details of specific OSHA policies, they often do show results. A few examples:
A 2012 study in Science found that OSHA's random workplace safety inspections caused a "9.4% decline in injury rates" and a "26% reduction in injury cost" for the inspected firms. The study found "no evidence that these improvements came at the expense of employment, sales, credit ratings, or firm survival."
A 2020 study in the American Economic Review found that the decision by the Obama administration to issue press releases that named and shamed facilities that violated OSHA safety and health regulations led other facilities to increase their compliance and to experience fewer workplace injuries. The study estimated that each press release had the same effect on compliance as 210 inspections.
There has especially made progress for those concerns that won’t be reflected in raw safety incidents, such as long term exposure to lead, asbestos, and other toxic chemicals “OSHA standards have virtually eliminated some occupational diseases such as “brown lung” disease in the textile industry, and accidental transmission of HIV and hepatitis in healthcare workers”.
OSHA standards have dramatically changed norms and practices. Just think about how asbestos removal is handled today — with enclosures, full-body personal protective equipment, and more — compared with decades ago. In health care, including dental offices, use of gloves and facemasks or respirators is standard practice, in large measure due to OSHA’s bloodborne pathogens standard. These practices are now viewed as necessary and appropriate to protect both workers and the public. But when these standards were issued, there was huge employer opposition, with claims that the rules were unnecessary, infeasible, and would put employers out of business and cost jobs.
- Peg Seminario, Safety and Health Director, AFL-CIO
What are the economic benefits vs costs of OSHA?
I have no idea why, but I can’t seem to find any present day studies on the compliance costs of OSHA. A number of very out-of-date studies from the 1990s find costs between $10 and $40 billion. Studies on their benefits seem totally clouded by your base assumptions - CATO assumes extremely small benefits because they attribute almost none of the post-1970 drop to OSHA; OSHA itself assumes high benefits because it takes credit for the whole drop. For long term exposure we would also want some way to calculate healthcare costs from ex: respiratory problems. In general I wasn’t able to find a ton useful here but maybe it doesn't matter that much either way; it’s okay if OSHA costs more than it brings in, in terms of dollars and cents, if it plays a large role in reducing human suffering.
Why has OSHA declined in stature?
This piece has a decent quick write up on what works well and not so well about OSHA. Broadly summarized, OSHA has some really well-tailored standards it’s created since the 90s, mixed with a bunch of woefully out-of-date standards from the 60s. The actual inspection trainings are insufficient, and obsolete standards means that sometimes unimportant things are flagged while serious safety hazards are ignored. Why does OSHA use so many out of date standards? It sounds like the same bipartisan dysfunction that’s slowed every agency down since the 70s:
The process for setting standards that protect workers has slowed to a crawl, because Congress, the executive branch, and the courts have weighed it down with added analytic and procedural requirements. The time-consuming hurdles that OSHA must overcome to revise its out-of-date standards means that it has less time to address new hazards that have been recognized since 1970, including the risk of workplace violence to health care and social service workers and musculoskeletal disorders arising from patient handling. It now takes OSHA, on average, more than seven years to complete a new standard. Since 1970, OSHA has issued only 37 major health and 55 major safety standards.
- Randy Rabinowitz, Director, Occupational Safety & Health Law Project
OSHA can regulate only after a complex process of finding “significant risk” and economic “feasibility,” and then is constrained to set standards at “the lowest feasible level.” As a result, some health standards have been costly compared to their effects. The longer process tended to make it less likely that any rulemaking could be begun and completed within the term of any OSHA director.
- John Mendeloff, Health and Safety in the Workplace Director, Rand Center
In its 46-year history the agency has issued standards for 30 toxic substances. The standard-setting process has gotten harder and longer, as layers of procedural and analytical requirements have been added and industry and political opposition has intensified. Early on, it took OSHA one to three years to issue new standards for major hazards. The most recent standards — silica and confined space entry in construction — took about 20 years. As a result for most hazards, standards are out of date or non-existent. OSHA can’t address even long-recognized problems, let alone the emerging hazards that put workers in danger.
- Peg Seminario, Safety and Health Director, AFL-CIO
Also, everyone from Mercatus to the AFL-CIO agrees that OSHA’s present day fines are actually too small to encourage much behavior change from companies, at least relative to things like worker’s comp and lawsuits.
Would More Funding Help?
Mercatus Center and CATO claim (without a source) that Quebec funds its equivalent workplace safety agency four times more per staff and gets similar results. I glanced at a few other countries: in France and Britain they both spend less than us; the UK gets much better results and France gets much worse, so make of that what you will! I just divided budgets by staff whereas the Quebec comparison is supposedly measuring “dollars spent on workplace prevention”, which I don’t know how to check for other agencies, but I could easily believe their numbers are better than ours because we waste a ton on administration or paperwork.
Still, whether we do it by spending our funds more effectively or by raising funds, there does seem to be a strong argument that OSHA needs more staff - the UK has about double our inspectors for a country about a fifth of the size, for instance.
OSHA’s biggest problem and deficiency is that it simply does not have the resources that are needed to meet its responsibilities. OSHA’s current budget is $552 million. As a comparison, the EPA budget is $8.1 billion. Federal OSHA and the state OSHA plans are responsible for overseeing the safety and health of 140 million workers at more than 8 million workplaces. But currently there are fewer than 2,000 OSHA inspectors (about 900 with federal OSHA). Federal OSHA is able to inspect workplaces under its jurisdiction on average only once every 147 years.
- Peg Seminario, Safety and Health Director, AFL-CIO
tl;dr
-
Workplace fatalities have fallen by 60% since the passage of OSHA. The rate of workplace fatalities did not fall any faster after OSHA, but it’s hard to disentangle the pre-1970 trendline from the safety regulation and legislation in decades prior, and there’s no reason to assume the trendline would have continued if our standards didn’t continue evolving as well.
-
OSHA definitely coincided with significant changes in worker pathogen exposure.
-
OSHA could be improved by:
-
Simplifying the procedural rules around creating new standards so they take <10 years.
-
Hiring more inspectors so they’re stretched less thin, and training those inspectors better
-
Probably increasing OSHA’s ability to levy greater financial fines.
Soriek
6mo ago
With the reports of Egypt notifying Israel in advance of an impending attack, people here and elsewhere have wondered if Bibi maybe let the attack slip through on purpose to consolidate power. Overnight he went from dealing with protests against his judicial reforms and the draft to having those problems disappear and securing the full backing of a broad unity government with his former opposition.
But Jerusalem Post just released a pretty damning poll:
An overwhelming majority of 86% of respondents, including 79% of coalition supporters, said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country's leadership...
Furthermore, almost all of the respondents (94%) believe the government has responsibility for the lack of security preparedness that led to the assault on the South, with over 75% saying the government holds most of the responsibility...
A slim majority of 56% said Netanyahu must resign at the end of the war, with 28% of coalition voters agreeing with this view.
In addition, 52% of respondents also expect Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to resign.
In addition, most respondents also noted that they do not trust the government to lead the war on Gaza, though the poll was held prior to former defense minister Benny Gantz joining an emergency unity government on Wednesday evening.
Is there any way for Bibi to hold onto power? If not, what might the future look like?
I couldn't say for everywhere, but in hospitals, the largest driver of healthcare spending, at least, a lot goes to administrative bloat: "A Harvard Business Review analysis shows the healthcare workforce has grown by 75 percent since 1990 . . . But there’s a catch. All but five percent of that job growth was in administrative staff, not doctors."
For the broader healthcare sector including VPBs and Pharma, as with all rent seeking systems, a fair amount presumably also goes to shareholders (excluding nonprofits) and top line executive compensation.
Soriek
1yr ago
Book Summary: “The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s” by William Hitchcock
Eisenhower got short shrift in his time - beloved by American Joe Normals but largely underappreciated by community leaders, historians, and other politicians, who bought into an image of him as basically asleep at the wheel, golfing while the Soviet Union launched sputnik. More careful history, coupled with recently released archival information, has revealed a portrait of an astute leader constantly manipulating massive operations behind the scenes. I’ll break things down roughly by domain:
Foreign Policy:
Despite being a Cold Warrior who castigated Truman for losing China and bungling the Korean War, Eisenhower mostly managed to steer clear of direct conflict himself. He immediately negotiated a detente in the Korean War, deftly resisted the surge of warhawk voices trying to get him to commit to war in Vietnam, and backed off China and the USSR from Taiwan and West Berlin.
In all of these conflicts Eisenhower often got buffeted from both sides by warhawks who thought he was playing nice with communists and by peace seekers who thought he was recklessly risking American engagement, but in each instance he protected American interests and diffused the situation without escalating to an actual war.
To highlight a case study of this approach, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 Eisenhower found both France and England had lied to his diplomats' faces and brazenly violated international law by invading Egypt. Much hung in the balance: the international order of “rule of law” that Eisenhower had worked so hard to create post-World War 2, the opinion of the Global Third World whose alliances would be so crucial in the Cold World, and the relationship between America and its allies, whether they would be allowed to betray America and still be supported or whether the US would assert itself as leader of the western world.
And nuclear war. This was a more real possibility than I think most realize - the Soviet Union was threatening to do anything necessary, and moreover was desperate to reestablish their credentials as an anticolonialst power a week after rolling tanks into Hungary. While the fact that Nasser later became opposed to America has caused many to criticize his move, in the context of the moment Eisenhower’s handling of the situation seems deft and reasonable. His decision to choke off Britain’s financing both legitimized the rules-based international order, established America as the post-war hegemon, and prevented a direct conflict between the four great powers with worldwide implications.
The Modern Warfare State:
The President who warned us about the Military Industrial Complex was well qualified to do so, seeing as he built it. Between World Wars 1 and 2 Eisenhower had been perpetually frustrated that America let its defenses atrophy during peacetime then rapidly scrambled to put it all together when a conflict emerged. His novel policy was for the first time to emphasize massive defense spending during peacetime to prepare for eventual conflict, and indeed he spent half the budget on defense, or roughly 10% of GDP:
Nuclear weapons were only one part of a grand strategy . . . NSC 162/2 demanded not merely more and bigger nuclear weapons, along with the aircraft to deliver those bombs; it also called for a robust intelligence network to analyze Soviet behavior, coupled with elaborate security measures to combat domestic spying. It outlined a nationwide manpower program, emphasizing scientific and technical training to serve military needs. It insisted upon military readiness through stockpiling and securing of vital raw materials and key industrial plants. The concept paper envisioned huge continental defense systems, with early warning radar and a large air force that could meet Soviet intruders. It called for the overhaul of military service requirements for American citizens, with longer tours of duty for draftees, inclusion of women into the armed services, and the establishment of civilians for maintenance work
The darker side of this is that Eisenhower also presided over the creation of the modern Intelligence Community, which under him led coups in Iran and Guatemala and prepared regime change for the DRC and Cuba. This set off a trend of replacing democratically elected leaders with brutal dictators that terribly damaged American prestige in the eyes of the Third World.
For a poignant example of the immediate backlash of this kind of spycraft, the CIA pressured Eisenhower relentlessly to approve the U-2 plane flights over the Soviet Union despite Eisenhower’s fears that it would jeopardize his attempt at detente. Indeed, on the eve of a joint conference between the two powers, a U-2 plane was downed. Kruschev initially assumed that Eisenhower wasn’t responsible, but instead of blaming CIA Chief Dulles for misleading him about the operation, Eisenhower took full blame for the decision. It was probably the responsible thing to do as a leader but it ruined any chance at a thaw in the Cold War.
A further irony is that a large reason for the perception of Eisenhower as an absentee President, golfing instead of governing, was that Americans had no idea these massive operations were happening behind the scenes. When talk started to emerge of a “missile gap,” no one knew that Eisenhower’s spies had been taking photos of Soviet missile sites for years and knew that those fears were overplayed; when events happened in far away corners of the world and Eisenhower seemed not to be acting at all, no one knew that his spies had already infiltrated the government and were busy at work.
Governing to the Center
Before Eisenhower, the political pendulum had swung from the archconservative nostrums of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover to the bold, all-encompassing activism of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Eisenhower, perhaps the least partisan president of modern times, sought to stop the pendulum in dead center. To be sure, when he ran for President in 1952, he thundered against the “statism” of the New Deal and its expansive federal programs. But once in office he adopted centrist and pragmatic policies that fairly reflected the preferences of most of his fellow citizens. Early on he made his peace with the New Deal, expanding social security, raising the minimum wage, and founding the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He even suggested ideas for a national health insurance system. Eisenhower found a way to make the government work without making it too big; his interstate highway system is a good example. Though building its thousands of miles of road cost billions of dollars, most of the money came from user fees in the form of a gas tax, used to replenish the Highway Trust Fund. The burden on the US Treasury was relatively light.
In this commitment to “not burdening the Treasury,” in almost each year Eisenhower fully balanced the budget. He did this by keeping Truman’s wartime high taxes in place, including a top marginal tax rate of 90% (on a tiny sliver of the population). In this he was castigated by the right flank of his party, but he kept the nation’s fiscal health in check while also building the most powerful military on the planet, millions of homes, and the modern highway system. Arguably he kept the pursestrings a little too tight, as his reductions in federal spending are partially credited with the recession of 1957, but he managed to hold the US off its present path of endless debt.
In other ways his centrism can look bold or cowardly, depending on your perspective. His coddling of McCarthy is hard to justify and his lukewarm handling of civil rights is a challenge as well. He desegregated military schools, and passed a toothless civil rights bill, but he refused to lead on the issue. Even his boldest action of all, sending in the troops to desegregate Arkansas, he framed squarely as enforcing rule of law - he didn’t even mention civil rights.
Leadership:
In many of Eisenhower’s addresses, on his high taxes, or his military readiness programs, he again and again urges Americans that they will need to sacrifice for the security and health of the nation. Actually, he doesn’t really urge per se, he basically just says sacrifice is what a good American knows is his responsibility and when he said it, everyone agreed. I can’t fully imagine a president now framing things like this without being castigated for it but Eisenhower enjoyed a whopping average popularity rating of 65%. Americans liked Ike. His star power, however, did not translate into broader success for his party, who lost successively more seats with each Congressional election. This is partially because Eisenhower himself wasn’t really convincingly a Republican and partially because he thought the President was supposed to be a national leader above the fray of partisan politics. When it came to likely his most important role of grooming a successor, he dropped the ball in amazing fashion; when asked by a reporter to name a major decision made by Nixon during their two terms Eisenhower responded “if you give me a week I might think of one.”
However, the strength of Eisenhower’s legacy was such that even without grooming a successor, his successors still largely found their time in office governed by the mold he had cast, in terms of national defense priorities, relatively centrist government activity, and confronting the rising currents of the third world. JFK considered himself in major contrast to Eisenhower’s doddling, asleep-at-the-wheel presidency, only for him to remark how much he ended up “behaving exactly as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved” (nowhere is this more stark than the inherited Bay of Pigs operation).
As for whether Eisenhower’s legacy was positive or negative, I’ll let you be the judge.
Soriek
1mo ago
Hey sorry, I’ve been pretty slammed the past few weeks and haven’t had time to really sit down and grind these out, they take a while.
I do have to admit my enthusiasm has been waning a little lately, here and on forum in general. I’ve never been really into the culture war side of things, but I like the userbase here and noticed a lot of people like to talk foreign policy, so this was an attempt to create a central place for that kind of discussion. The hope was for TT to develop into something more community driven / self-sustaining without me, if users were into it. But after nine months it looks likely we won’t reach that; I think last week had zero posts and today has one. Which is fine, if people’s interests just lie elsewhere, not every swing is a hit.
What do you think of Napoleon's Legacy?
I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night. By terrible mistake I related to a friend who loves the Emperor that I enjoyed the movie, and was informed that the entire film was a piece of British propaganda. I objected that the British were hardly in the movie at all, only to be explained that the things Scott chose to highlight or ignore mostly followed the contours of the British perspective on the conflict. For instance, Waterloo is emphasized because the British played a decisive role, even though Napoleon stood no real chance of victory during his return, whereas the larger Battle of Leipzig which really ended Napoleon's bid for domination wasn't even mentioned because the British weren't there. And of course what about the fact that Napoleon only ever declared war twice while Britain was actively funding other countries to oppose France, and so on and so on.
My friend's counter-narrative of perfidious Albion being the real villain behind the Napoleonic wars is likely no more straightforwardly true than the narrative that France alone was at fault, but it's a helpful reminder that even today there remain vastly diverging perspectives on the immense impact of the man, the myth, and the legend of Napoleon Bonaparte.
For instance, there's also of course his political reforms, which are the part I found myself missing the most in the movie, even though they would have been impractical to include. A while back Scott touched upon a study by Daron Acemoglu claiming that long run growth was much higher in the areas that Napoleon conquered, due to him abolishing guilds, monopolies, and other rent seeking institutions. Rebuttals included people arguing that Acemoglu et al forgot to control for access to coal, after which you supposedly see no impact from Napoleonic conquest remaining.
Or military reforms. Was Napoleon a genius for coming up with military reforms like how to mobilize national resources and break armies down into self-sustaining units that could live on the land and rely less on supply trains? I've heard people argue these were really mostly Ancien Regime ideas crafted after their loss in the Seven Years War. Napoleon only took advantage of the flux of the revolution to be the one to ram them through.
And what about Republicanism and liberalism in general? Did he hasten them along by spreading their ideas farther and faster than they ever would on their own, or did he doom them for decades by encouraging the conservative monarchs to see liberals as a threat to be immediately stamped out, rather than a nuissance that could be tolerated?
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy? Was he an expansionist warmonger or a peacemaker driven to conflict by other powers? Was he a brilliant military reformer or mostly an opportunist riding off others' inventions? Did he leave a legacy of economic and political dynamism or barely make a dent? What's your take?
Transnational Thursdays 6
I generally won’t cover Europe here, mostly because I don’t follow it that closely, so input from our European/Europe-follower user base would definitely add value.
Guatemala
Guatemalan elections will be going to a runoff between the establishment center left and the progressive left. Former First Lady Sandra Torres has come in second place in the previous two elections and will be squaring up against the anti-corruption progressive Bernardo Arevalo, son of the famous Juan Jose Arevalo, the first democratically elected leader of Guatemala. Their parties only received respectively 15% and 12.2% among the 20+ other contenders, so it’s hard to predict how the final tallies will shake out, though polls favor Arevalo (Torres is unpopular in the populous Guatemala City) which would be a major upset. Notably, Zury Ríos, daughter of the former dictator Efrían Ríos Montt and previous frontrunner, did not make it to the runoff. Corruption and fraud accusations have abounded, as well as frustration with the government’s decision to bar popular anti-establishment candidates in the lead up to the election:
with nearly one in four ballots either spoiled or left blank, Guatemalans expressed discontent at the electoral process and the decision to bar early front-runner, businessman Carlos Pineda. Pineda urged supporters to spoil their ballots after he was ruled ineligible.
Interestingly, his exclusion (he was previously the frontrunner) will likely mean that Guatemala will have some flavor of left leaning government no matter who wins, which is probably not what the current conservative ruling party was hoping for.
El Salvador
Bukele is officially running for reelection, against the law of El Salvadoran constitution. This is not much of a surprise from a leader who sent the military into the legislature after they voted against him and has frequently ignored his own Supreme Court. A court packed with his allies has ruled that it’s cool though, and his substantial popularity renders the legal technicalities kind of irrelevant. He will be going against a big tent coalition of the former mainstream right and left wing parties.
Honduras
Related, Bukele’s crackdown on the gangs has attracted supporters across Central America (the now failed Zury Ríos in Guatemala ran on copying his security approach) and Honduras is one glimpse at what that looks like. They have declared a state of Emergency which suspends some constitutional rights and deployed the military in their war against the gangs. Escalating violence in the conflict has also led to curfews being declared in two cities. Left wing President Xiomara Castro originally actually ran on a policy of demilitarizing the police, but following a deadly gang-driven prison riot she has officially handed over control of the prison system to the military.
Sierra Leone
The reigning President Maada Bio won another term with 56%, narrowly passing the 55% threshold needed to avoid a runoff election. Watchdogs have called the count out for fraudulence and the “US, UK, Ireland, Germany France and EU Delegation” have acknowledged irregularities but seem to be tacitly supporting the outcome. Violence has been scattered but not severe.
Mali
Mali’s military junta held a referendum for a new constitution, supposedly to restore the democratic process. The referendum passed with 97% in favor; Observers are unimpressed:
The election observer group MODELE said that participation at midday had only been about 21% of eligible voters. The mission also cited dozens of polling stations that were closed due to security problems, disenfranchising people. The referendum also did not include Mali’s entire northern Kidal region.
Also, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) is one of the longest standing and most dangerous UN Missions. Originally deployed in 2013 to help the government with the Taureg rebels in the northeast, relationships have deteriorated with the government following the 2020 military coup. The junta government famously forced France to leave last year and earlier this month demanded that MINUSMA leave as well. However, the sudden departure has now been delayed. While I can’t find anyone saying it specifically, I feel like the government has to be hedging their bets till they see how the situation falls out with the Wagner Group, who have largely come to supplant France and even now control many of the Uranium mines the French previously guarded so closely. Following the events of Saturday every host country is curious to see if Wagner will remain a stable partner, (you know, stable-ish), especially in the Central African Republic where the ruling regime largely owes their survival to Wagner.
Pakistan
Pakistan draws nearer to securing a $6 billion bailout from the IMF after passing a budget mostly in accordance with IMF recommendations. They have been in economic turmoil since the coup, of course worsened by the floods, and have been kept afloat by assistance from “ China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates”.
The crackdown on Imran Khan’s party, PTI, continues, with many arrested or driven to switch sides. You can hear him speak about it if you want.
Japan
Japan has reestablished Korea as a most favored nation trading partner, hopefully finally ending their last four years of tension. The source is Japanese reparations for Korean workers and particularly for Korean comfort women during the Empire. Japan’s position is that they already paid reparations during the Park Chung-Hee era; Korea’s position is the money went to the ruling class rather than the victims (though supposedly a lot was invested into the economy); Japan’s counter-position is, well, you shouldn’t have done that. The current nationalist party in Korea is ironically more pro-Japan and has worked towards reestablishing their relationships; security collaboration will increase as well.
Japan is famous for dropping Prime Ministers at the drop of a hat, making the Italian government look like a beacon of stability in comparison (in fairness, in Japan it’s mostly the same party), but astoundingly PM Fumio Kishida has survived both the assassination of Abe and the attempt on his own life, and looks poised to become one of the more important post-war leaders for his security policy. Kishida in his role of Foreign Minister and Defense Minister was known as a dove, but has ironically presided over the largest military buildup in post war history, with a projected 67% increase by 2027. His ability to push this through is of course shaped by general rising fear of China, but imo is also partially because his historical aversion to conflict has left normal critics reassured he won’t abuse a larger military. He has also strengthened ties with the QUAD and as mentioned, is heading towards security reconciliation with Korea as well.
Saudi Arabia
The Yemeni War is not yet over, but both Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have largely honored their ceasefire, and for the first time in seven years Saudi Arabia partially relaxed its blockade to allow a few Yemenis to make the Hajj. The Foreign Ministers of Saudi Arabia and Iran also met again recently and affirmed their desire to continue diplomatic relations. China brokered the deal and Saudi Arabia also recently completed a“$5.6bn deal with a Chinese company to manufacture electric vehicles” and is trying to boost Chinese tourism, along with its larger push to become a sports hub. Relations with other countries seem mostly positive-ish lately, as these things go for the House of Al-Saud, with Riyadh even reversing its previous stance and allowing the ascension of Syria back to the Arab League.
Does our fiction say anything about our society?
(The way I've been encouraging myself to read fiction again is by convincing myself it's anthropology/history/a window into culture)
Tanner Greer once authored a piece called "On the Tolkienic Hero," arguing that while history is littered with heroes who had no distrust of power and who conciously sought out their quest, J.R.R. Tolkien popularized the notion of a hero as a character whose very goodness is that they don't want power, that they will only shoulder power as a temporary burden. Nowadays we see this trope everywhere in the most popular form of writing: Young Adult fiction, from Harry Potter to Hunger Games to Star Wars. In a piece in City Journal Greer explores the implications of this - what could a culture that produces these kind of myths tell us about our society?
Greer has also written at length in the past about how he feels that modern Americans have lost agency as the country moved from self employed, locally-governed settler communities towards our current era of vast corporations and vast bureaucracy. His thesis here is that we see this expressed in our fiction - the modern, powerless YA protaganist raging against the machine is symptomatic of a society where people feel themselves to be at the whims of distant and impersonal forces:
As unconscious illustrations of common beliefs about authority, fate, and morality, [French Fairy Tales] offered a rare window into the ancien regime as the common man experienced it. The fairy realm of the French peasant mirrored his lived reality. His was a vicious and empty moral order, where personal destiny depended on the arbitrary whims of the powerful...
like the fairy tales of old, [American] escapist yarns can escape only so far. Their imagery and plotting are irrevocably tied to our society...these fictional narratives share a set of attitudes and convictions about the nature of authority, power, and responsibility. They provide a window into the moral economy of the twenty-first century’s overmanaged meritocrats...
The defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters...
It is not just twenty-first-century teenagers who feel buffeted by forces beyond their control...one-third of Americans now find themselves employed by corporations made impersonal by their scale. The decisions that determine the daily rounds of the office drone are made in faraway boardrooms—rooms, one might say, “where adults discuss things out of earshot.” What decides the destiny of Western man? Credit scores he has only intermittent access to. Regulations he has not read. HR codes he had no part in writing...
The modern-day fairy tale is not at peace with HR. Our fairy realm’s preoccupation with the problems of the micromanaged life resonates. Its paranoia reflects a culture that has lost faith in its own ruling class. The YA novel’s adolescent attitude toward authority speaks to the experiences of the many millions shaken by their own impotence. The mania for dystopia is a literary sensation custom-made for the frustrations of our age.
Counterarguments:
1. Women's Liberation
In general when Greer talks about missing a past where people had more autonomy, he's really talking about men, and I think it's right to say that men are more likely to be disillusioned by modenity than women. The society that created these modern myths is one where women finally gained the right to have a voice, get a mortgage, start a business, etc, and Greer himself points out that most YA authors, protaganists, and readers are women. Should we see the portrayal of the teen girl protaganist finding empowerment against an oppressive society as just a story of the time, articulating a struggle many women went through in the last century? (Remember that even authors writing about young people are often from a previous generation and have lived through more cultural change).
Counterpoint: the female YA protaganists don't seem that different from the males in terms of their position in society. This might be just because more male protaganists are written by women and so also embody themes that women have lived through. On the other hand, compare modern "Tolkienic" women protaganists to heroines written by women authors in a different age, like Scarlett O'Hara of Gone With the Wind, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables. All of these characters to me feel much more self-confident in their rank or purpose. Also, their much more sexist and heirarchical societies are not portrayed as particularly dystopian or oppressive, even with those books do grapple with themes of patriarchy.
2. Fiction written by commoners rather than elites
For a long time most great literature was created by a privledged elite class - of course they weren't going to portray their society as oppressive, they were the ones doing the oppressing! Elizabeth Bennet and Scarlett O'hara are literally from wealthy landowner families, of course they don't question their (relative) empowerment. Nowadays anyone can take a stab at writing fiction, so of course you're going to have more perspectives from people who don't feel particularly powerful and whose relation to society has been more subservient.
Counterpoint: Not all empowered female protaganists from that era were from wealthy backgrounds - Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley were orphans. Counter-counterpoint - their authors kinda were, Lucy Maud Montgomery was from a political elite family in Canada and Charlotte Brontë was at least relatively privledged, if not a giga-elite, so maybe their perspectives still don't incorporate the common person on the street.
3. ? Insert yours
Despite the counterpoints I listed to my own arguments, I think the answer is likely a combination of all of the above - late stage capitalism and advanced bureaucracy means we are now governed by vast, distant forces, but also fiction is increasingly created by women and normal people whose historical experience of being treated like second class citizens are going to bleed into the art we create.
Soriek
5mo ago
Staffing Shortages in Nursing Homes
Recently the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee held a hearing about two new Biden Administration rules impacting staffing in nursing homes.
The lay of the land is that everyone in both parties agrees that we have a critical lack of workers in nursing homes. There have been more than 500 long term facility closures in 2020, and we would need to fill 150,000 jobs just to reach pre-pandemic levels. One of the witnesses mentioned that most nursing homes do not have anywhere near the minimum number of staff that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services considers a requirement to be safe. Higher numbers of staffing are also associated with higher quality patient care and lower deaths. Some witnesses related horror stories of nurses not being able to wash patients who had soiled themselves because they were dealing with more urgent medical situations for other patients.
This is especially urgent because by 2030 all 75 million of the boomers will be over 65 and the demand for care will only continue to rise. So the Biden Administration has proposed two rules to address the situation.
1 - The Proposed Minimum Staffing Rule would require there to be a registered nurse on-site 24 hours a day (up from 8 hours currently), and a ratio of one nurse for every 44 residents and one nurse aid for every ten residents.
• Republicans objected that the Kaiser Family Foundation found as many as 80% of nursing homes would not be able to meet the minimum staffing requirements, and compliance costs alone would be tens of millions per state. This would be especially difficult for rural nursing homes where trained staff are rare.
• Democrats responded by pointing out that the rule phases in over three years, gives rural facilities five years, and makes full exceptions for nursing homes that are trying to find staff but can’t.
• Republicans also claimed there simply aren’t enough trained staff out there to be hired, which makes the requirement impossible. It’s unclear if this is true; the witnesses were pretty evenly divided.
• (Related tidbit from outside this particular hearing: Senator Bill Cassidy, Bernie Sanders’ Republican counterpart on the Senate HELP Committee, has complained that we have a shortage of trained nurses partially because many states require nursing colleges to be taught by nurses with masters degrees, who are few in number and already mostly working as practitioners. I can buy this because in my experience looking into other healthcare issues, state level regulations often do make federal laws go much less far. For example pricing transparency rules don’t really matter when states allow hospitals to be monopolies.)
• Democrats responded that the rule provides $75 million in grants to train nurse aids, and also pointed out that Democrats repeatedly have tried to boost federal spending to help with this kind of training and hiring but Republicans were opposed soooo.
2 - The proposed Medicaid Access Rule would require home health agencies to pass through a minimum of 80% of funds to direct health care work force.
• Republicans objected that this only leaves 20% of funds to handle everything else: administrative costs, facilities, training, supervision.
• Democrats countered by demonstrating that non-profit nursing homes were spending on average 43 more minutes per patient each day than for-profit nursing homes, and this held consistent across urban vs rural areas as well as rich vs poor areas. Meanwhile, for-profit orgs are also, obviously, walking away with more profit. Thus, the 80% rule is just a way of ensuring that the federal funds goes to our most critical problem: staffing and patient care, since clearly you can’t rely on businesses choosing to do this on their own.
It's a crappy situation. Basically everyone agrees that the current status quo is unacceptable, but also nursing homes genuinely don't seem to be the funds to hire the desperately needed more nurses, even though they were able to (at least moreso) only a few years ago? The only solution seems to be raising federal funding for nursing homes to hire more people, but this is unlikely to happen any time soon. It would probably be easier to get everyone to agree on stuff like lifting the supply restrictions on nursing colleges, but of course that happens on the state level and is much more complicated to address from the federal side.
Soriek
8mo ago
Legislative Updates: Senate Appropriations Committee Mark Up
After all the acrimony over the debt negotiations, Senate Appropriations has actually had a surprisingly productive session: “holding 40 hearings in the Spring, the first markups in years, and passing 8 of the 12 major appropriations bills with significant bipartisan support.” The session today passed the remaining four bills, also all with significant cross party support; the first time since 2018 that all 12 bills have been marked up. Speeches about bipartisanship were inserted in between every single amendment. The Senate normally has better manners than the House but everyone was genuinely excruciatingly polite to each other. Nice to see them getting along though. Not all of these are guaranteed; House versions are being prepared as well with some differences that remain to be seen. Summaries are below:
Defense Appropriations Act, 2024
Vote Result:
Passes with twenty seven Ayes and one Nay (Sen. Jeff Markley (D-OR)
Summary:
-
$831.8 billion for Defense Spending.
-
5.2% pay raise for our troops.
-
$145 million to address recruiting shortfalls.
-
Supports procurement contracts for nine types of weapon systems.
-
Doubles the number of children who have access to pre-K in DoD schools.
-
$508 million to support Indo-Paycom activities across all services.
-
$294 million for long range radars and sensors to close awareness gaps.
Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024
Vote Result:
(Unanimous) Passes with twenty eight Ayes and zero Nays
Summary:
-
No additional support for firefighters past September.
-
$82 million increase in staffing in the Indian Health Service.
-
$12.5 million for tribal safety such as courts and jails.
-
$10 million in housing for firefighters and housing for National Park Service.
-
Reduces EPA superfund program by $282 million. No cuts to clean air or water.
Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024
Vote Result:
Passes with twenty six Ayes and two Nays (Sen. Hagerty (R-TN) and not sure who the second was)
Summary:
-
$224.4 billions spending.
-
$943 million for NIH to support lifesaving research.
-
$100 million increase for mental health research.
-
$100 million increase for Alzheimer research.
-
$60 million increase for cancer research.
-
$300 million for substance use and mental health programs.
-
$18 million increase for suicide prevention lifeline.
-
Targeted increase to programs for maternal mortality, ending the HIV epidemic, boosting technical education, pandemic preparedness and biodefense.
-
No increase for family planning.
-
$1.5 million for state opioid relief.
-
$700 million for childcare and development.
-
$275 million for head start.
-
$175 million for Tittle I school to support low income students.
-
$175 million increase for special education services.
-
$250 increase to maximum Pell grant award.
Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2024
Vote Result:
Passes with twenty four Ayes and four Nays (Sen. Hagerty (R-TN), Sen. Rubio (R-TX), Sen. Britt (R-Al), Sen. Fischer (R-NE))
Summary:
-
$61.3 billion in spending.
-
TSA pay schedule funded moving towards federal pay schedule.
-
CISA get a small increase to handle cyber security attacks.
-
FEMA receives funding boost.
-
Coast Guard gets $579 million for offshore patrol cutter program.
-
$56 million for two MH-60 Jayhawk helicopters.
-
$55 million on new Great Lakes ice breakers.
-
$150 million for new polar ice breaker and funds for a crew.
-
Hiring 700 additional Customs and Border Patrol Officers to reduce wait times for people and goods, estimate this will increase $1.3 billion in GDP.
-
Increasing Border Patrol agents up to 20,000.
-
$263 million increase in technology investments, funds for facilities and nonprofits.
-
There are also un-extended border barrier funds the Administration has not yet spent and we require them to be obligated.
-
$824 million in new investments to stop fentanyl from coming over the border. Funding to scanning 40% of passenger vehicles to 65%, should result in 15% more fentanyl seizures.
-
Expanding AEGIS task forces, increasing outbound inspections for drug money or weapons going out.
-
This bill does not increase ICE detention beds.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’d love to create a tradition of regular Hill tracking / legislative analysis here if people are interested.
Soriek
9mo ago
Updates on Oil and Gas
In the old place I started a conversation about rising oil and gas prices. Several people responded at the time that it was due to policy, like Biden cancelling the keystone pipeline and pressuring the adoption of green technologies. The theory was that the Biden Administration wanted to keep prices high to effect a transition to green technology. At the time I argued that it seemed very unlikely that Biden wanted gas prices high, and that these regulatory factors were an insufficient explanation for price spikes/production gluts: Obama cancelled offshore drilling and pushed green tech too and yet oil production doubled under him. @Iconochasm, who I think is no longer with us, made a prediction that oil would fall significantly anyway because fossil fuel companies would react to Biden’s opposition.
As a follow up on that prediction, in the year since this conversation oil production in the US has shot up and looks on pace to soon reach its previous heights before the Covid collapse, with prices falling correspondingly. Now I see articles like “U.S. Crude Oil Production Rebounds In January: EIA”, “America is going through an oil boom — and this time it's different”, and “U.S. Crude Oil Output Expected to Hit New Record Highs in 2023”:
U.S. crude oil production is expected to average 12.4 million barrels per day in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019. These forecasts, offered by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, include increased production in the Permian region and the Federal Offshore Gulf of Mexico.[1]
The U.S. is on track to recover all the decreases in production that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand for oil collapsed along with its price. The low price of oil caused energy companies to slow production and close their least profitable wells, resulting in an 8% drop in oil production for 2020, the highest annual decrease on record. Following the easing of travel restrictions and a rebound of global demand, U.S. oil output is close to surpassing pre-pandemic levels…
The bulk of the growth in U.S. oil production has come from the Permian region, which spans parts of Texas and New Mexico and accounts for about 40% of U.S. oil output and currently produces 5.7 million barrels per day. The other major source of growth is the Federal Offshore Gulf of Mexico, where several large projects have come online in the past few years, producing 1.8 million barrels per day.
In addition to boosting domestic production, the U.S. is expanding its access to new oil resources in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. In March 2023, the Biden administration approved a controversial drilling project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, known as Willow. The project, initiated under former President Trump and faced legal challenges from environmental groups, is expected to produce up to 160,000 barrels per day of oil at its peak and generate $10 billion in revenue for the federal government over 30 years.
A few weeks later, the Biden administration announced plans to hold an auction for a lease sale of more than 73 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, which could yield up to 1.1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the project’s lifetime
It’s gotten so pronounced that environmentalist groups have even started critiquing the Biden Administration (1, 2, 3) for surpassing even Trump in their zeal for fossil fuels:
Federal data show the Biden administration approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years, outpacing the Trump administration’s 6,172 drilling-permit approvals in its first two years…
Nearly 4,000 of the Biden permits are on public lands administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s New Mexico office, followed by 1,223 drilling permits in Wyoming, and several hundred each in Utah, Colorado, California, Montana and North Dakota.
Will the outlook stay rosy? I have no idea. As I argued in previous posts I think regulatory decisions are probably less impactful than the broader global markets, and investments in new productive capacity remains low for that exact reason. So a lot of the future probably hinges on stuff like the Ukraine War and the decisions made by OPEC. Still, coupled with the fact that Biden tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to depress prices, I think this largely confirms that Biden was certainly not driven by a desire to crush oil production and keep prices high for Americans. Like most Presidents, he wants voters to be happy with him.
Drawing Connections between Distant Events
One of the things I find most exciting about history is when I can find some underemphasized connection between seemingly unrelated things happening in far flung places. Here’s a few examples, widely ranging in how specific/general they are:
1: The Battle of the Shimonoseki Straits:
During the late Tokugawa Shogunate the rogue Chōshū clan started opening fire on western ships. This was after we had declared Japan officially open, so the US promptly sent a warship to battle the Chōshū and ultimately beat them into submission. What makes this interesting? It happened on July 16th, 1863, almost immediately after the Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, meaning that Lincoln didn’t learn of two pivotal victories that July but rather three. The scope of the Civil War was simply so huge that we entirely forget America was even both fighting and winning against foreign powers at the exact same time.
2: Spanish Silver in Beijing:
A lot of people know the story of how Spain mined so much gold and silver in Mexico and Peru that it caused them to deal with inflation, and played a role in their repeated bankruptcies in the sixteenth century.
Less talked about is the impact of the Potosí mines on China. After setting up their colony in the Philippines, the Spanish started buying up Chinese goods in exchange for their limitless supply of Bolivian silver, which soon flooded into China and came to replace their own paper currency. This created a critical dependency on problems happening on the other side of the world; during the 30 years war Spain halted the distribution of silver so they could ensure they had enough to wage the war. China, which continued to buy imports with silver, rapidly found its money base dwindle, as well as their ability to pay the military to keep order. Unfortunately, at the same time they got hit with droughts, famines, and various other calamities. How serious was the fallout?
3: Stalin’s Two Fronts:
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 in a secret agreement with the Soviet Union, but the USSR itself didn’t invade until September 17th. Why the wait? The USSR was fighting a totally different war over with Japan. The Soviet military leadership was in disarray and Stalin made the remarkable choice of replacing the commander with a little known peasant officer named Georgy Zhukov whose career had shot up mostly as a result of the purges taking out other officers. Zhukov ended up being a military genuis and turned the conflict around at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. A ceasefire was settled on the 16th and the USSR invaded Poland the very next day. Stalin was obsessed with avoiding a two front war and the question remains, if they hadn’t won such a commanding upset in Khalkin Gol, can we be certain the USSR would have proceeded with the invasion in Poland?
On the other side, the ceasefire meant that the North Strike faction in the Japanese military finally lost out to the Spread South faction, who pushed for Japan to rapidly proceed into Southeast Asia, where conflict inevitably waited with British Malaya and American Philippines.
4: Ghana, Sumatra, and Salem:
Back in the day the Dutch controlled part of Ghana and was allied with the Ashanti Empire, while the British controlled another part of the country and was allied with the Fante Confederacy. Eventually, in a well meaning effort to standardize custom duties and create space between the two countries forts so as to avoid conflict, the Dutch and English swapped some land around. Suddenly the Dutch found themselves controlling land with Fante, who did not like being their subjects, or having to deal with the Ashanti, who had been their enemy forever. With conflict flaring up, what previously had been one of the most productive colonies in the Dutch Empire suddenly became a huge pain, leading to the Dutch ceding it to the English only a few years later.
This skirmish between two tribes of under a million people each led to a treaty with ripples from West Africa to Indonesia all the way to North America. In Ghana it led to three more Anglo-Ashanti Wars, finally resulting in the full English conquest of the Gold Coast, which would remain under British control until 1957, with Ghanian troops fighting for the British Empire in places as far flung as Ethiopia and Myanmar.
On the other side of the world, in exchange for taking the rest of the Gold Coast, England recognized the Netherlands’ full conquest of Sumatra in Indonesia, which led to a brutal three decade war of conquest, and finalized Dutch control over the entire Indonesian archipelago, which did not become independent until 1949. This particular conquest also had further repercussions for the global spice trade because Aceh was the world’s largest supplier of pepper.
In fact, there had been a multi-million dollar pepper trade between Aceh and, of all places, Salem, Massachusetts. This was such a relevant market that Andrew Jackson sent gunships not once but twice to Aceh to take vengeance on pirates raiding the pepper traders. With the Dutch asserting full control over the industry and continuously raising trade barriers, the experience of being at the whims of European trade restrictions in overseas markets helped build towards American policy makers’ promotion of the Open Door Policy and even overseas colonization.
If there are any other interesting connections across distance or time, share them here! I’m an avid collector.
More options
Context Copy link