StephenKMackSD's Blog

Insights on the ‘players’ in Ms. Tett’s latest economic melodrama, and some commentary.  

Oxford Economics:

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https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/about-us

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Morningstar: 

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Some insights on Lehman Bros.: 

Headline:  Ten years on, the Fed’s failings on Lehman Brothers are all too clear

Sub-headline: The key policymakers have always maintained they had no choice but to let Lehman collapse. That’s simply not true

In 2007 Fortune magazine ranked Lehman Brothers investment bank number 1 on its list of “most admired securities firms”. Just a year later, on 15 September 2008, the financial world was shocked when Lehman, with $600bn (£463bn) of assets, filed for bankruptcy, causing chaos in financial markets: stock prices plummeted, credit flows froze, and markets feared that even larger financial institutions – from Morgan Stanley to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup – might fail.

The Lehman bankruptcy was shocking, in part, because it was unique. Other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG, also experienced crises in 2008 and surely would have failed if not for emergency loans from the US Federal Reserve. On the eve of its bankruptcy, Lehman urgently sought similar aid from the Fed, but the policymakers at the time – Fed chair Ben Bernanke, Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – said no.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/03/federal-reserve-lehman-brothers-collapse

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Some insight on Carmen Reinhart: 

Headline: The Reinhart-Rogoff error – or how not to Excel at economics

…

Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are two of the most respected and influential academic economists active today.

Or at least, they were. On April 16, doctoral student Thomas Herndon and professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, released the results of their analysis of two 2010 papers by Reinhard and Rogoff, papers that also provided much of the grist for the 2011 bestseller Next Time Is Different.

Reinhart and Rogoff’s work showed average real economic growth slows (a 0.1% decline) when a country’s debt rises to more than 90% of gross domestic product (GDP) – and this 90% figure was employed repeatedly in political arguments over high-profile austerity measures.

During their analysis, Herndon, Ash and Pollin obtained the actual spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff used for their calculations; and after analysing this data, they identified three errors.

The most serious was that, in their Excel spreadsheet, Reinhart and Rogoff had not selected the entire row when averaging growth figures: they omitted data from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark.

In other words, they had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their key calculation.

When that error was corrected, the “0.1% decline” data became a 2.2% average increase in economic growth.

…

https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646#:~:text=The%20most%20serious%20was%20that,%2C%20Belgium%2C%20Canada%20and%20Denmark.&text=When%20that%20error%20was%20corrected,average%20increase%20in%20economic%20growth.

Ms. Tett provides more of Reinhart’s insights.   

…

Big US banks have increased their reserves to cope with this. But Ms Reinhart fears that those in countries such as India and Italy are less prepared. Furthermore, ultra-low interest rates erode bank profitability.

Another issue is that it is hard to model future risks due to the lack of historical precedent. “Crises usually happen because of a boom-to-bust cycle and investors know what that looks like. This is different,” Ms Reinhart adds. As far more financial activity flows through the non-bank sector, via capital markets, nasty surprises can easily erupt.

…

And a concluding paragraph featuring Reinhart:

“Surveys [already] show a significant tightening of lending standards,” observed Mr Shin. Or as Ms Reinhart notes: “A credit crunch seems really very likely.” No wonder Oxford found that fears about finance were poisoning confidence; or that the chance of a V-shaped economic recovery seems increasingly low. 

This reader is given to a kind of nostalgia for another Tett: 

January 16, 2015:

Headline: A debt to history?

Sub-headline: To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed 

…

Last summer I found myself in that spot for a conference, having dinner with a collection of central bank governors. It was a gracious, majestic affair, peppered with high-minded conversation. And as coffee was served, in bone-china crockery (of course), Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian, stood up to give an after-dinner address.

The mandarins settled comfortably into their chairs, expecting a soothing intellectual discourse on esoteric monetary policy. But Friedman lobbed a grenade.

“We meet at an unsettled time in the economic and political trajectory of many parts of the world, Europe certainly included,” he began in a strikingly flat monotone (I quote from the version of his speech that is now posted online, since I wasn’t allowed to take notes then.) Carefully, he explained that he intended to read his speech from a script, verbatim, to ensure that he got every single word correct. Uneasily, the audience sat up.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/c95e5a72-8322-4cfc-b36a-69e8998aea01

Here is the a news story, that just might have more political weight, than Mr. Luce’s collection of concerns, in his latest essay:

Headline: Senate report slams Bidens for conflicts of interest, flags possible criminal activity

Sub-headline: GOP-led investigation cites ‘glaring’ evidence of Burisma bribe, suspicious foreign money transfers and sex trafficking.

A year-long Senate investigation concluded Wednesday that Hunter Biden’s efforts to cash in on foreign business deals during his father’s vice presidency raised alarm among U.S. government officials, who perceived an ethical conflict of interest and flagged concerns about possible criminal activity ranging from bribery to sex trafficking.

The long-awaited joint report by the GOP-led Senate Homeland and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees delivered several blockbuster revelations less than two months before Election Day, suggesting Obama administration officials ignored clear warning signs about ethical conflicts and possible extortion risks involving Joe Biden’s family.

Perhaps the most explosive revelation was that the U.S. Treasury Department flagged payments collected overseas by Hunter Biden and business partner Devon Archer for possible illicit activities.

…

But the U.S. government’s worries about Hunter Biden’s globetrotting business pursuits didn’t stop in Ukraine.

“In addition to the over $4 million paid by Burisma for Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s board memberships, Hunter Biden, his family, and Archer received millions of dollars from foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds,” the report said.

Senate investigators flagged transactions in at least three other foreign countries:

• Archer received $142,300 from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan, purportedly for a car, the same day Vice President Joe Biden appeared with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and addressed Ukrainian legislators in Kyiv regarding Russia’s actions in Crimea.
• Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and Russia’s only female oligarch.
• Archer received $142,300 from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan, purportedly for a car, the same day Vice President Joe Biden appeared with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and addressed Ukrainian legislators in Kyiv regarding Russia’s actions in Crimea.
• Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and Russia’s only female oligarch.Hunter Biden opened a bank account with Chinese national Gongwen Dong to fund a $100,000 global spending spree for the Biden family.
• Hunter Biden had business associations with Ye Jianming, Gongwen, and other Chinese nationals linked to the communist government and the People’s Liberation Army. “Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in cash flow,” the report said.
• The report did not expand much on its sensational claim of alleged links to sex trafficking or prostitutes, reserving most of the discussion to two footnotes.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/senate-report-slams-bidens-conflicts-interest-flags

As long as the Corporate Media ignores this …

Political Observer 

https://www.ft.com/content/76f35579-f58e-44eb-b984-18141d1bc3bb

Facing up to financial reality | May Letter of the Month

Victims of ‘vulture capitalism’

Describing Mitt Romney as a good businessman in the Letter of the Month is a travesty. Newt Gingrich created a YouTube in which he called Romney venal and coined the term “vulture capitalism” for Romney’s ruinous business tactics.

I know, because my own business was a victim. Kay Bee Toys, headquartered in the bucolic Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts, had been in business 106 years, operating profitably, with 8,000 employees and 1,300 stores doing $1.1 billion in sales. KB Toys was socially conscious and refused to sell toy guns for children. Romney’s Bain Capital bought KB Toys, immediately took on $120 million in debt, and used it to buy back its own stock and to pay Romney an $86 million bonus. The business was soon shut down, dumping thousands out of work. Romney needed a cover story for the disaster he imposed on local lives. He said that he was not personally involved and that he was only doing the employees a favor by “harvesting” the business.

My service business depended on KB as its main customer. It is gone now, too, along with 70 workers.

KB Toys, and my business, were just more lambs ready for slaughter in Romney’s view.

Allan Ardis, Wesley Chapel

https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/letters/saturdays-letters-victims-of-vulture-capitalism/2281139/

Old Socialist

The reader just has to wonder at Mr. Ganesh’s ignorance of American political/jurisprudential  history !  Brown v. Board I & II denounced by the revered   Learned Hand, as  ‘second-guessing of legislative choices by the states’ was the grain of sand, that political/legal irritant, that was the ‘first cause’ of the Federalist Society?  Learned Hand its political/rhetorical midwife? 

…

It was not, he wrote, “a lawless act to import into the Constitution such a grant of power,” for “without some arbiter whose decision should be final the whole system would have collapsed.” But justices and other judges, he advised, should use this power only when that was essential—when a governmental act violated the clear “historical meaning” of the amendments in the Bill of Rights—or they would function as a super-legislature. “For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians,” he said famously, “even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not.”

The lectures were an attack on judicial activism but also the Warren Court. In 1954, Warren had led the Court to the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Every justice then on the Court, as the legal historian Michael Klarman noted, “had criticized untethered judicial activism as undemocratic.”⁴ But the justices recognized that America was a transformed nation in its views about race and that history compelled the Court to find segregation of public schools unconstitutional.⁵ In a short opinion, Warren stated that principle.

Among liberal and centrist legal thinkers, the question was how broad a principle of equality the Court had actually stated. In his lectures, however, Hand staked out a very conservative position. The Brown ruling was unacceptable because it was second-guessing of legislative choices by the states, even though that put Hand on the wrong side of history.

…

The Judge Who Shaped Our Law

See also ‘The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist’ by John A. Jenkins a revelatory biography of this jurist, the first of his kind to occupy a Supreme Court chair. Here is Eric A. Posner’s caustic review of Mr. Jenkins book.  Mr. Posner is a partisan of Rehnquist.   

THE PARTISAN IS the first full biography of William Rehnquist, who was an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1972 to 1986, and chief justice from 1986 to his death in 2005. Rehnquist was one of the more conservative members of the Court, and had many detractors. Jenkins too does not like Rehnquist’s performance on the Court, but his objection amounts to little more than the complaint that Rehnquist decided cases differently from the way Jenkins would have decided them, which leads to the forensic task of sifting through Rehnquist’s life for an explanation as to how he could have gone so far astray. This lack of generosity toward his subject undermines a biography that could have addressed some interesting questions, such as how someone who tended toward the extreme and frequently dissented managed to lead the institution so effectively.

…

https://newrepublic.com/article/107540/the-partisan-life-of-chief-justice-william-rehnquist-john-jenkins

Roe V. Wade takes the lead in Mr. Ganesh’s ‘History Made to Measure‘ that ends  here, in the thicket of ‘Ganesh Speak’, or should it be ‘Ganesh Incantation‘?    

The Supreme Court can launch a judicial revolution from the right, then, but at risk to itself and the party that enabled it. Don’t be surprised if even a 6-3 majority settles for gradual incursions into the left’s body of work. This would show a concern for tangible institutions over abstract projects and a willingness to let sleeping dogs lie. “Conservatism”, we might call it.

This Politico news story, report puts forward the fact that that Amy Coney Barrett, the most likely candidate to replace Ginsberg, is the product of the very careful grooming by the Textualist’/’Originalist’ clique. Note the melodrama of the last quoted paragraph!

Amy Coney Barrett was prepared for this moment.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been seated on the Supreme Court for only a year, in 1994, when a group of professors at the University of Notre Dame first recognized the potential of a first-year law student and began paving the way for her career as a conservative jurist: collaborating on scholarship, helping her land a Supreme Court clerkship and later recruiting her to the law school’s faculty.

The group was part of a growing legal movement opposed to the secularization of American society generally and to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in particular. The 1973 abortion-rights decision not only struck many conservatives as an affront their religious values, but to the principle of judicial restraint. To wage what would be a decades-long fight to reverse the activist decisions of the court from 1950s to the 1970s, they needed young legal minds like Barrett’s.

“She was kind of the Manchurian candidate,” said one former colleague at Notre Dame Law School. “She’s been groomed for this moment all the way along.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/20/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-419219

The slow but inexorable erosion on the Supreme Court’s authority, moral and political,  began with the appointment of Rehnquist by Richard Nixon.  

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/f2b4c8a4-edca-483b-b15e-47701668791c

The reader can only wonder at Mr. Ferguson’s – what reads like nostalgia for George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, of Prop 87? Oh! sorry he is just a late arrival to California, 2016, in its advanced state of ‘Decadence/Decay’ the idée fixe of the Political Romantic. With the aid of Victor Davis Hanson, another political refugee, at The Hoover Institution, where 1929 went to live!

The transgenerational economic/political sway of Neo-Liberalism comes home to roost, across the nation, in the face of the Pandemic, and the concomitant collapse of Robber Capital, even with the the American Political Class’ extravagant kowtowing Bail Out. In Mr. Ferguson’s telling the blame for the California’s ills are the Democrats, who are in fact New Democrats, the not so sub rosa allies, in fact, the enactors of the Reaganite Agenda! Jerry Brown is the political object lesson of that political de-evolution.  Newsom is ‘Old Money’, who is subject to a cult: 

Headline: When Gavin Newsom issued marriage licenses in San Francisco, his party was furious. Now, it’s a campaign ad

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-gay-marriage-20180515-story.html

The appearance of the political hysteric Ben Shapiro, who is moving out of California and going to the South. Its ‘as if’ C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America come to life. 

Mr. Ferguson lards his essay with apt literary references, and the fact that many Corporations are leaving the state. Going to California is the story of my mother and father, and many of their families. Its the story of the state itself! 

In the 70’s I applied for work at McDonnell Douglas, in Long Beach, California , and my sister’s daughter worked there before it went out of business. This campus, next to the Long Airport, was being turned into a housing development, and shopping complex, when I last drove by it in 2008.

 The Myth of  California entrepreneurship was built on being the subcontractors to the Defense Industries of the Cold War.  Silicone Valley has replaced those Defense Industries, but with the difference that highly skilled workers are of value, as the manufacture of products have been off-shored: to China and other countries in Asia as America workers, and their Unions, were ‘greedy’ according to the Capitalist apologists like Ferguson and  Hanson. Has The Pandemic illustrated the vital part an indigenous manufacturing capacity can play in the civic/political life of States and Nations?

Political Skeptic 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-20/california-burnin-a-warning-against-one-party-rule?sref=bfOwbK4O

@Arabella raises not just an interesting point, by focusing upon the failure of America’s political/technocratic class to take the necessary action to save 200,000 lives. Not in any way a small matter? What can this New York Times news story offer in terms of an even more catastrophic failure of America’s ‘experts’: 

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

…
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/magazine/displaced-war-on-terror.html

The Refugee Crisis in Europe is a direct result of America’s War on Terror! If the ‘experts’  who produced this crisis, are the same ‘experts’ who now screech about the dangers of  ‘the rise of extraterritoriality’ -it is the voice of the hucksters, that offered the TPP & TTIP as the natural successor to the collapsed Neo-Liberal Swindle! 

StephenKMackSD

Thank you @Arabella !!!!

https://www.ft.com/content/33e23a5b-3e33-4b2e-a8ee-e7b341ef3a30?commentID=fcb1760f-a459-479f-bcfe-883e7c417cb5

One of the central powers of TTP was this very ‘ rise of extraterritoriality’ : For example, Corporations could bring suits against its signatories, via a claim of  ‘loss of profit’, for enforcing pollution laws against trucks, that didn’t meet existing laws, about pollution regulation.

The technocrats and scribblers  have a convenient memory lapse? Not to speak of the once enthusiastic members of the American Political Class? 
TTP was supposed to be the triumph of the now collapsed ‘Free Market’, a ‘vision’ for the Radiant Future, to borrow from Zinoviev! 
Predictably the villians , here, are the ‘Russians’ and ‘Chinese’ , although America does garner a mention : The New Cold War is the template, its political elasticity its virtue. Yet the question remains about the responsibility, of the technocrats and the scribblers, to think ‘holistically’?  Herman Kahn’s imperative was to ‘think the unthinkable’ while the men we are asked to pay our homage can’t even consider ‘the possible’. 

The closing paragraphs of Mr. Rachman’s essay are about the value of ‘common international rules’ ,and a quote from Thucydides steeped in political fatalism: 

The US, and perhaps China, have the power to enforce their laws around the world. For midsize powers that is not an option. Instead, smaller countries need to prop up international rules-making bodies, such as the World Trade Organization — which has ruled against both China and the US on occasion.

Without common international rules, third countries may increasingly find themselves torn between the competing extraterritorial demands of Washington and Beijing. In that situation, our world will look increasingly look like the one described by the Greek historian, Thucydides, in which — “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.” 

https://www.ft.com/content/33e23a5b-3e33-4b2e-a8ee-e7b341ef3a30

Political Observer

In a Political World, that is slipping out of the control of the American Empire, and its invasions, wars e.g. white phosphorus in Fallujah, Agent Orange in Vietnam, the collection of NGO’s well funded foreign subversions, garnished with a heaping helping of self-proclaimed victimhood…

All of this so brazen, that it can’t be ignored, except by ‘Enthusiasm Gap Biden’ as reported in this newspaper! Joe and son Hunter made a bundle out the 2014’s Ukrainian Coup!

Enter stage-right the current technocrat from the FBI- should the reader recall the Comey/Mueller Keystone Cops Act of recent memory? Or the smarmy, mendacious record of America’s most notorious Closet Case J. Edgar Hoover?

Even the mercifully brief video from Posh Boy Luce, with ‘guests’ Neo-Con Ghoul Anne Applebaum, and the Professional Zionist Apologist Simon Schama, looks like journalistic haste, pasted together to meet that Friday deadline. 

Old Socialist

P.S. Not to forget the collapse of Capitalism, in the face of The Pandemic, a Political Class that has failed the pressing needs of the the 99%, while kowtowing to the 1% etc., etc…  

https://www.ft.com/content/09aff9cb-2315-438c-b283-1271264a1f2a

Mr. Ganesh’s usual political feuilletonism devolves into a long commentary on Joe Biden’s mundanity, as his saving grace, in the the Age of Trump. 

But first, just to clarify, Delaware is a Tax Haven:

Headline: How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven

NOTHING about 1209 North Orange Street hints at the secrets inside. It’s a humdrum office building, a low-slung affair with a faded awning and a view of a parking garage. Hardly worth a second glance. If a first one.

But behind its doors is one of the most remarkable corporate collections in the world: 1209 North Orange, you see, is the legal address of no fewer than 285,000 separate businesses.

Its occupants, on paper, include giants like American Airlines, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Wal-Mart. These companies do business across the nation and around the world. Here at 1209 North Orange, they simply have a dropbox.

…

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Headline: Forget Panama: it’s easier to hide your money in the US than almost anywhere

Sub-headline: The term tax haven may evoke images of exotic locales, but Panama actually ranks as the 13th most attractive spot for hiding assets, while the US lies third

…

Welcome to Delaware

A while back, Shah sent her husband to return an overdue book she had borrowed from the library. When he returned, he told her her library card was expired and that to renew it she would have to bring her driver’s license showing her current address or a utility bill with her address.

“If I were to open a shell company, I wouldn’t require any of those things. I would actually need less information to open a shell company in the US than I would need to get a driver’s license or a library card,” pointed out Shah.

There is nothing illegal about setting up a shell company. US states are proud of their business-friendly policies. Delaware, for example, prides itself on being the incorporation capital of the US. “More than 1,000,000 business entities have made Delaware their legal home,” claimed the state’s Division of Corporations website. “More than 50% of all publicly-traded companies in the US including 64% of the Fortune 500 have chosen Delaware as their legal home.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/06/panama-papers-us-tax-havens-delaware

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Mr. Ganesh begins his essay, with a small, but important bit of propagandizing about the fact that Delaware is a notorious Tax Haven. With that attempt at rhetorical prestidigitation, what can his reader expect? 

Delaware can reasonably claim to be the most innocuous state in the US. The tax-advantageous peninsula seldom incurs hatred, its opposite, or even a second thought from those outside its nearly 1m residents.  

Not content with this first exercise in faint praise, Mr. Ganesh continues in the same vein:

Not all politicians take after their states, but despite being Pennsylvania-born, Joe Biden is Delaware incarnate. In half a century of public life, the Democratic candidate for president has never assembled an intense fan base or many dedicated enemies. His politics are middle-of-the-road and his charisma is of the functional, baby-kissing sort. 

After more of the same Mr. Ganesh discovers ‘the enthusiasm gap’ between the Trump Ideologues, in the loosest sense, and Biden’s political deficit  ‘disturbs the sleep of some of Mr Biden’s supporters.’ 

But the reader is then confronted with this pronouncement of Joe’s utter mediocrity as a virtue: 

It is also the most precious thing about him. The US has had two consecutive presidents with messianic followings, and it is worse off for the 12-year surge of emotion. No democracy is riper for a period of tepid leadership. 

What follows is the usual cliche ridden History Made To Measure, of the apologists for the Political Present. What escapes Mr. Ganesh historical grasp, is one of the literary observations on American political life, in ‘The Last Hurrah’ the 1956 novel written by Edwin O’Connor.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo22213372.html

While not a perfect descriptor of Biden in 2020, it does make plain the fact that this run for the presidency, is indeed Biden’s last hurrah. While Biden has no political charisma, like Frank Skeffington, he represents the final gasp of the New Democrats/Neo-Liberals. As the ‘reformers’ are winning seats in Congress as ‘insurgents‘ , in the face of The Pandemic, and the economic collapse that has placed a majority of American in jeopardy of loosing all that they have worked so hard to build. The vexing question that Mr. Ganesh avoids, by way of his rhetorical/political ploys, is the utter failure of the whole of America’s Political Class, to even govern with a sense about the shared destiny of The Republic: E pluribus unum? 

American Writer 

https://www.ft.com/content/5c2ee5d6-34a5-4ba7-83c4-84e259215eed

This newspaper provides space for a Bill and Melinda Gates press release.  No surprise! Oligarchs and their apologists, this newspaper, stumble over themselves to kow-tow to this ‘Man of Vision’. Gates’ answer to the AIDS Crisis is the circumcise every male on the planet!

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Where-We-Work/China-Office/Case-Highlights/Expanding-Circumcision-Options-to-Reduce-HIV-Risk

Yet in Iran nearly 100% of the male population is circumcised, yet AIDS is epidemic:  66 thousand people living with HIV. 

Headline: Iran Struggles To Deal With Its AIDS Problem

‘Despite the government’s pledge to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, the number of individuals suffering from AIDS/HIV in Iran has been steadily rising.

According to a 2016 survey by the United Nations, there were roughly 5000 new infections between the years 2010 and 2016, adding up to the total of 66 thousand people living with HIV. However, some estimates claim that there may be over 100 thousand Iranians suffering from HIV, highlighting significant discrepancies between official statistics and reality.

The AIDS epidemic in Iran has a significant drug-related dimension. Being part of the Golden Crescent, a region spanning Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan with prominent illicit opium production, Iran has served as a pathway for drug traffickers in the shipping of narcotics from Afghanistan to Europe.’

But AIDS is rising in Iran, not because of sexual relations, but drug addiction:

While the Iranian government does not treat drug trafficking lightly, the illegal drug trade has fueled the country’s growing problems with drug addiction.

According to a survey carried out by the Iranian Drug Control Organization, there are about 2.8 million Iranians who regularly use narcotics. Out of those, roughly 67 percent take heroin as their primary drug.

The widespread availability of heroin and other opiates, which are often taken intravenously, has served as an important vector spreading AIDS/HIV among drug addicts, with UN statistics claiming that9.3 percent of Iranian drug addicts currently have HIV.

https://en.radiofarda.com/a/iran-aids-hiv-drugs-addiction/29445043.html

Bill and Melinda are political/moral conformists who are unable question the practice of circumcision, rationalized sexual violence,  in American life because it has been normalized. Leonard B. Glick provides a revelatory history of this practice:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/marked-in-your-flesh-9780195176742?cc=us&lang=en&

The Gates’ judgement is really at question here. This newspaper prints the opinion of these two people, who have no qualification, except that they are wealthy nearly beyond the comprehension of us mortal beings. They somehow possess a knowledge, indeed a prescience, that demands our collective attention?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/f999c4e4-78a2-4f83-9beb-91c15dccd0b8

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In reply to Mike James