BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-03-03 Su
It was not all that “hot” a PCE inflatIon number!; the FT Editorial Board is dismayed that the U.S. Supreme Court majority puts its thumb on the scale for neofascists & Julian Sanchez’s trust in the Supreme Court majority is proven hilariously wrong; & grave moral fault rests on everybody who contributes their money and their talent to the New York Times; Suresh Naidu & Alice Evans on the U.S. labor movement; the human demographic transition; & very briefly noted…
SubStack NOTES:
Economics: It was not all that “hot” a PCE inflation number. And the people saying that inflation is still ongoing (rather than squelched, at least for the moment) all rest what little quantitative chops they have on the lagged year-over-year measure—and that fell. So I am not so surprised, or impressed by the lack of panic:
Paul Krugman: ‘Impressive lack of panic over the hot PCE number. Everyone in my feed seems to understand that it’s probably wonky seasonals, and that underlying inflation has fallen to ~2.5 percent without a recession… <threads.net/@paulkrugman7/post/C371CRGu…>
As Fred Bellemore says:
Why is 0.3% monthly now “hot”?…Never in 40 years has a 0.3% monthly been called hot…And now in the last 5 weeks it has…
Neofascism: The Financial Times Editorial Board—the Financial Times Editorial Board!—expresses its dismay that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is willing to put its thumb on the scale to support the neofascist cause in America. One would think that it would not have taken even one Putin to convince people that neofascist kleptocrats are the natural enemies of people in general but of plutocrats too, and that carrying water for insurrectionists is a really bad idea. Still, I do find their willingness to call a spade a spade very heartening:
Financial Times Editorial Board: The US Supreme Court has helped Donald Trump: ‘Nobody denies that the wheels of justice should be allowed to take their course. In this case, however, the court has repeatedly dragged out the process…. The court could have chosen to hear the oral arguments next week, as Smith requested—and as the urgency of the question demands. Instead, they will not hear the case until April 22, which was the last possible date in their term. This means that their ruling may not be published until as late as July…. Bush vs Gore… [that] settled the 2000 presidential election in favour of George W Bush was issued a day after the court heard the oral arguments. When the court wants to act fast, it does—and this argument is as pressing as any the court has faced in recent history…. Few legal brains have any doubt about the final outcome…. The former president’s legal team is playing for time. The fact that a majority of Supreme Court justices are apparently willing to go along with that is a matter of the gravest concern. In this case, justice delayed would be justice denied… <ft.com/content/9e13c9c6-7e8a-4d2a-a9e7-…>
Neofascism: Starting in January 2001 I have presumed it 50-50 that people arguing the Supreme Court was not deeply corrupt were themselves deeply corrupt, and lying. The needle has only moved left since then: It is now 100%-0%:
Julian Sanchez: ‘Maybe I’ll be proven hilariously wrong, but I think people are wildly overestimating the extent to which the conservative justices have any real interest in protecting Trump personally. They don’t have primaries. They don’t have to pretend to like him…
Julian Sanchez: ‘I have been proven hilariously wrong. There is no real way to account for the delay and certiorari grant on an obviously frivolous immunity argument except as an effort to do Trump a political favor… <threads.net/@normative/post/C36e08bLka0>
Journamalism: Grave moral fault rests on everybody who contributes their money and their talent to the New York Times. Just saying:
Parker Molloy: This NYT Headline About Student Loan Forgiveness is an Exercise in the Paper’s Absurdity: ‘On Wednesday, The New York Times reported on President Joe Biden’s latest round of student loan forgiveness. “Biden Cancels $1.2 Billion in Student Loan Debt for 150,000 Borrowers,” read the headline, simply stating the facts. The subheadline was equally neutral-yet-informative, letting readers know that the administration “has canceled $138 billion of student debt for nearly 3.9 million borrowers.”… But then the paper changed the headline <twitter.com/nyt_diff/status/17604657214… to “A Beleaguered Biden Chips Away at Student Loan Debt, Bit by Bit,” managing to take a neutral headline and turn it into a standard and here’s why this is bad for Biden piece… <readtpa.com/p/this-nyt-headline-about-s…>
ONE AUDIO: Suresh Naidu & Alice Evans on the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement:
ONE IMAGE: The Human Demographic Transition:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Niko Batallones: We knew we were never, ever, ever having Taylor Swift over: ‘The technical expertise to mount… [large pop-music events] events is there [in the Philippines]…. But for Filipinos, going to these shows can be quite a chore, if only because getting to and from venues—even if they are within Metro Manila—is a challenge. Take my experience with last year’s Mamamoo concert… at… Araneta… a 16,000-seater… home of… Muhammad Ali… [vs.] Joe Frazier… just north of dead center of Metro Manila… served by two train lines and a major bus route. Yet my friends and I planned to go there as early as ten in the morning for a concert that would start nine hours later…. Friends who were scattered along the south, a mostly residential area where NIMBY-ism prevails…. You end up driving…. Imagine what time I, the designated driver of this party of four MooMoos, had to wake up, pick up friends, find parking, and get a good enough spot to wait for the gates to open…. When Bruno Mars performed there last year traffic was so bad that a tweet from Eat Bulaga! host Maine Mendoza, talking about how she missed all but the last two songs of the concert, went viral…
Journamalism: Parker Molloy: This NYT Headline About Student Loan Forgiveness is an Exercise in the Paper’s Absurdity: ‘On Wednesday, The New York Times reported on President Joe Biden’s latest round of student loan forgiveness. “Biden Cancels $1.2 Billion in Student Loan Debt for 150,000 Borrowers,” read the headline, simply stating the facts. The subheadline was equally neutral-yet-informative, letting readers know that the administration “has canceled $138 billion of student debt for nearly 3.9 million borrowers.”… But then the paper changed the headline to “A Beleaguered Biden Chips Away at Student Loan Debt, Bit by Bit,” managing to take a neutral headline and turn it into a standard and here’s why this is bad for Biden piece…
Tom Watson: The New York Times Is Broken: ‘The hard truth, especially for New Yorkers who have read the paper for decades, is that it’s not cluelessness or simply bad journalism keeping from NYT from defending democracy. It’s business…. The liberal paper of record continues to stage a mass freak out event over Joe Biden’s age…. Never mind that Biden promised neither concentration camps nor the destruction of the western alliance, and appears both more fit and mentally sharp than the 78-year-old Mussolini wannabe. The Times is not interested. And here’s why, folks—here’s the hard truth, especially for New Yorkers who have read the paper for decades. It’s not cluelessness, some misguided “both sides” ethic, or simply bad journalism. No, to me it sadly comes down to the now undeniable conclusion that the Class A shareholders of stock in The New York Times Company want Trump to win. Probably, for the money. Occam’s Razor. And the newsroom got the memo…
Patrick Cosmos: ‘Deep respect for Bari Weiss building the media company version of a breakaway child army, deploying her junior birdbrains to say factually wrong things, and then when they get corrected be like “interesting! you are invited to have this debate content monetized for the Bari Weiss Brain Institute”… <https://bsky.app/profile/veryimportant.lawyer/post/3kmnwees7io2f>
Public Reason: Noah Smith: Getting Past the 2010s: ‘Bushnell… was not a good man, fighting for a good cause. But that doesn’t make him insane, either. He was a passionate man, fighting passionately for an extremist cause. We should no longer be surprised when such people are willing to die…. I’m just glad that Aaron Bushnell chose not to take anyone else with him when he decided to die for the mishmash of online leftist propaganda that had taken over his worldview. Palestine has already become the central, unifying cause of American leftists—the type of people who pay dues to the DSA and call America the “heart of empire” and listen to Chapo Trap House…. Palestine is starting to absorb some of the energy of progressive causes…. Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta are becoming Palestine rallies. The International Planned Parenthood Federation declares that Palestine is “a litmus test” for commitment to reproductive justice. Greta Thunberg has pivoted from climate activism to Palestine…. I thought about Sanrizuka. A Japanese leftist movement that had begun as a broad-spectrum revolt against the powers that be had narrowed its focus as it shrank, throwing everything it had into the effort to stop Narita Airport, and still somehow imagining that a victory against Narita would be the spark that ignited a nationwide leftist revolution. That hope turned out to be in vain…. Broad-based economic improvement does not mean that everyone is happy, or should be happy. In particular, downwardly mobile educated people may still feel that their rightful place in America’s elite has been withheld from them…. [But as] new recruits, new donations, and new enthusiasm stop flowing into progressive activist movements, and start flowing out. .. this can make progressive activists more extreme…. Moderates exit the movements first… evaporative cooling. There’s an effort underway to amend South Dakota’s state constitution to codify abortion rights as defined under Roe v. Wade. But many progressive activist groups are opposing this effort, for various reasons that all boil down to extremism…. This sort of spiraling demand for ideological purity over political power is the hallmark of a movement in decline. There are definitely flavors of the mid to late 1970s here…. This, I think, is the way the unrest of the 2010s ends… a long buzzing hangover that lingers until midafternoon…
Neofascism: Craig M Rawlings & Clayton Childress: The Polarization of Popular Culture: Tracing the Size, Shape, and Depth of the “Oil Spill”: ‘135 widely known movies, TV shows, musicians, sports, and leisure activities…. The “oil spill” of polarization into popular culture is large but loosely organized…. Cultural polarization is also asymmetric. Liberals like a wide variety of popular culture, do not dislike conservative popular culture, and their tastes are more rooted in their sociodemographics. Conservatives… like a much narrower range of popular culture, dislike the culture created and liked by Black and urban liberals, and their tastes seem to be more directly rooted in their political ideology… <https://academic.oup.com/sf/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/sf/soad150/7502686>
Ian Buruma: Alexei Navalny Did Not Die for Nothing: ‘By rewarding conformity, by making people repeat lies and propaganda, by forcing friends and relatives to betray one another, dictatorships bring out the worst in people. They create a culture of fear, mistrust, and betrayal…. It is then that the example set by political martyrs plays a vital role. Societies warped by dictatorship have to find a moral basis for building something better…. Jean Moulin… never saw the end of the Nazi occupation…. The Nazis executed the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer… three weeks before Adolf Hitler killed himself…. Liu Xiaobo… spent… his life in and out of jail and died in custody in 2017, having failed to dismantle his country’s one-party regime. Navalny had no chance of toppling Putin’s neo-czarist rule. But the only hope of building societies that can protect freedoms and bring out the best in people lies in the examples of what they have done… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/navalny-faced-dissident-dilemma-stay-or-flee-by-ian-buruma-2024-03>
Jonathan V. Last: The Trouble with Nikki: ‘When only Republicans vote, Haley lives around the 25 percent mark. Her best showings—in New Hampshire and South Carolina—are powered by independents and crossover Democrats… [and] moderates, urbanites, and people with college or graduate degrees. And yet Haley spends most of her time trashing this voting coalition. She’s not a Never Trumper! She hates the Democrats! She’s fighting against the elites in her high heels because it hurts more when you curb-stomp the socialists or whatever! Haley does this weird thing where she pretends that her real support comes from True American MAGA types…
HandMaid Movement: Jeff Tiedrich: More IVF fuckery from the forced-birth fascists: Get your stories straight, hypocrites…. ‘“Yes, life begins at conception and frozen embryos are babies and killing babies is murder,” they’re saying—but also that “it’s totally cool to kill embryo-babies during the IVF process because…” oh fuck, my head hurts from just trying to type out this sentence. Check out Holy Mike Johnson trying desperately to thread that needle. Reporter: “do you believe discarding embryos is murder?” Johnson: “look, I believe in the sanctity of every human life—I always have—and because of that I support IVF”…
Polly Curtis: Citizens’ assemblies could help repair our toxic political culture: ‘Citizens’ assemblies, which Labour has recently proposed for constitutional reform, devolution and planning decisions, can break the most intractable policy deadlock. In Ireland in 2018, a group of 99 citizens chosen at random sat down to debate abortion…. Citizens’ assemblies have been used to help decide net zero policies in France in the aftermath of the gilets jaunes protests, to think through affordable housing in Switzerland and to set a 10-year, £5bn allocation of funding in Melbourne…. We need a collaborative democracy, starting with an honest approach to the complexity of the challenges we face — and the trade-offs required in overcoming them. Engaging citizens in policymaking can help us all find breakthroughs. And by building partnerships between citizens and governments, politicians will be better equipped to be bolder and to go further in addressing our collective challenges… <https://www.ft.com/content/6de680af-834e-4a14-a3f3-38b277b5d472>
