Neoliberal mythology on education and wages

Bad schooling is NOT the cause of low earnings

Nasal spray defense against COVID

Roundup of commercial products

Betadine is the standard but availability is limited now

Iodine plus a viscous agent like carrageenan.

Povidone diluted with saline is a diy method but doesn’t provide the barrier that the carrageenan has.

I’ve used enovid/ Sanotize which is a nitric oxide nasal spray.  I don’t think I have ever had COVID since but also avoid crowded indoor spaces with shared air, and mask frequently.

I think I have had COVID zero to three times. Never tested positive but have had symptoms .  Best guess is once, March 2020, when Cynthia definitely had it.

Neoliberalism’s “ quiet coup “

Book review

Can neoliberalism explain everything?

neoliberalism continues to thrive on a steady diet of scholarship, commentary, and invective. In The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, Mehrsa Baradaran is the latest to anatomize the neoliberal octopus. Baradaran, the author of pathbreaking books on systemic inequality in the United States’ banking system, limns a bleak history of modern American politics. Since the 1960s, she argues, American law and public policy has been reshaped around corporate interests – a transformation that has rippled out into U.S. society and culture.

…

the sweep and breadth of Baradaran’s account—touching on everything from empire to civil rights to campaign finance and antitrust—raises the question of whether neoliberalism can explain everything. Is there a unitary system of political, legal, and economic thought, crafted into laws and public policies by a set of ideological actors, that explains our world since the 1960s? It’s a seductive prospect: master this one equation, and you render perfectly legible six tumultuous decades of history.

…

For every green industrial strategy, there is a crypto bubble. Moreover, for all that left-leaning and liberal commentators now critique the conditions of neoliberalism, it is unclear whether these critiques are rooted in durable political coalitions. Baradaran makes the provocative, highly astute point that if the 2020s are a decade of transition, it is worrying that figures on the Right traffic in “utopian” appeals far more fluently than do liberals or the Left, from emergent post-Trump populists to Silicon Valley’s sinister philosopher-king Peter Thiel.

Money, economy, why no one knows anything…. MMT adjacent

Doug Lamont goes on a rant.

What is happening today, as a series of unexpected events and crises have unfolded, is that people have been unable to cope in an emergency - especially an extended one. It drives people around the bend. Uncertainty means fear eats away at hope and reason.

…

Neoliberal / Neoclassical ideas.

These fundamentally libertarian ideas - which include assumptions and mathematical models of different parts of the economy, claim to describe how the mechanics of the economy work. They don’t.

The fundamental assumption that neoclassical / neoliberal economics gets wrong is related to the creation of new money in an economy.

Institutionalized slavery as the “cure” for homelessness

Business wins with cheap prison labor

In the 1970s, the US began loosening restrictions on prison labor while simultaneously starting to attribute homelessness to mental illness and addiction (and ignoring economic factors). Forty-plus years later and those two parallel tracks of neoliberalism are merging and resurrecting the 19th century Victorian workhouse.

With the number of homeless continuing to rise in the US, municipalities, states, and the national government are faced with the task of doing something about a problem that’s apparently just too hard to solve. As with most any response to the fallout from neoliberalism here in the land of the free, the US comes equipped with a hammer in search of a nail that will profit the powerful and well-connected. And so it is with the “homeless problem” as we see the outlines of consensus beginning to form around solutions that involve incarceration — and therefore forced labor.

Ukraine issues discussed

CNN interview

Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Ryabkov 

This interview is outstanding in every way. It is especially valuable for explaining Russia’s disparagement of what we know of Trump’s plans for ending the war very quickly by use of threats and blandishments to the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. Per this official Russian position, a settlement is possible only if the core security concerns of Russia are addressed, meaning a settlement addressing the European security architecture and not merely a ceasefire, a frozen conflict, and other nonsense contained so far in what the Trump entourage is touting.

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Ryabkov is the official who crafted and presented the ultimatum to NATO in December 2021 over the need to roll back the NATO European presence to what it was at the end of the Cold War, before the alliance expanded eastward under Bill Clinton. The refusal early in the new year by Washington and Brussels to enter into negotiations over the Russian demands led directly to the launch of the Special Military Operation and invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with Russia determined to win by force of arms what it could not achieve by diplomacy.

COVID vaccine side effects

Are they rare?  

Can we have a discussion?

Anti vaxxers often contribute BS but the medical establishment is still pushing “rare” as a narrative despite mounting evidence 

Some efforts to find out the reality and sift out personal, corporate and political agendas…

discussion of Covid side effects was aggressively suppressed

reporting to VAERS [is highly discouraged by the medical community]

But

the confounding problem is that the anti-vax crowd has a bias to any out-of-band health issue as the result of the vaccines

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With the topic of Covid vaccines having become so deeply politicized, and their unacknowledged problems leading to widespread vaccine hesitancy even with old vaccines with very good safety profiles, we are sure to see the pent-up anger about Covid vaccines (the result of dubious and punitive mandates) generate full-throated criticism under Trump 2.0. But the lack of good data means the demonization won’t be factually better founded than the earlier knee-jerk defense.

…

Of course, vaccines save lives. But the “nothing to see here” posture regarding legitimate vaccine side effects is preventing government from having our backs and following up on flaws in the products — in the same the way it does when romaine lettuce or lunch meat gets contaminated, or air bags don’t function properly.

…

as is well known in the medical profession, there really is a flaw. Several vaccines have a problem with Guillain-Barré syndrome, known as GBS.

The US looks more and more like a third world country

Fraying institutions

People get sorted not so much into red and blue worlds but into different financial systems, living conditions, and educational opportunities. When they get sick, deal with the law, travel—you name it—their experiences are like night and day. They exist in separate spheres. Pretty much the only way for someone in the low-wage sector to break into the affluent one is through a top-notch education—but that path is riddled with obstacles, even if you can find the money.

For most, escape is a distant dream.

The well-educated affluent sector makes decisions, sets the agenda, while the rest are just trying to survive – and getting sicker and dying younger. One cohort makes moves, while the other is caught in the aftermath.

As a rule, here’s what usually happens when a country splits into a dual economy:

• The low-wage sector has hardly any say in public policy.
• The high-income sector keeps wages down in the low-wage area to secure cheap labor for their businesses.
• Social control is used to keep low-wage workers from pushing back against policies that favor the wealthy.
• The main goal for the richest in the high-income sector is to cut taxes.
• Social and economic mobility become rarer.

We see

• Across party lines, the majority of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations.
• Most Americans want to increase Social Security benefits and oppose cuts.
• The majority favor higher taxes on the wealthy to keep Social Security robust.
• Most U.S. adults think the federal government should guarantee healthcare coverage for everyone. The majority favor single-payer – a single government program for healthcare.
• A bipartisan majority of voters want to expand Medicare to cover long-term, in-home care services.

And on it goes. Americans see very little real action from politicians in either party on these issues. In fact, they often see the opposite. Misleading rhetoric won’t make their concerns vanish.

The electorate is not stupid. Most Americans know perfectly well that their wages have not kept up with inflation, no matter how politicians try to spin it. They see the ever-rising costs of essential goods — keeping a roof over their heads, seeing a doctor, and going to college. They realize that the rich are profiting off their hard work and refusing to contribute their fair share in taxes. Black men, in particular, are worse off than they were before the pandemic – and people wonder why they aren’t supporting the status quo as they once did.

Medicine

Makary

Explains a lot about how the practice of medicine can be improved.

He does not call the medical establishment nefarious; rather, he accuses it of frequently embracing a narrative — that stress causes ulcers, for instance — without evidence, ignoring scientific findings that do not support the idea, and blackballing those who question their position.

Medical journals, for example, are a primary way in which doctors learn about new scientific knowledge that informs the medical care they provide. Most journals use a peer-review process, meaning that an article is only accepted for publication if a panel of experts deems it to be accurate and of high quality.

Makary has written more than 250 peer-reviewed articles in medical journals, but he is no fan of the genre. In his view, editorial boards, the gatekeepers of peer-reviewed publishing “tend to be composed of like-minded friends.”

“I have been shocked to see studies so flawed that the results are rendered invalid, yet they were published in prestigious medical journals and upheld as scientific proof when instead they just support a groupthink narrative,” 

Some issues with Medicare Advantage

Problematic

this year 54 percent of all beneficiaries are enrolled in private Medicare plans. 

To those in favor of market-oriented solutions, this would seem like a success story. It would be, except one crucial piece of context: It is costing taxpayers a lot of money. The Medicare Advisory Payment Commission (MedPac), a nonpartisan congressional agency, estimates that the CMS has spent 23 percent more on Medicare Advantage patients than it would have if those patients were in traditional Medicare.

Free market abuses rather than automatic “efficiency “

Monopoly power

Incentives to cheat.

Elinor ostrom and reclaiming the commons

Handling the polycrisis

Some wisdom about how the crises could be resolved but not necessarily a good blueprint for how to solve the political details in order to move forward.

My working thesis is that it cannot be solved without serious disruption, looking to game theory.  Too many people have self interest in near term projects that create benefits for them but impose huge costs on the rest of the world.

the thinking that got us into our current mess, particularly but not solely climate climate change and environmental degradation, is inherently ill-suited to come up with remedies... 

What we are up against is not just neoliberalism. It is a highly complex society, with most occupying very specialized roles, combined with capitalism, which requires a large majority of people to sell their labor to survive. Oh, and worse, sell that labor in a competitive market. That generally means that trying to do things differently as a current or prospective employee is likely to result in not having a paycheck.

Individuals are typically subject to multiple sets of responsibilities, and they often conflict. The number of conflicts tends to increase as societies become more complex, starting with family/tribal, local communities, national, global. Humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility. The tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex.

Conjunctural analysis

How to 

communicate without getting lost in the Overton Window

The problem with information these days is not only its content, but equally its form. The velocity of information is striking, making it near impossible for a concerned person to discern both what is significant and what is true. Providing an excess of information that comes without proper, democratic analysis and is almost entirely controlled by a small oligarchy is its own form of censorship, exhausting the reader and viewer into submission. What is censored is not only information itself, although that does occur more than we admit, but also knowledge and wisdom. The news remains at the level of it happened, without explaining most of what happened at all: it does not explain why it happened, what caused it to happen, or its possible consequences. This form of reporting lies by omission, as events are neither static nor singular but part of a complex process.

Conjunctural analyses are an important tool for understanding that complexity, since they seek to explain the dynamic process of history at a certain point in time. Any given point in time is rooted in a past and a future: the past shapes the present, but the present also presages what may come in the future depending on how one intervenes now. That is why conjunctural analyses, derived from a history of Marxist analysis and from the work of the political and social movements that conduct them, are rooted in four principles:

1. History. Since events do not take place in isolation but are part of a long-term process, there must be a distinction between incidental or occasional events and organic or structural events.
2. Totality. Events are interconnected. They are part of a complex structure that encompasses various possibilities.
3. Structure. Events take place within a lattice that includes economic, political, social, and cultural aspects and within which people are organised into classes and power blocs that interact through institutions and ideas.
4. Politics. Events must be understood in an active way, which means asking how a political force will act to shape the future, rather than passively watching the future unfold. Answering this question requires a close analysis of the nature of class formation, the balance of political forces, and cultural traditions that could advance a certain political agenda.