#Industrial Policy

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."

Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.

That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.

These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.

Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."

Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."

(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.

Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.

In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.

The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.

A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.

This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.

If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.

What's not to like?

Here's what.

The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.

That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.

These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.

For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.

But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.

Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.

Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.

The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.

This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.

This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.

For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.

Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.

But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.

That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.

Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily – lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.

For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.

These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.

It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.

For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.

Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.

This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:

https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#

Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.

The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.

Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.

Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.

Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.

The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?

2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.

That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.

The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.

Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.

The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.

The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.

Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").

All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.

Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.

Image: Mickael Courtiade (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #chips act #ip #monopolies #antitrust #national security #industrial policy #american economic liberties project #tmsc #leading-edge #intel #mature node #lagging edge #foundries #fabless

[probablyasocialecologist]

Economic statistics should be taken critically as the shaky constructions they are, but they do tell you something. Industrial policy has made its worldwide comeback within an equally worldwide exhaustion of the global economic system, the slow-motion expiration of the US-based configuration of capitalism inaugurated at the close of the Second World War. On the surface, Bidenomics seems to represent a decisive break with neoliberal dogma, and so it is in some respects; but more fundamentally, it is smoothly continuous with the deeper trend, starting in the 1940s, of fading growth prospects and rising state involvement in the private economy. If anything, it is an intensification of this trend. Its official adoption represents the belated recognition by “policymakers” that still greater state action is needed to sustain the already meager growth rates of the national economy, crushed beneath the dead weight of an expiring system.

#economics #joe biden #keynesian economics #industrial policy

[robpegoraro]

Weekly output: slumping social-media satisfaction, Russia threatens to leave ISS, CHIPS Act, IRS direct e-filing, net-neutrality bill

Weekly output: slumping social-media satisfaction, Russia threatens to leave ISS, CHIPS Act, IRS direct e-filing, net-neutrality bill

My workweek ended with a streak of only-in-Washington posts. 7/26/2022: Customer Satisfaction With Social Media Platforms Is Slumping, PCMag I got an advance look at the latest results from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, an ongoing survey project that’s been a source of story ideas since I worked at the Post. 7/27/2022: A Russian ISS exit could give NASA a hangover—then leave…

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#ACSI #Build Back Better #CHIPS Act #Gigi Sohn #industrial policy #Inflation Reduction Act #International Space Station #IRS direct file #IRS e-file #ISS #nasa #net neutrality #Roscosmos #social media satisfaction #Title II

[feckcops]

Why is Labour still using the self-defeating, discredited ‘maxed out credit card’ analogy?

“Rarely has a lacklustre policy been abandoned for a reason so bad that it threatens to inflict long-term damage on a society. Independently of whether the £28bn green investment programme was the right policy for the next Labour government to commit to, Rachel Reeves’s reasons for ditching it were an undeserved gift to the Tories and a partial vindication of their disgraceful flirtations with an austerian, anti-green political narrative ...

“When your credit card is ‘maxed out’, you do indeed need immediately to tighten your belt. The reason why parsimony works for you, and helps limit your debt, is that you are blessed with an income that is independent of what you decide to spend money on. In other words, if you don’t buy the shoes or new phone you covet, your income will not diminish, and so your deficit will shrink reliably. But the state’s budget is nothing like a credit card. As chancellor of the exchequer, your (tax) income is highly dependent on your (public) spending. Limit your spending and you have limited your income too. This is why the more Osborne slashed public spending in the 2010s, the more money he needed to borrow. By adopting the ‘maxed credit card’ narrative, Reeves endorsed Osborne’s flawed logic and, indirectly, absolved the Tories for the wanton damage they have inflicted on a generation of Britons.

“Austerity, and the credit card analogy that provides its thin veneer of logic, is not just bad for workers and people in desperate need of state support during tough times; it also depresses investment. By hastening the stagnation of a society’s aggregate income, it signals to businesses that they would be mad to put money into building up the capacity to produce the output that society is too impecunious to buy. That’s how austerity undermined investment in Britain and that’s how it will annul Labour’s ambition to draw in private green investments, now that Reeves has ditched her modest green public investment plan, replacing it with wishful thinking that the private sector will, magically, make up the difference ...

“These large sums can be raised, not through Treasury bonds that need to be repaid by taxpayers, but by bonds issued by a new public investment bank – to be repaid from the proceeds of the green enterprises they fund. The Bank of England could also help with an announcement: if the price of these green bonds were to fall below a certain point, it would buy them second-hand – even while selling off its stock of Treasury bonds. This mere announcement would ensure it would not need actually to buy them because investors would rush in to snap them up, thus leaving Britain’s public debt servicing costs unaffected.”

#yanis varoufakis #keynes #rachel reeves #keir starmer #labour party #labour #green new deal #green investment #industrial policy #public spending #austerity #deficit #economics #uk politics #politics

[johnjankovic1]

Moby Dick

There is a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship, and the sailor's dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies, and fill merchantmen, than all the press gangs of Europe. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast, 1840

#Industrial Policy #Maritime Sector

[shirleywhere]

#china #industrial policy

[dserwer1]

Stevenon's army, January 2

Stevenon’s army, January 2

Under federal law, 5 USC 6103, today is New Year’s Day, a federal holiday for pay and leave purposes, since January 1 was on a Sunday this year. Enjoy it! Tomorrow, pursuant to the Constitution, the 118th Congress will assemble, take the oaths of office, and try to do business. CRS explains the procedures for the Senate and the House. The biggest issue is whether Cong. Kevin McCarthy [R-CA]…

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#2022 Election #China #Congress #Industrial policy #Russia #Ukraine

[brightpunjabexpress]

PUNJAB GOVERNMENT TO SET UP 20 DEDICATED RURAL INDUSTRIAL HUBS IN THE STATE: SAYS CM

PUNJAB GOVERNMENT TO SET UP 20 DEDICATED RURAL INDUSTRIAL HUBS IN THE STATE: SAYS CM

MOVE AIMED AT GIVING MAJOR PUSH TO INDUSTRIAL GROWTH AND EMPLOYMENT IN THE STATE MOOTS IDEA OF ‘ONE DISTRICT, ONE PRODUCT’ TO ENSURE PRODUCTION OF SPECIALIZED GOODS IN VARIOUS DISTRICTS ANNOUNCES TO FURTHER STRENGTHEN THE SINGLE WINDOW SYSTEM IN STATE FOR FACILITATING THE INVESTORS Chandigarh, December 6- With an aim to give a major push to the industrial development of the state especially…

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#Bhagwant Mann #brightpunjabexpress #Industrial Policy #PunjabChiefMinister #Punjabgovernment #Rural Industrial Hubs

[africaindustrializationday]

The Future of Industrialization in a Post-Pandemic World.

The Future of Industrialization in a Post-Pandemic World. Industrial Development Report 2022.

#UNIDO #industrialization #post pandemic #Future of Industrialization #Agribusiness #Regional value chains #financing for industrial development #industrial development #industrial infrastructure #SEZ development #Energy access #green transition #Human capital #Industry 4.0 #Trade capacity building #Health industry #Entrepreneurship #Partnerships #Industrial policy

[inkskinned]

one of the things that i think we should pay attention to, socially, about the disney v. desantis thing is that it is really highlighting the importance of remembering nuance.

in a purely neutral sense, if you engage in something problematic, that does not mean you are necessarily agreeing with what makes it problematic. and i am worried that we have become... so afraid of any form of nuance.

disney isn't my friend, they're a corporate monopoly that bastardized copyright laws for their own benefit, ruin the environment, and abuse their workers (... and many other things). this isn't a hypothetical for me - i grew up in florida. i also worked for the actual Walt Disney World; like, in the parks. i am keenly aware of the ways they hurt people, because they hurt me. i fully believe that part of the reason florida is so conservative is because it's been an "open secret" for years now that disney lobbies the government to keep minimum wage down, and i know they worked hard to keep the parks unmasked and open during the worst parts of Covid. they purposefully keep their employees in poverty. they are in part responsible for the way the floridian government works.

desantis is still, by a margin that is frankly daunting, way worse. the alternative here isn't just "republicans win", it's actual fascism.

in a case like this, where the alternative is to allow actual fascism into united states legislation - where, if desantis wins, there are huge and legal ramifications - it's tempting to minimize the harm disney is also doing, because... well, it's not fascism. but disney isn't the good guy, either, which means republicans are having a field day asking activists oh, so you think their treatment of their employees is okay?

we have been trained there is a right answer. you're right! you're in the good group, and you're winning at having an opinion.

except i have the Internet Prophecy that in 2-3 months, even left-wing people will be ripping apart activists for having "taken disney's side". aren't i an anti-capitalist? aren't i pro-union? aren't i one of the good ones? removed from context and nuance (that in this particular situation i am forced to side with disney, until an other option reveals itself), my act of being like "i hope they have goofy rip his throat out onstage, shaking his lifeless body like a dog toy" - how quickly does that seem like i actually do support disney?

and what about you! at home, reading this. are you experiencing the Thought Crime of... actually liking some of the things disney has made? your memories of days at the parks, or of good movies, or of your favorite show growing up. maybe you are also evil, if you ever enjoyed anything, ever, at all.

to some degree, the binary idealization/vilification of individual motive and meaning already exists in the desantis case. i have seen people saying not to go to the disney pride events because they're cash grabs (they are). i've seen people saying you have to go because they're a way to protest. there isn't a lot of internet understanding of nuance. instead it's just "good show of support" or "evil bootlicking."

this binary understanding is how you can become radicalized. when we fear nuance and disorder, we're allowing ourselves the safety of assuming that the world must exist in binary - good or bad, problematic or "not" problematic. and unfortunately, bigots want you to see the world in this binary ideal. they want you to get mad at me because "disney is taking a risk for our community but you won't sing their praises" and they want me to get mad at you for not respecting the legit personal trauma that disney forced me through.

in a grander scheme outside of disney: what happens is a horrific splintering within activist groups. we bicker with each other about minimal-harm minimal-impact ideologies, like which depiction of bisexuality is the most-true. we gratuitously analyze the personal lives of activists for any sign they might be "problematic". we get spooked because someone was in a dog collar at pride. we wring our hands about setting an empty shopping mall on fire. we tell each other what words we may identify ourselves by. we get fuckin steven universe disk horse when in reality it is a waste of our collective time.

the bigots want you to spend all your time focusing on how pristine and pretty you and your interests are. they want us at each other's throats instead of hand in hand. they want to say see? nothing is ever fucking good enough for these people.

and they want their followers to think in binary as well - a binary that's much easier to follow. see, in our spaces, we attack each other over "proper" behavior. but in bigoted groups? they attack outwards. they have someone they hate, and it is us. they hate you, specifically, and you are why they have problems - not the other people in their group. and that's a part of how they fucking keep winning.

some of the things that are beloved to you have a backbone in something terrible. the music industry is a wasteland. the publishing industry is a bastion of white supremacy. video games run off of unpaid labor and abuse.

the point of activism was always to bring to light that abuse and try to stop it from happening, not to condemn those who engage in the content that comes from those industries. "there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism" also applies to media. your childhood (and maybe current!) love of the little mermaid isn't something you should now flinch from, worried you'll be a "disney adult". wanting the music industry to change for the better does not require that you reject all popular music until that change occurs. you can acknowledge the harm something might cause - and celebrate the love that it has brought into your life.

we must detach an acknowledgment of nuance from a sense of shame and disgust. we must. punishing individual people for their harmless passions is not doing good work. encouraging more thoughtful, empathetic consumption does not mean people should feel ashamed of their basic human capacities and desires. it should never have even been about the individual when the corporation is so obviously the actual evil. this sense that we must live in shame and dread of our personal nuances - it just makes people bitter and hopeless. do you have any idea how scared i am to post this? to just acknowledge the idea of nuance? that i might like something nuanced, and engage in it joyfully? and, at the same time, that i'm brutally aware of the harm that they're doing?

"so what do i do?" ... well, often there isn't a right answer. i mean in this case, i hope mickey chops off ron's head and then does a little giggle. but truth be told, often our opinions on nuanced subjects will differ. you might be able to engage in things that i can't because the nuance doesn't sit right with me. i might think taylor swift is a great performer and a lot of fun, and you might be like "raquel, the jet fuel emissions". we are both correct; neither of us have any actual sway in this. and i think it's important to remember that - the actual scope of individual responsibility. like, i also love going to the parks. Thunder Mountain is so fun. you (just a person) are not responsible for the harm that Disney (the billion dollar corporation) caused me. i don't know. i think it's possible to both enjoy your memories and interrogate the current state of their employment policies.

there is no right way to interrogate or engage with nuance - i just hope you embrace it readily.

#does this make sense #to do be deleted probably yikes #(takes a swing at a wasp's nest) #like i think ppl have started to just be really quiet when they like something 'problematic' #and im like... u can be like - #girl tswift NEEDS to just TAKE A BUS . LIKE????????????????????? #while also being like. #''she's a lot of fun'' #if ur personal policy is that u don't support her for that reason that's great #but it's like. eating meat??? #like yeah some people won't bc the environment. but the fact i eat meat doesn't mean i hate the earth #like i can say that i think the meat industry is HORRIFIC and also downright cruel to its employees #but like. still enjoy a chicken nugget.... #there are people who choose otherwise. it's okay . we are people. i make like no money. u probably don't either #us fighting about whether or not it's Right To Eat The Chicken Tender just distracts from like. #actually turning your ire on the corporation #i hope it's clear what i'm saying here is like. when we fight each other for Purity Reasons #we are just doing the work of corporations . for free. like they WANT us to be doing this lol #it's the fucking DREAM of the upperclass that now ALL forms of responsibility fall on the individual

[androgynouspaperyouth]

“In other words, the more ground China gained in these industries, the more the United States lost.”

#industrial policy #stem #tech #china #artificial intelligence

[progressivemillennial]

#politics #us politics #progressive #war #foreign policy #jeremy scahill #nancy pelosi #free gaza #gaza strip #gaza genocide #gazaunderattack #gaza #free palestine #palestine #special interests #military industrial complex

[shinobicyrus]

Hey, yanno how Climate Change is a real thing that is tangibly, at this moment, affecting our world?

Well it turns out, the wealthy and their investment firms have been seeing the mounting evidence that oil companies have had for decades and are slowly starting to think more long-term about their portfolios in the face of rising sea levels, more extreme weather, and the myriad of ways climate crises are affecting...well. Everything. Maybe this means they invest more into sustainability, green energy, building more resilient infrastructure, or carbon offsets. Some of it, of course, is simple corporate greenwashing, but there are those that are taking this trend and packaging it into something called ESG (Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance).

Now some people would say this is predictable, even sensible. Just the good ol’ Free Market(tm) rationally responding to market forces and a changing world.

But those people would be fools! Insidious fools! For conservative sorcerers have come out with a new cursed phrase to explain this new market trend: Woke Investing.

What makes this investing “woke?” Well, much like how conservatives normally flounder when trying to define a word they stole from black people, “Woke Investing” essentially just means any kind of capital investment that they, the fossil fuel billionaire class and their sycophants, don’t personally profit from.

One of these aforementioned sycophants is Andy Puzder, conservative commentator, fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and former fast-food CEO. He calls this kind of so-called woke investing “socialism in sheep’s clothing,” further explaining in leaked audio of a closed-door meeting:

“My father's generation's challenge was the Nazis, who, by the way, were, of course, very proud socialists[citation fucking needed]. The challenge of my generation was the communists, who were, of course, very committed socialists. The challenge of your generation is ESG investing, and it's more insidious than communism or the Nazis.”(source)

You heard it here first, folks. Not investing as much in fossil fuels is more insidious than the Third Fucking Reich.

As usual, the Heritage Foundation is putting their petro-chemical donor’s money where their mouth is. Bills are being proposed to blacklist banks that don’t invest in key state industries, such as West Virginia coal or Texas oil. Fourteen states have already passed bills to restrict ESG-type investing, with Florida Governor Ron “Bullies Kids for Wearing Masks” Desantis leading the charge.

In other words, Climate Denial has reached such a point that so-called Free Market Conservatives who claim to hate big government are trying to make it illegal for banks, investment firms, and financial institutions to make any financial decisions that acknowledges Climate Change is real.

#of course ESG has also been used to describe any kind of internal corporate action #to increase diversity in the work place or implementing new anti-discrimination policies #(which are usually more performative than actually meaningful but that's a separate issue) #a Republican Presidential candidate #Vivek Ramaswamy #has even made ESG investing his personal bugbear #writing such books as 'Woke Inc' and warning of socially conscious investors ''forcing'' companies they invest in #to devote resources to environmental and social policies that are anathema to the right #which is just...a brand new invented crisis by a political movement #in constant need of a crisis to rally their base and justify for draconian legal controls #to favor certain industries and undercut their competition #all under the guise of red scare-type moral and economic panic #ESG #Woke Politics #Climate Change #Capitalism #Republicans #Investment

[johnjankovic1]

Economic Statecraft

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. André Gide, 1947

Between the postcolonial Tonnage Act, lighthouse proliferation, the Erie Canal’s inauguration, mail subsidies, the Panama Canal moonshot and the Great Depression’s ex post legislation statecraft has perennially been a prime mover. These vignettes essentially belie free market purists whose reductive views do not align with history. At critical moments across America’s storied past has industrial policy purveyed the seedbed for economic development. Of course the magic of free enterprise creates wealth in the spirit of Adam Smith’s invisible hand but government perpetually remains a handmaiden to it bereft of which nothing would take root in barren soil. A myopic exegesis conflates effect with cause. Such a ‘chicken before the egg’ fallacy remains blinkered to how the apposite conditions must exist as a precursor to the works of laissez-faire capitalism. Ergo there is a special place for government when a country finds itself in the midst of industrializing. Rather than anathema to growth this intervention begets a matrix wherein firms are vested with the latitude to innovate whilst immune to liabilities hence their carte blanche enables them to gestate. Or if not for the right infrastructure these same outfits would be deprived of markets particularly where it relates to their supply chains.

During the nascent years of the Republic in the wake of the Revolutionary War economic nationalism bore the imprimatur of Alexander Hamilton whose advocacy captured a vast audience. With the inordinate clout of British imperialism still looming large over America it behooved President George Washington to channel this doctrine in his government so London’s predations could be checked. It followed that the Tonnage Act of 1789 imposed onerous levies on foreign ships not only as a method to generate revenue but equally to hem in infant industries against the maritime monopoly of Britain. Import-competing shipbuilders could finally carve out a space for themselves where they were once unable. Henceforth America would not be beholden to its counterparts for the carriage of its wares and fare nor would it be idle in the defence of its proper interests overseas. By discriminating against competitors domestic industries catapulted the country into the pantheon of a seaborne power. By stimulating demand for American-made ships producers reaped a windfall of capital whereby they could plough it into their expansion. By running afoul of free trade orthodoxy foreign industries no longer prostrated shipbuilding at home. The Tonnage Act made America a great power to be reckoned with.

Whilst sharing the same vintage as this legislation the federalization of maritime infrastructure also came to substitute for the piecemeal efforts led by states in governing lighthouses. Where trade routes might have once been neglected these upright sentinels lighting the path for ships began to take precedence. Since private investment did not square with the reality of such a public good insofar as the free-rider dilemma disincentivized individuals from contributing to its provision this beckoned government to intercede. Thereafter lighthouses became the ward of the federal treasury. Rather than fall into disuse the proper funds saw to the upkeep of this infrastructure. Lighthouses were unambiguously the sine quo non to the safe passage of ships and this industrial policy made sure that underinvestment no longer beleaguered their operation. Through the mitigation of maritime hazards government attended to the constellation of interests between shipwrights and mariners who could now be assuaged of their anxiety about voyages at sea. Were it not for the Lighthouse Act these same trips would be fraught with the perils of having vessels run aground or worse. Insurers thus breathed a sigh of relief. Although perhaps a roundabout way this investment certainly gave patronage to the maritime industry.

In the same vein as infrastructure the heavy-handed industrial policies giving vent to the Erie and Panama Canals were equally landmarks in America’s development. By cleaving a path through the wilds of the Adirondack region for a gateway to the Atlantic or parting the Isthmus of Panama in two it followed that dividends were had by all. America’s breadbasket in the interior would unite with the cosmopolitan metropolis of New York and the quasi-teleportation portal in the South abridged the journey of commerce between the Western and Eastern seaboards. These corollaries to industrial policy birthed westward expansion in keeping with the providence of Manifest Destiny before the ubiquity of railroads. Both of these monuments to government dirigisme truncated time and transportation costs such that these shortcuts enhanced the competitiveness of America’s exports and imports. Where in a bygone time the prohibitive sum of outlays deterred industrialization now the economic calculus indelibly changed. What these monolithic pieces of infrastructure wrought then was a reconfiguration of trade from a dribble to a torrent of volume. Quite precipitously were capitalism’s animal spirits awakened once nature had been conquered between the Hudson River and Lake Erie or via Panama’s thoroughfare.

The last method by which America trafficked in industrial policy for the maritime sector since jettisoning the British yoke of imperialism entailed both mail and direct subsidies. The former in the guise of the 1845 and 1847 Acts of Congress underwrote packet ships and steamships alike as a stimulus to harness the winds of commerce. By subsidizing mail service Washington feathered an impetus to businesses so they may bootstrap their own growth. A steady stream of revenue promised these firms a lifeline to weather the vagaries of markets with a long term outlook to plough capital into further expansion whether it be in the size of fleets or in the number of trade routes. Upon lowering risk it made private investment more attractive. In turn a stronger Merchant Marine would be a counterpoise to the British Empire that long claimed dominion over the seas. As for direct subsidies like the 1916 Shipping Act or the 1936 Merchant Marine Act they centralized authority between the Shipping Board and the Maritime Commission respectively in order to spur the drumbeat of industry. America’s supply chains diversified in earnest under their purview with the buildup of inventory in ships. Rather than being some derivative footnote all the aforementioned industrial policies nurtured America until it bestrode the world like a giant.

#Industrial Policy #Maritime Industry

[allthecanadianpolitics]

With electric vehicle sales in Canada breaking records every year, the demand is clear, say advocates of EVs.

"There is currently very high interest, and that interest is growing," said Louise Lévesque, director of policy at Electric Mobility Canada, a national industry association that works to advance electric transportation.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault last week unveiled the federal government's electric vehicle sales mandate regulations, which include a national target of 100 per cent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035. In making his announcement, Guilbeault also noted how the Canadian marketplace is already experiencing "a rapid shift toward zero-emission vehicles."

But some observers say the market and demand for EVs is more nuanced, that data shows most Canadians still aren't particularly eager to buy one and that the targets laid out by Guilbeault might be difficult to achieve.

"If we have to get to 100 per cent of new car sales by 2035, the path we're on right now won't get us there," said Niel Hiscox, president of Clarify Group Inc., a Canadian-based automotive research and advisory firm. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #green tech #automotive industry #climate policy

[kny111]

Do World Powers Engage in Subtle Systemic Slavery or Overt Systemic Slavery? It doesn’t Matter. Slavery is Slavery & It Will Never Be Needed Especially Not As A System.

The United States along with other world powers and those that serve them have created this ‘using us, yet against us’ system. We need to change this. The fire James Baldwin spoke of, the very merited rage those enslaved have against this system, is well overdue.

Those who serve a government that knowingly allow for enslavement still and lie to people about it being abolished when their own amendment backs daily institutional and systemic enslavement when it allows “slavery is abolished except in punishment or crime“. This does nothing to remove slavery as a systemic feature from this governing system and you are implicit.

                                                                                                by - K, Blog Admin

What happens when we as a community repurpose the instruments of science and evidence gathering and focus on the 13th amendment? This piece of document literally allows for enslavement. What has been created in its wake? Here’s the thing, when colonial imperial powers in Europe said okay when issues occur we’re gonna call them ‘crime’  they meant it as a word to account for social norms being breached and a sort of “holler if you hear me“ approach to solving those issues was laid out institutionally which included neighborhood watch people that could process this. They later became police. Between that time and the present 2023, legislature and policy reshaped crime and policing, as well as the defending of issues through military, crime became systemically synonymous with prisons/cages/slavery to solve those issues. From the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its bolstering of these pro enslavement laws to this past historical investment in this strange notion of punishing others so physically, violently to the benefit of a system, a legalized market of slavery was formed and continues to persist with similar legislative and political play on words as they did with the 13th amendment’s clause: The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

When you specifically write into law and action that amendments create and actualize the means to the system we use, what are you enacting when you pronounce through this same mechanism that “no slavery shall exist within the united states or any place subject to its jurisdiction - EXCEPT as punishment for crime“? We need to, as a people really inspect this slowly and carefully because science has yet to produce any evidence that says punishment at that level and method is required to solve these issues so where is this evidence that says that type of punishment is even needed for the people to “fall in line”?

Secondly, isn’t it evident that processing issues as merely ‘crime’ is factually bringing us more structural issues than not because not every issue can be generalized to crime and often times the word crime itself just doesn’t do nearly enough to account for the disabled community and many other far reaching issues.

These aren’t assumptions, these are educated deductions based on statistical data provided by the errors of the running system. Again, it has yet to produce reputable convincing evidence that establishes prisons, crime, and cops/ slave patrol systems they synergized with as effective means to solve the issues we as a society constantly face. And with this same lack of adhering to scientific facts are we supposed to feel comforted by these slave industry agents, legislators and policy makers that allow for that amendment to exist as is because they know it buys them that much time to not worry of their implicitness in enslavement of others? I implore everyone watch the documentary by Ava DuVernay 13th available for free on youtube from NetFlix due to its educational merit. This documentary is like a course 101 on understanding just how much of an issue enslavement systems are and how synonymous prisons and cops are to slave markets and patrols. It gets right to the problem of slavery, what scriptures did they use to embed it into our social mainframe? did it exist back then? Yes, Is it gone? No, it let’s us know it’s still active and strategies by white supremacists and slavers then benefit their lineages and communities now.

They have a lot of control over the systems that try to govern us. Reconfiguring, inspecting and enacting amendments at this level will be required for us to do something meaningful against this oppressive system and its unsustainable, inefficient amalgamation with slavery markets as a resource system.

Reparations for those harmed by these systems as well as systemic decolonization strategies will be commonly needed. We need documentaries like this and similar subject media to help the public understand the necessary steps to abolish prisons and repurposing the military that serve them away from the rich’s interest and focus on the people. Since all defending this slavery system are implicit. 13th by Ava DuVernay is available now on YouTube for free via NetFlix along with other educational documentaries

#documentary #trans atlantic slave trade #history #scripture #policy #legislature #amendment #ava duvernay #13 the musical #13th amendment #politics #slavery #slave market #prison industrial complex #science #slave patrol #abolishment #abolish police #abolish slavery