Category: Books

Posted on

Wealth and Income Inequality and the Great Recession

The Price of Inequality; How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future; Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2012

See Thomas Piketty On Redistribution of Wealth and Participatory Socialism

See these other accounts of the Subprime Mortgage banking disaster of 2008  that led to the Great Recession .

The most important role of government, however, is setting the basic rules of the game, through laws such as those that encourage or discourage unionization, corporate governance laws that determine the discretion of management, and competition laws that should limit the extent of monopoly rents. As we have already noted, almost every law has distributive consequences, with some groups benefiting, typically at the expense of others.

Indeed, even the IMF (the International Monetary Fund, the international agency responsible for ensuring global financial stability) has now recognized the dangers of unencumbered and excessive financial integration: a problem in one country can rapidly spread to another. In fact, fears of contagion have motivated bailouts of banks in the magnitude of tens and hundreds of billions of dollars. The response to contagious disease is “quarantine,” and finally in the spring of 2011, the IMF recognized the desirability of the analogous response in the financial markets. This takes the form of capital controls, or limiting the volatile movement of capital across borders, especially during a crisis.

Politics–and in particular how politics shapes the laws governing corporations–is a major determinant of the fraction of a corporation’s revenues that its top executives take for themselves. U.S. laws provide them considerable discretion. This meant that when social mores changed in ways that made large disparities in compensation more acceptable, executives in the United States could enrich themselves at the expense of workers or shareholders more easily than could executives in other countries.

(Japan in 2010) paid their chief executives an average of $580,000 in salary and other compensation…about 16 times more than the typical Japanese worker ($36,000). Average CEO pay at the 3,000 largest U.S. companies is $3.5 million, including stock options and bonuses…CEO pay of major U.S. corporations (is) some 263 times that of the income of the average worker ($13,300).

It used to be that when the economy went into recession, employers, wanting to maintain the loyalty of their workers and concerned about their well-being, would keep as many as they could on their payroll. The result was that labor productivity went down, and the share of wages went up. Profits bore the brunt of the downturn. Wage shares would then fall after the end of the recession. But in this (2008 and the previous 2001) recession, the pattern changed, the wage share declined in the recession, as well as in the ensuing years. Firms prided themselves on their ruthlessness–cutting out so many workers that productivity actually increased.

The irony is that just as markets started delivering more unequal outcomes, tax policy asked less of the top. The top marginal tax rate was lowered from 70 percent under Carter to 28 percent under Reagan; it went up to 39.6 percent under Clinton and down finally to 35 percent under George W Bush.

…One of the reasons that the top has done so well is rent seeking–which entails seizing a larger share of the the pie and, in doing so, making the size of the pie smaller than it otherwise would be…Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently, and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable in the long run. When one interest group holds too much power, it succeeds in getting policies that benefit itself, rather than policies that would benefit society as a whole. When the wealthiest use their political power to benefit excessively the corporations they control, much-needed revenues are diverted into the pockets of a few instead of benefiting society at large.

Since the time of the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, governments have understood that when there is a shortfall of demand–when unemployment is high–they need to take action to increase either public or private spending. The 1 percent has worked hard to restrain government spending…(Substituting large tax cuts for the wealthy didn’t work).

There is a second way that unbalanced politics driven by extremes of inequality leads to instability: deregulation. Deregulation has played a central part in the instability that we, and many other countries, have experienced. Giving corporations, and especially the financial sector, free rein was in the shortsighted interest of the wealthy; they used their political weight, and their power to shape ideas, to push deregulation, first in airlines and other areas of transportation, then in television, and finally, and most dangerously, in finance.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, an event preceded by similar excesses, the country enacted strong financial regulations, including the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. These laws, effectively enforced, served the county well: in the decades following passage, the economy was spared the kind of financial crisis that had repeatedly plagued this country (and others). With the dismantling of these regulations in 1999 (Clinton), the excesses returned with even greater force: bankers quickly put to use advances in technology, finance, and economics. The innovations offered ways to increase leverage that circumvented the regulations that remained and that the regulators didn’t fully understand, new ways of engaging in predatory lending, and new ways to deceived unwary credit card users.

The losses from the under utilization of resources associated with the Great Recession and other economic downturns are enormous. Indeed, the sheer waste of resources brought on by this crisis caused by the private sector–a shortfall of trillions of dollars between what the economy could have produce and what it has produced–is greater than the waste of any democratic government ever.

For several decades America has suffered from under investment in infrastructure, basic research, and education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead, given the commitment by both parties to bringing down the deficit and the refusal of the House of Representatives to raise taxes. The cuts come despite evidence that the boost these investments give to the economy far exceeds the average return in the private sector, and is certainly higher than the cost of funds to the government. Indeed, the boom years of the 1990s were buoyed by innovations made in previous decades that finally took their place in our economy. But the well from which the private sector can draw–for the next generation of transformational investments–is drying up. Applied innovations depend on basic research, and we simply haven’t been doing enough of it.

The financial sector succeeded in making student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, which meant that the lenders had little incentive to see to it that the schools for the which the students were borrowing money were actually providing them with an education that would enhance their income. Meanwhile, private for-profit schools with richly compensated executives have defeated attempts to impose high standards that would make schools that exploit the poor and ill informed-by taking their money and not providing them with an education that enables them to get jobs to repay the loans–ineligible for loans.

Rent seeking distorts our economy in many ways–not the least of which is the misallocation of the country’s most valuable resource: its talent. It used to be that bright young people were attracted to a variety of professions–some to serve others, as in medicine or teaching or public service; some to expanding the frontiers of knowledge.  Some always went into business, but in the years before the (Great Recession) crisis an increasingly large fraction of the country’s best minds chose finance. And with so many talented young people in finance, it’s not surprising that there would be innovation in that sector. But many of these “financial innovations” were designed to circumvent regulations, and actually lowered long-run economic performance. These financial innovations do not compare with real innovations like the transistor or the laser that increased our standard of living.

Someday, perhaps soon, we too will see how globalization as currently managed promotes neither global efficiency nor equity; even more importantly, its puts our democracy in peril. Another world is possible: there are alternative ways of managing globalization that are better for both our economy and our democracy; but they do not entail unfettered globalization. We have learned the lessons of unfettered markets for our economy and how to temper capitalism so that it serves the majority of citizens, not a tiny, powerful fraction. So too, we can temper globalization; indeed, we must if we want to preserve our democracy, prevent our rampant inequality from growing worse, and maintain our influence around the world.

 

 

 

Posted on

A just Transition from neoliberal capitalism to progressive capitalism

The Road to Freedom; Economics and the Good Society, Joseph E Stiglitz, 2024

From FDR’s “Four Freedoms Speech” 1941

The first is freedom of speech, and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world…freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world…freedom from fear — which translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit and act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

From Reagan to Clinton, presidential administrations expanded the freedom of the banks. Financial deregulation and liberalization meant freeing the banks to do as they pleased…The very word “liberalization” connoted “freeing”. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, we discovered the cost. Many Americans lost their freedom from fear and want as the very real prospect grew that millions of workers and retirees would lose their jobs and homes. We as a society lost our freedom — we had no choice but to spend taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks.

John Maynard Keynes and FDR saw an alternative way forward from classical economics. Updated for the marked changes in the economy and our understanding of the past three-quarters of a century, their vision still stands as an alternative to the neoclassical and neoliberal economics that followed and to the new Right that is emerging. The Keynes and FDR approach was a tempered capitalism with government playing a key but limited role, ensuring stability, efficiency, and equity — or at least more than is provided by unfettered capitalism. They laid the groundwork for a twenty-first-century progressive capitalism that supports meaningful human freedom.

Adam Smith 1776 The Wealth of Nations :

The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order…ought never to be adopted, till having having been long and carefully examined. with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men…who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.

If you are born into the wrong environment, those assets mean nothing. They yield the returns they do only because of the socioeconomic environment as to our own skills and effort. There is full justification, then, for imposing high taxes on high income even in a perfectly competitive economy in which wealth is garnered in ways that have full moral legitimacy.

Likewise, the moral claim against progressive taxes is slim if high incomes arise out of luck or inheritance–and even more so if they are made possible through exploitation or because the rules that generate or allow such income have been shaped by access to political power.

Donald Trump illustrates what happens when parents and teachers fail, and an individual does not become socialized. When norms, peer pressure, and tradition worked normally, we didn’t need strong laws to define what a president could ethically do. Almost every president acted within the constraints. But Trump, with his brazenness, may force us to define the presidential limits more precisely by putting them within laws and regulations.

In the centuries since the Enlightenment, we’ve developed institutions that do a remarkable job of assessing the truth–independent courts, research and educational institutions, and professional associations. There was a widespread consensus behind these institutions until the naysayers in the modern Republican Party and their counterparts around the world arrived on the scene. Unless we restore trust in our truth-ascertaining and verification institutions, it will be hard to have a sustained, well-functioning society or a productive economy.

Financial Times article in 2020 on Facebook;

In short, without full transparency, with a mechanism for holding participants to account, without equal ability to transmit and receive information, and with unrelenting intimidation, there is no free marketplace of ideas. One of the major insights of modern economics is that private and social incentives are often not well-aligned. If those who want to spread misinformation are willing to pay more than those who want to counter it, and if lack of transparency is more profitable than transparency [if we simply say] “so be it,” we won’t get a well-functioning marketplace of ideas.

Online platforms have not only exacerbated societal fragmentation; they have also increased the problem of the rapid, viral spread of mis- and disinformation. Virality means that information can spread quickly, more quickly than “antidotes” to the misinformation can be designed. The lack of transparency in who gets what messages have meant that the antidotes cannot be effectively developed and delivered in the relevant time span, if at all.

Social media companies have enabled the incitement of violence and the spread of hate speech and induced antisocial behavior. Their claim that they are neutral is obviously false.

Should we allow greenhouse gas emission to go unfettered? How should we manage a public health crisis like a pandemic? In that case, the transmission of scientifically false information — especially targeted mis- and disinformation that goes viral — can have dangerous and destructive consequences.

Feudalism was marked by a high concentration of power and wealth, low economic growth and slow social progress. Communism succeeded in generating greater security and more equality in material goods but failed on other counts, including low economic growth, an absence of freedom in all dimensions; a concentration of power, and a greater inequality of standards of living than Communist rulers would admit.

Milton Friedman Friedrich Hayek

Neoliberalism, the dominant economic system in the West over the past forty years, is increasingly viewed as an economic failure because it brought slower growth and more inequality than in earlier decades…It increased societal polarization; created selfish, materialistic, and often dishonest citizens, and contributed to a growing lack of trust.

It is intuitively clear to me that a society marked by greater equality (other things being equal) is better than one marked by huge disparities; that cooperation and tolerance is fundamentally better than greed, selfishness, and intolerance. The extreme versions of the latter that have appeared on the American scene in recent decades are truly loathsome.

Similarly, we now recognize the dangers of climate change, but if governments take action to restrict fossil fuels, under existing investment agreements, they might have to pay out as much as $340 billion to compensate the companies for not destroying the planet.

Our economic system has to be decentralized, with a multiplicity of economic units–many enterprises and other entities (of different kinds) making decisions about what to do and how to do it. The world is too complex to be centrally planned…Any well functioning economy or society requires a mix of types of institutions, not only public and private for profit, but also cooperatives, private not for profit, and so on. And the governmental institutions need to operate at multiple levels, including local, state or provincial, national and global. These institutions need to exert checks and balances on each other and the overall governance structure must limit power and its abuse. I want to emphasize that there must be large parts of the economy that are not and cannot be driven by profits. These include much of the health, education, and care sectors, in which the the narrow pursuit of profits often leads to perverse results. The private prison system has failed its core mission of rehabilitating prisoners.

…we are not born fully formed; we are shaped by our parents, our schools, and the environment surrounding us–including the economic, political, and social system in which we are embedded…cooperative institutions may spur more cooperative behavior. The neoliberal system that we’ve had for the past half century has failed on its own terms by not producing the shared prosperity it promised, but more disturbingly, it also bred more selfish and materialistic people who are less honest and trustworthy. What kind of a world is it in which individuals routinely make money by taking advantage of others and don’t even feel guilty?

Progressive capitalism’s deep aspiration is to construct a society in which there is more empathy, more caring, more creativity, and healthy striving, with individuals who are less selfish and more honest–and these attributes will lead to a better-functioning economy and society.

I believe a large part of the answer is related to two problems of neoliberalism that I’ve called attention to: the growing income and wealth divide that marks twentieth and twenty-first century neoliberal capitalism and the polarization caused by the media. Making matters worse is that current rules allow the rich and elites to have a disproportionate voice in shaping both the policies and societal narratives. All of which leads to an enhanced sense by those who are not wealthy that the system is rigged and unfair, which makes it all the more difficult to heal divisions.

As income inequalities grow, people wind up living in different worlds and don’t interact. There is a large body of evidence showing that economic segregation is growing and has consequences, for instance, on how each side thinks and feels about the other. The poorest members of society see the world as stacked against them and give up on their aspirations; the wealthiest develop a sense of entitlement, and their wealth helps to ensure that the system is rigged. But these individual opinions about the economic divide only increase the societal divide.

Not only are neoliberal economies inefficient, but neoliberalism as an economic system is not sustainable. There are many reasons to believe that a neoliberal market economy is prone to devour itself. A market economy runs on trust. Adam Smith emphasized the importance of trust, recognizing that society couldn’t survive if people brazenly followed their own self interest rather than good codes of conduct.

The regard to those general rules of conduct, is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence to human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions… Upon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.

A “businessman” like Donald Trump can flourish for years, even decades, taking advantage of others. If Trump were the norm rather than the exception, commerce and industry would grind to a halt.

 

Posted on

History of the Americas 1500 to present

America, América: A New History of the New World, Greg Grandin, 2025

As if to intentionally mock expectations and exacerbate resentment, President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan into law on Apr 3, (1948), shorty after talks in Columbia (the last Pan-American Conference held in Bogota, Columbia, in March and April 1948) had gotten under way. No funds were included for Latin American reconstruction. As the plan’s formal name made clear, it was exclusively a European Recovery Program. Earlier in the year, after the government of Brazil had asked Washington to fund a modest program of industrial development, the White House send down a commission headed by the economist John Abbink, chairman of McGraw-Hill, to study the request. The commissions response, try “self-help,” and “do it yourself.” Adding to such insults, Truman, when pressed on whether Latin America would receive a recovery plan, answered: “There has been a Latin American Marshall plan for the Western Hemisphere for a century and a half and known as the Monroe Doctrine.”

Marshall had little to give because Washington had, by this point, moved on from the region. The train of global of events hurtled forward, as fighting a Cold War against Moscow became official policy.

In mid-February 1948, George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff produced a paper meant to “trace the lines of development of our foreign policy, and to project them into the future, so that we could see where we were going.” Sending the paper on to Marshall, Kennan apologized for not including Latin America.” Kennan said, But, he confessed, “I am not familiar with the problems of the area, and the Staff has not yet studied them.”

The irony: Good-Neighbor Pan-Americanism (FDR) was such a spectacular diplomatic and strategic success that, after Allied victory, not much diplomacy or strategy was needed to administer the region. Latin America fell back to being a place to make money and rehearse new strategies of global policing. By 1948, the White House and the State Department had largely ceded responsibility for Latin America to the Pentagon and the private sector.

In Western Europe (after WWII), access to public capital and cheap credit allowed liberalism to reestablish itself, to expand social welfare. In Latin American, the need to placate foreign capital allowed no such outcome. For instance, in Germany, the founding document of the Christian Democratic Union called for the the creation of a “socialist economic order.” When Christian Democrats in El Salvador and Guatemala said they wanted the same thing, they were executed.

The Catholic Church, Israel’s secret services, and the CIA joined forces to get the SS officer Walter Rauff, who during the war killed tens of thousands with his mobile gassing vans, first to Ecuador and then Chile. There, he started building a network of refugee Nazis that he put at the service of the region’s militaries and intelligence agencies. When Pinochet overthrew Allende in 1973, Rauff began working with Chile’s secret police, the DINA, Pinochet’s notorious gestapo. Rauff also helped the government construct a concentration camp on Dawson Island in remote Patagonia and had close ties to the cultish Colonia Dignidad in the low Andes, a guarded community of German immigrants that served Pinochet as a torture center.

United States investment soared during this decade of jackboot stability, with a “great surge” of capital flowing into Latin America. The State Department, now led by John Foster Dulles, turned away appeals for intercession on behalf of the “the political prisoners rotting in the dungeons of Perez Jimenez.” “We must concede,” wrote Kennan in 1950, “that harsh government measures of repression” are necessary to establish stability.

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala assasinated Apr 9, 1948 Bogota, Columbia

Kennan and Wisner went about weaponizing the kind of confusion, speculation, and conspiracy that swirled around Gaitan’s execution. The routine bewilderments of daily life, and the muddle that came with rapid social and technological change, were hypercharged whenever groups of men in the White House, at Langley, or at Foggy Bottom decided that there were things that needed doing.

Cuba didn’t become a state, as many had predicted it would. But with organized crime established on the island since at least the 1930s, Cuba was incorporated into the union in different kind of way, as a shadow state of offshore desire, for drugs, gambling, and sex…When the insurgent army led by Fidel Castro took power in Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959, the RAND Corporation calculated that the “book value” of United States investment in Cuba was greater than in any other Latin American country, apart from Venezuela…If Cuba’s (revolution) has occurred in the 1930s, say, it might have progressed at a pace of the Mexican Revolution, with cycles of reform, radicalization, reaction, and consolidation, and fights over property rights playing out over decades…”A chain reaction was occurring all over Latin America after Castro came to power. I (Jacob Esterline, CIA project director of the Bay of Pigs) saw — hell, anybody with eyes could see it– that a new and powerful force was at work in the hemisphere.” Esterline here is describing Castro the way Carcia Marquez did Gaitan, as a phenomenon whose moral energy radiated across the Americas.

In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the United States backed a quick round of coups; El Salvador in 1961; the Dominican Republic, Guatemala (again), and Honduras in 1963; Brazil and British Guiana in 1964. All told, Washington had a hand in sixteen regime changes between 1961 and 1969.

By the end of World War II, Latin America had done the unthinkable: it had forced the great powers to recognize the sovereign equality of all nations, abrogated the doctrine of conquest, and provided a model for a world system organized around the presumption of mutual interests rather than inherit antagonisms. But a reform of diplomacy wasn’t enough to strike at the domestic sources of exploitation. Just as Eighteenth-century philosophers wrote against royal absolutism is all its stultifying effects, Latin Americans wrote and worked against all the various manifestations of dependency: economic, psychological, cultural, political, and moral.

The spread of liberation theology, dependency theory, and artistic critique went hand in hand. “Dependence and liberation are correlative terms,” Father Gutierrez wrote. “An analysis of dependence leads one to attempt to escape from it.”

The United States is now a two-tiered nation, where about 30 or so percent of the population benefits from globalization and the rest struggle to make their bills. Infant mortality is up. Life expectancy is down. And every year breaks a new record for suicides, which are significantly higher in rural areas.

Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s political class imagines nothing. Its grand strategists do no better than offer perilous talk of a new cold war, of restarting nuclear testing, abrogations disarmament treaties, rearming Germany and Japan, expanding NATO, and garrisoning Africa. Wars are seen not as things to be ended but chances to leverage strategic tension to advantage, create new realms of influence.

The international institutions and rules that Latin America helped create or inspire after World War II, long enfeebled, are today nearly worthless. NATO, modeled on the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, is now a blunt instrument of United States power in Europe. The world’s many wars proceed as if there never was a thing called international law. Considering the growing dependence on private mercenaries, corporate intelligence firms, and the accelerating power of out-of-control technologies, the head of Amnesty International, Agnes Callamand, says that the world stands on the brink of a “descent into hell.” Private firms like Palantir Technologies and Israel’s Elbit Systems have teamed up to turn Ukraine, the U.S. Mexico borderlands, and Gaza into their testing grounds, integrating high-tech, AI-driven intelligence gathering into what the CEO of Palantir calls “digital kill chains.”

It feels like the 1930s all over again, as Latin America teeters between the dark and the light. Only this time its reformers are on their own in their fight against reaction — there’s no equivalent of (FDR’s) (Ernest)  Gruening, (Josephus) Daniels, or (Sumner) Wells to work with.

One would think that, with all the region has suffered, from the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition to the death squads and disappearances of the Cold War, Latin Americans would have given up on the idea that history is redeemable. Yet centuries of violence seemed to have seared into activists an irrepressible ability both to recognize the dialectic lurking behind the brutality and to answer every bloody body with ever more adamant affirmations of humanity.

Bartolomé de las Casas Bishop of Chiapas

Las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of Indigenous peoples, especially by trying to convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization.

One reason for the persistence of a humanist, social-democratic left, one absorbent enough to take in demands related to gender, race, and sexuality, has to do with, I think, the fact that Spanish colonialism’s moral crisis came early with the Conquest. The critique launched by dissenters was frontal and all encompassing, and when independence from Spain finally came, many of those who led that movement understood “emancipation” (even if they didn’t always act on that understanding) in its fullest sense, to include, potentially at least, all forms of oppression. This, I think, helps explain Latin America’s commitment to a panoramic conception of citizenship, on that includes social rights.

The Anglo experience was different. Evasion and denial were English settlement’s hallmarks. And remained so for centuries. No ethical dilemma accompanied the destruction of the continent’s indigenous people. When a moral crisis over chattel slavery did finally come, in the 1800’s, it abstracted Black-skin bondage as a singular, exceptional sin. This, as historian David Brion Davis wrote fifty years ago, had the “great virtue” of providing an “ideal” and “clear-cut” model of evil, which was useful for abolitionists when it came to fighting it but a hindrance to later historians and activists when they tried to relate it to the persistence of “other species of barbarity and oppression.” This, I think, helps explain why the United States’ inability to overcome a narrow conception of individual rights.

Latin American nations do not always agree on the best way forward to calm international problems, including, for example, Valenzuela’s 2024 electoral crisis. Yet despite their differences, most of their leaders all start with the founding premises of American International Law, persistent diplomacy, arbitration, de-escalation, respect of sovereignty, and as Sumner Wells put it when Vargas made his power grab, “patience.” Washington, be it led by Republicans or Democrats, has forgotten Well’s call for forbearance — for letting countries work out their own internal class struggles — and rampages through Valenzuela like that bulls in that china shop, making matters considerably worse.

Still, Latin America remains among the the most peaceful continents in the world, in terms of state-to-state relations. For many, nationalism is still a gateway not toward rivalry but universalism. Native Americans have entered into politics in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru,, Guatemala, and Mexico not under the banner of ethnonationalism or separation. Rather, indigenous-led social movements and political parties are often the primary carriers of the region’s social-democratic heritage.

…”Democracy has,” FDR said over the radio in 1938, “disappeared in several other great nations, not because people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership,” Latin Americans know that the way to beat fascism now is the same as it was then: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising to better the material conditions of people’s lives. Nearly every Latin American nation has the “right to health care” enshrined in their constitutions — a simple clear popular objective liberals and leftists in the United States should consider fighting for.

Getúlio Vargas        Lázaro Cárdenas Popular Front Salvador Allende

Its difficult to imagine any politician or coalition in the United States, from any party, rising above the country’s cresting anger or its vertiginous politics of fear to become a stable ally, the way the politicians of the New Deal were, to Cardenas’s Mexico, Vargas’s Brazil, or Popular Front Chile. One can hope.

Posted on

Time is running out to limit climate change from greenhouse gases

Here Comes the Sun; Bill McKibben, 2025

At 210 pages this short book is intended to paint an optimistic picture of our chances to limit global temperature rise to a livable maximum. The book is packed with decades long activist experience and remarkable solar power technical development. The reader can reach their own conclusions whether this picture warrants optimism. But the book is well worth reading.

Solar power generation technology that required breakthroughs in solar panels, storage batteries, and power generating wind turbines have, in only the past 15 years, succeeded in joining Moore’s law of  growth in digital computing power as the second exponentially advancing technology in human history.

Thanks to Chinese and other nation’s investments, the world is now in position to replace the burning of fossil fuels with greenhouse gas free energy to meet the total needs of the planet. Now the question becomes – will solar based infrastructure be deployed in time to limit temperature rise to livable levels. In McKibben’s view we may only have five  years to do so.

Solar power is now far and away the cheapest power source in human history and it continues to drop in price. On the positive side, China has made the most progress, reducing its dependence on coal burning generation more than any other country. China is also the leader in the development and production of EV cars, trucks, and buses.  Even the petrol-states of the middle east are converting to solar power generation. In America, California and Texas (surprise?) are leading the way in adopting solar power. Rolling blackouts in California are (almost) a thing of the past. Arizona’s SRP (home to valley of the sun) is slowing down deployment by charging $50 a month just to connect your home solar to their grid. They should be paying homeowners and businesses to connect.

The global south, most close to the equator stand most to gain and adoption is happening at the grass roots first with self installed Chinese panels being placed everywhere. Cheap power is central to reducing inequality and improving lives throughout the globe.

The cost of converting the globe as fast as possible could be expedited with surprisingly little investment but the returns on such investment would be much lower than other alternate investments for billionaires and wealthy retirement funds. In the investment world, saving the planet does not enter the calculations.

The risks (of coups or outright corruption) are greater as well. McKibben suggests that the World Bank and IMF should shoulder these risks but that seems unlikely.

So we have an unstoppable exponential growth source of clean energy that may not get deployed in time to save the planet.

McKibben ends talking about grass roots efforts in the U.S. where key decisions regarding building wind and solar farms are usually local decisions that may come down to the whims of one or two key participants.

He notes that the Covid pandemic demonstrated a widespread and fast public and political response but the threat of immediate personal risk was at the heart of this pandemic. Within a five year period only those directly affected by weather and fire events are likely to be motivated to take action.

And the billionaire class are busy investing in survival pods and space travel! Like Trump, only they matter – no empathy for anyone else.

Posted on

Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

The Fort Bragg Cartel; Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, Seth Harp, 2025

(H.R.) Bush’s subsequent tenure in the Executive Building coincided with a transfer of power from the CIA to the military, which, thanks to the creation of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), now had operatives fully capable of carrying out the same skullduggery as civilian spies, but without the added baggage of congressional meddling.

Over the next eight years (1980s) , as Reagan and Bush waged off-the-books dirty wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and also intervened in Columbia, Haiti, and Grenada, the administration leaned heavily on Delta Force and other undercover soldiers. The militarization of covert action was tied up with the rapidly metastasizing “global war on drugs,” another brainchild of George H. W. Bush’s, and partially exposed by the hydra-headed Iran-Contra Affair, the essence of which was the use of illegal arms deals and the sale of other untraceable commodities to fund secret operations. A classified White House memorandum that Reagan signed in 1984 reads like a sketchy blueprint to the “global war on terror” that Bush’s son and political heir would institute at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Among other things, the memo authorized killing in “preemptive self-defense,” so long as the targets were defined as “terrorists.”

That same Orwellian year, The New York Times belatedly broke the news of JSOC’s existence. The article titled “U.S. Military Creates Secret Units for Use in Sensitive Tasks Abroad,” was sourced to members of Congress and intelligence committee staffers. “The worry,” concerned lawmakers told the Times, was that JSOC might become “a uniformed version of the Central Intelligence Agency,,” used by the executive branch “to circumvent Congressional restrictions and reporting requirements.”

Under U.S. occupation, Afghanistan had become the world’s leading narco-state, with an economy almost entirely dependent on the the drug trade. Within a year of the Taliban’s ouster, opium production had returned to record levels. “The significant increase,” the DEA reported “is attributable to the fall of the Taliban, and the Taliban poppy ban.” …By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. The 2007, the country’s annual output of pure heroin approached a thousand metric tons. By comparison, in a far distant second place, produced just fifty tons that year.

The superabundance of highly potent product inundated Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, all of Europe, Australia, and the whole world. In the United States, street prices went down, purity went up, and opioid addiction took hold in a population primed for it by a a decade of loose prescribing practices around pharmaceutical painkillers.

According to the DEA, virtually none of the heroin consumed in America during the surge in usage seen in the 2020s and 2010s came from Afghanistan. Less than 1 percent is the official figure.

In his second term in office, President Obama completely abandoned any remaining effort to counter narcotics in Afghanistan, and it became implicit U.S. policy to allow poppy to flourish unimpeded. The amount of land under poppy cultivation expanded to nearly a quarter million hectares. Major traffickers protected by the Karzai cartel, such al Lal Jan Ishaqzai, became untouchable.

Ever since World War II, illegal drugs have served as a common coin for the purposes of espionage, paramilitary operations, and covert actions, and the foreign entities that choose to work for the U.S. military and the CIA — the twin sentinels of global capitalism — often profit from this most capitalistic of all enterprises. Throughout its history, the CIA has worked to achieve American national security objectives in partnership with known drug traffickers, including the anticommunist Kuomintang, the founders of modern-day Taiwan; France’s Corsican mafia syndicates; Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro; Hmong irregulars in Laos as well as the Royal Lao Army; and the contra rebels of Nicaragua. But American foreign policy elites’ complicity in the international drug trade was never so substantial, sustained, witting, and consequential as in Afghanistan…No person in any position of influence dared to suggest that the scourge of opiate addiction then afflicting the poor and working classes across the United States might have resulted from the wartime narcotics bonanza.

But over time, a sea change took place in the composition of the Special Forces. A good number of those who stayed in the Army for the second decade of the GWOT (Global War on Terror) were animated by baser character traits, including a sheer love of fighting, addiction to the gun-slinging lifestyle, and a mercenary attitude toward killing. Theft of government funds, seen as a victimless crime became commonplace… According to Special forces quartermaster James Dumas Sr.’s son “They’re bringing the drugs from overseas into Fort Bragg. They say a group of Special Forces are pushing and selling drugs. They fly it in, put it out on the street. Said they have been doing that for years.”

But the wars that won him (Admiral William McRaven 2014) and his privileged ilk so many encomiums were, for the rest of the nation, an era of cataclysmic abasement. The wars that made SOCOM a budgetary and bureaucratic juggernaut were not worth fighting, in the opinion of a majority of Americans, including supermajorities of combat veterans. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine, the United States failed to achieve its stated ex anti objectives and succeeded only in killing millions of people, displacing millions of people, displacing tens of millions, squandering trillions of dollars, and making America the great villain of the twenty-first century in the eyes of most of the world. Ten years after McRaven’s speech, the iconic archetype of the rugged special operator no longer occupied the same vaunted position in the cultural firmament. The prototype figure of the bearded commando had taken on a grittier, dirtier, darker cast in the popular imagination.

“You start to see behind the curtain,” said former Delta Force soldier and Army Ranger Tyler Grey to the podcast host Sean “Buck” Rogers, an ex-Green Beret, of his service alongside the CIA in Iraq and Syria. “Dude, this is not what I thought it was,” Grey realized. “We’re not who I thought we were. We’re not doing this for the reasons I thought.”

Over tine, the suspicion that the Americans might actually be the bad guys “just continues to grow,” Grey said, speaking in 2023. “To were now I see why veterans or wars, when they’re older, feel a certain way,” he said. “I’m starting to be that guy.”

Grey went on to say that if he could speak to a young person thinking of joining the military and pursuing a career in special operations, he’d be tempted to tell the kid, “Don’t do it. It’s a trap. Run, go live your life, man.” He added, “Don’t trust your recruiter. Don’t believe them.”

Between January 2017 and September 2022, a total of 15,293 active duty service members suffered drug overdoses, and 322 of those were fatal, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Defense. The data showed that Fort Bragg had far more overdoses than any other military base, in both absolute and per capita terms, and that Fort Bragg soldiers were significantly more likely to overdose and die than the average American.

There were at least twenty-four murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers between 2020 and 2024. Many remained unsolved years after the fact.

See also CIA Pioneer Alan Dulles  Legacy of Ashes  The Murder of Osama Bin Laden  President as Assassin

Posted on

How Dupont (Chemours) Saint-Gobain and 3M Poisoned the World

They Poisoned The World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals; Mariah Blake 2025

Manhattan Project: “The goal was to isolate a rare class of uranium atoms that were capable of producing nuclear chain reactions — the only process that could yield enough energy for an atom bomb…The most promising — gaseous diffusion — involved converting uranium into a gas called uranium hexafloride, or hex, and pumping it through a maze of porous barriers. Since the desired isotope, uranium-235, passed through the tiny pores, the rest of the atoms would gradually be filtered out, leaving only the prized nuclear fuel….If the project stood any chance of succeeding, the physicists needed materials that could stand up to both flourine and hex in some of the harshest conditions imaginable…As luck would have it, Dupont had already developed one that seemed to fit the bill: Teflon. The company hadn’t figured out how to make more than a few ounces at time, but it had a history of ramping up production fast…In the last two months of 1942 alone, the government contracted with Dupont to build two  factories to produce flourocarbon lubricants and sealants based on research from university scientists, and a third facility to manufacture a chemical critical to the production of both flourocarbons and hex — which were now a matter of national security….To avoid being seen as a war profiteer, the firm agreed  to limits its fee for the project to one dollar above costs and to turn all patents over to the US government. But it held on to its patent for Teflon, expecting the material would be key to the Columbia method for enriching uranium.”

Post War Products: “The push by companies like 3M to turn wartime innovations into peacetime profits would transform American Life. After the conflict, manufactures began marketing these materials for every imaginable purpose. Poison gases found new life as pesticides. Explosives like ammonium nitrate were repackaged as chemical fertilizer, revolutionizing entire food systems. And plastics once reserved for military use were transformed into a cornucopia of goods. Polyethylene, which had been used to coat radar cables, were turned into Tupperware, Hula Hoops, and grocery bags. Vinyl, or PVC, became shower curtains, flooring, medical equipment, and a popular new household item call Saran wrap. Nylon, which had been used to make parachutes, flak jackets, and aircraft fuel tanks, returned to store shelves in the form of previously scarce run proof stockings.”

Rob Bilott and Mark Ruffalo

The book first focuses on PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic Acid C8HF15O2) which has a chain of 8 carbon atoms and were the first identified forever chemicals that do not break down. The book gives detailed histories of the long legal battles around the Dupont plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia, and the Dupont plant near Hoosick Falls NY surrounding Dupont’s production of PFOA chemicals. Cincinnati attorney Robert Bilott was involved in both battles. The 2019 Todd Haynes movie Dark Waters dramatizes the Parkersburg legal battle with Mark Ruffalo playing Robert Bilott.

Bilott first filed a Federal case in West Virginia in 1999 on behalf the Tennants, farmers whose cattle were dying as a result of Dupont hazardous substances being dumped into Dry Run near his farm. The case evolved into a class action suit with 3500 plaintiffs. Dupont reneged on their medical agreement forcing Bilott to file cases one by one. When the first few cases awarded millions in damages, Dupont settled with all plaintiffs for $671 million in 2017.

The Hoosick Falls case was settled for $27 million in 2025.

Dupont spun off its forever chemical division to Chemours Company in 2015.

Chemical companies continued development of forever chemicals in a new class of PFOS (Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid C8F17SO3H or C8HF17O3S ). Other new inventions were chemicals with carbon chains from 1 to 7 atoms and are identified as PFAS and include PFOA and PFOS.  They all share the characteristic that they don’t break down so are forever chemicals. It has become next to impossible for governments or the EPA to regulate (like setting parts per billion limits in drinking water).

“It all began in the early 2020s, when a group of European researchers developed a technique to detect an elusive subset of forever chemicals that evaded other methods — specifically, those with three or fewer carbon atoms. After applying this technique for drinking water across Germany, they made a breakthrough discovery: All but 2 percent of PFAS detected were ultashort-chain substances, which up until that point had hardly registered on scientists’ radar.”

“One molecule turned out to be particularly abundant — triflouroacetic acid, or TFA, which is used to make pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and working fluids for heating and cooling systems. It is also a common breakdown product of other PFAS. The researchers found that this chemical alone accounted for 90 percent of forever chemicals detected in German tap water. Since then, TFA has been detected in alarming levels in beer, bottled water, tea, and baby food in a variety of countries. One survey found the TFA made up virtually all PFAS found in rivers and groundwater across Europe.”

“Similarly, when researches from Emory University measured the levels of various PFAS in tap water from homes in Indiana, they found that TFA accounted for 85 percent of the total. And the average concentration was orders of magnitude above the EPA’s safety limits for PFOA. Industry has long insisted that shorter chain chemicals are safer because they don’t build up in people’s bodies. But the Emory team found that the TFA levels in homeowner’s blood were even higher than the national average for PFOA at its peak. This wasn’t because the chemical had built up over time but because people were being exposed to such large qualities.”

“They (TFA) build up faster in crops, leading to enormous concentrations in the few foods that have been tested. And they’re virtually impossible to get out of drinking water. Not only do they pass right through the type of carbon filters used to remove legacy chemicals but they also foil newer treatment technologies that are meant to remove a broad range of PFAS.”

“So far, manufacturers like Dupont, Chemours, and 3M have been hit with roughly fifteen thousand legal claims, the lion’s share from municipalities, water districts, and residents of polluted communities, though more than thirty U.S.states have also brought cases. And the numbers are expected to rise sharply in the coming months and years.”

“While these (EPA) standards are a potentially important step, they do nothing to protect people from the thousands of other forever chemicals that are inundating their bodies. And there’s no telling whether they (EPA standards) will survive Donald Trump’s second presidency.”

“In the end, any federal action may prove less consequential than the aggressive measures cropping up in other places. In 2023, the European Commission introduced a wholesale ban on the production and sale of PFAS and products containing them, the most sweeping chemical regulation in the bloc’s history. Thanks to the tireless efforts of grassroots activists, many U.S. states are embracing similar measures.”

“Rob Bilott, the lawyer who brought these chemicals to the world’s attention, sees these developments as a testament to the power of ordinary citizens. “It shows just how much individual people and communities standing up and speaking out can do and the dramatic change they put in motion” he said. “It took us way too long get here, but its happening.””

 

Posted on

The Current American Oligarchic System

The System; Who rigged it, how we fix it; Robert B Reich, 2022

The typical American, as I have shown, has little wealth and has “near-zero, statistically non-significant” political power. Almost all wealth and power now reside in the oligarchy. Yet the oligarchy is not committed to the public good. It does not want to raise the wages of working Americans, reduce inequalities, guarantee all Americans access to good health care and a world class education, or stop climate change. The oligarchy’s allegiance is to corporate shareholders, and its major interest is enlarging their  and its own wealth. The easiest way to lift share values and enlarge the oligarchy’s wealth are to hold down wages, roll back regulations, find ever cheaper places to produce products and services, fight unions, and secure giant tax cuts that result in less money for education, health care, and everything else most Americans need.

In the 1980s and 1990s almost a quarter of all public corporations in the United States were at one time the target of an attempted hostile takeover, opposed by a firm’s management. Another quarter received takeover bids supported by management.

Corporate Raider Carl Icahn and Donald Trump

Few conditions change minds more profoundly than the imminent possibility of being sacked. Hence across America, CEOs who were now threatened by being replaced by CEOs who would maximize shareholder value began to view their responsibilities differently: they would maximize shareholder value even more. The corporate statesmen of previous decades became the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was — in the meat ax parlance that became fashionable — “to cut the fat,” “cut to the bone,” and make their companies “lean and mean.” By 1997, the Business Roundtable reversed the position it had taken in 1981. Now it declared the “job of business is in fact only to maximize shareholder wealth.”

Between 1981, when Jack Welch took the helm at GE, and 2001 when he retired, GE’s stock catapulted from $13 billion to $500 billion. Welch accomplished this largely by slashing American jobs and abandoning the communities GE had been rooted in. Before he became CEO, most GE employees had spent their entire careers with the company, usually at one of its facilities in upstate New York. But between 1981 and 1985, a quarter of them — 100,000 in all — were laid off, earning Welch the moniker of “neutron Jack,” along with the growing admiration of the business community. Between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, GE slashed its American workforce by half again (to about 160,000) while nearly doubling its foreign workforce (to 130,000)…As GE opened facilities abroad, staffed by foreign workers costing a small fraction of what GE had paid its American employees, the corporation had all but abandoned upstate New York.

Giant corporations that dominate an industry also gain political power. They provide significant campaign contributions, have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers, and directly employ many voters. As a result, their CEO’s phone calls to members of congress are promptly returned. Items they want included in legislation are dutifully inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped. They get tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, and loan guarantees they seek. They can stop laws in their tracks. Never underestimate the monetary value of such largess. The financial returns on political investments are among the highest in the whole system.

The three systemic changes I have outlined — from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from unionized workers to corporate monopolies, and from regulation of Wall Street to letting the street run wild — profoundly altered the American system. It created a jaw-dropping wealthy and powerful oligarchy. It shafted just about everyone else.

      

Jamie Dimon and Sandy Weill <> <> <> <> <> Koch Brothers

Dig under the surface of the system and you see individuals making deals that generate billions for themselves — such as Carl Icahn’s corporate raids, Jack Welch’s attacks on GE’s workers and unions, Warren Buffet’s investments in corporations with moats, and Sandy Weill’s and Jamie Dimon’s unfettered financial supermarkets and betting parlors.

Dig deeper and you see how these deals depended on seemingly small changes in laws and regulations, such as preventing companies defending themselves from raiders, neutering antitrust enforcement, imposing small fines for firing union organizers, refusing to regulate derivatives, and dismantling Glass-Steagall.

Bore still deeper and you see a vicious cycle in which, starting around 1980, wealth and power began concentrating around a relative small group at the top, giving them increasingly political clout to get changes in laws and regulations that concentrated their wealth and power even more.

The first three decades after WWII featured a growing middle class. a steadily more inclusive democracy, and a nation beginning to grapple with problems like poverty, inequality of opportunity, and environmental decay. African American and women slowly gained footholds in the system. Mass production begat mass consumption demanded steady jobs with good wages. This balance relied on strong unions, a government willing to regulate corporations, and large corporations rooted in their communities and responsible for the well being of their employees and neighbors as well are shareholders.

The  last forty years, the opposite has occurred. The middle class has shrunk, democracy is too often malfunctioning, and the nation has turned its back on climate change, poverty, widening inequality, and the evils of racism and xenophobia. As I’ve said, the economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game in which the winners do better only to the extent losers do worse. But power is necessarily a zero-sum game. Certain people possess it only to the extent other people don’t. Some people gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated  in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.

Posted on

Techno Feudalism – OpenAI

Empire of AI; Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao 2025

In their book Power and Progress, MIT economists and Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that every technology revolution must begin with a rallying ambition. It is the promoted of a technology benefiting everyone that puts in motion the long journey of amassing enough talent and resources to turn it into a reality. After analyzing one thousand years of technology history, the authors conclude that technologies are not inevitable. The ability to advance them is driven by a collective belief that they are worth advancing. The irony is that for this very reason, new technologies rarely default to bringing widespread prosperity, the authors continue. Those who successfully rally for a technology’s creation are those who have the power and resources to do the rallying. As they turn their ideas into reality, the vision they impose–of what the technology is and whom it can benefit–is thus the vision of a narrow elite, imbued with all their blind spots and self-serving philosophies. Only through cataclysmic shifts in society or powerful organized resistance can a technology transform from enriching the few to lifting the many.

The two features of technology revolutions–their promise to deliver progress and their tendency instead to reverse it for the most vulnerable–are perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence. Since its conception, the development and use of AI has been propelled by tantalizing dreams of modernity and shaped by a narrow elite with money and influence to bring forth their conception of the technology. That conception is what has led to the exploding social, labor, and environmental cost that are playing out around the world today, particularly, as we’ll see, in many Global South countries, for which the consequences of their dispossession by historical empires still linger in delayed economic development and weaker political institutions.

“In February 2020, I (Hao) published a profile for MIT Technology Review, drawing on my observations from my time in the (OpenAI) office, nearly three dozen interviews, and a handful of internal documents.“

“There is a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors .. Over time it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration.”

“…OpenAI would ‘t speak to me again for three years.”

Alan Turing published in 1950 the article “Can machines think?”  proposing the Turing Test, also known as the imitation game. He argued that if a machine could engage in conversation indistinguishable from a human, it could be considered to be thinking. The term “artificial intelligence” was first coined by John McCarthy, an American computer scientist, in 1956. The field immediately divided into two camps promoting alternate research approaches:

1. Symbolic AI (or GOFAI – Good Old-Fashioned AI)
  • Relies on representing knowledge using human-readable symbols and logical rules,.
  • Aims to explicitly program knowledge and rules into the system, enabling logical reasoning and deduction.
  • Strengths: Transparency and interpretability, logical reasoning, and handling structured problems where rules are well-defined.
  • Weaknesses: Inflexibility in handling complex and ambiguous real-world scenarios, difficulty with large and unstructured datasets, and a labor-intensive process of knowledge acquisition.
  • IBM’s Deep Blue computer that first defeated chess grand masters used symbolic AI in its development.
2. Connectionist AI
  • Models AI processes based on the structure and functioning of the human brain, utilizing artificial neural networks.
  • Learns from data through training, identifying patterns and relationships, rather than relying on explicit programming.
  • Strengths: Excels at pattern recognition, handles large and complex datasets effectively, and demonstrates adaptability.
  • Weaknesses: Often considered “black boxes” due to their lack of transparency, making it difficult to understand how they arrive at decisions, Also requires significant computational resources and extensive training data. 
  • AlphaGo which first beat the Go champion was developed with Connectionist AI
Bridging the gap: Neuro-symbolic AI
Recognizing the limitations of each approach, a new field called neuro-symbolic AI is emerging. This approach aims to combine the strengths of both symbolic AI and connectionist AI, creating systems that are both adaptable and explainable. 
  • This integration allows AI systems to leverage neural networks’ ability to learn from data while utilizing symbolic reasoning to understand and explain their decisions.
  • This approach is especially promising for complex tasks requiring both pattern recognition and logical reasoning, such as medical diagnostics, autonomous driving, and financial modeling. 
The evolution of AI continues to explore ways to effectively combine these approaches to create more robust and trustworthy intelligent systems. 

Effective altruism (EA) is a philosophical and social movement that advocates using evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to benefit others.

Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, Mira Murati, and Greg Brockman, of OpenAI

Following Sutskever’s philosophy of scaling simple neural networks, the question in the early days of OpenAI became: Scale which one?..none of the neural networks that had gained widespread traction seemed to fit the bill. In August 2017, that changed with Google’s invention of a new type of Neural network know as the Transformer. Transformers excel at picking up on long-range patterns. In 2018 OpenAI released the first version of that model, called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, later nicknamed GPT-1. The second word in the name pre-trained — is a technical term with AI research that refers to training a model on a generic pool of data as a prerequisite for it to learn more specific tasks later. IGPT-1 in other words, had been trained on a generic pool of English to create a rough approximation of how the language worked. The model could then be “fine-tuned” or specialized, later by training on a much more tailored dataset–say Shakespeare plays to teach it how to generate Shakespeare-esque prose.

The cluster of models that OpenAI trained leading up to the final 1.5-billion-parameter version illustrated this relationship (between data, compute, and parameters). Each one (model) fell neatly on a curve of increasing capability. So it was little surprise when the largest one, which they named GPT-2 markedly improved over the juvenile text generation of GPT-1 to produce lengthy and coherent enough prose to be confused with a human’s.

What the darker surprise to the team was the content that GPT-2 was producing with its new coherence. Fed a few words like Hilary Clinton or George Soros, the chattier language model could quickly veer into conspiracy theories.. Small amounts of Nazi propaganda swept up in its training data could surface in horrible ways.

Everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable; the explosive global costs of its massive deep learning models, and the perilous race it sparked across the industry to scale such models to planetary limits, could only have ever arisen from the place it actually did.

GPT-4’s new level of performance convinced OpenAI leadership that it was time to start working toward one of Altman’s long-coveted ambitions: an AI assistant that would look like and feel like the character Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her.

But for the OpenAI executives, the rumors (that Anthropic was about to introduce a chatbot) were enough to trigger a decision; the company wouldn’t wait to ready GPT-4 into a chatbot; would release Schulman’s chat-enabled GPT-3.5 model with the Super-assistant team’s brand new chat interface in two weeks, right after thanksgiving (ChatGPT launched Nov 29, 2022 “No, all the GPU’s are melting. Everything is crashing.”).

Within two months ChatGPT had reached one hundred million, at the time the fastest-growing consumer app in history.

ChatGPT catapulted OpenAI from a hot startup well-known within the tech industry into a household name overnight.

The model’s (ChatGPT) high rate of hallucinations, for example, had continued to prove particularly difficult to get under control … an internal document noted that OpenAI’s model had hallucinated during an internal test on roughly 30 percent of so-called closed-domain questions.

AI hallucinations occur when large language models (LLMs) generate false, misleading, or nonsensical information, presenting it as factual. These errors can range from simple inaccuracies to completely fabricated details.

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

This paper originate within Google. The four big warnings:

First, large language models were growing so vast that they were generating an enormous environmental footprint, as found in Strubell’s paper. This could exacerbate climate change, which ultimately affected everyone but had a disproportionate burden on Global South communities already suffering from broader political, social, and economic precarity.

Second, the demand for data was growing so vast that companies were scraping whatever they could find on the internet, inadvertently capturing more toxic and abusive language as well as subtler racist and sexist references. This, once again, risked harming vulnerable populations the most in ways like the wrongful arrest of the Palestinian man or as documented in Noble’s work.

Third, because such vast databases were difficult to audit and scrutinize, it was extremely challenging to verify what was actually in them, making it harder to eradicate toxicity or more broadly ensure that they reflected evolving social norms and values.

Finally, the model outputs were getting so good that people could easily mistake its statistically calculated outputs as language with will meaning and intent. This would make people prone not only to believing the text to be factual information, but also to consider the model a competent advisor, a trustworthy confidant, and perhaps even something sentient.

 

The kinds of chips that OpenAI needed were expensive. Known as graphic processing units, or GPUs, that had originally been designed to quickly render graphics on computers, such as for giving video games a low-latency, glossy finish. But the same form factor excelled at training the AI models OpenAI wanted to develop, since they shared with graphics-rendering a common requirement: the need for crunching massive amounts of numbers in parallel.

Nvidia was the only chip maker making suitable GPUs and A100s, B100s, H100s, and V100s were are used in OpenAI ‘s modeling.

A15 Bionic Chip

Apple does not figure significantly in this discussion of the development of AGI. Their first Iphone introduced in 2007 incorporated an ARM (Advanced reduced instruction set computer) and a Power IV GPU. In 2017 Apple added an NPU (Neuroprocessing unit to its Bionic chip.

Yanis Varoufakis take on the tech giants damage to capitalism TechnoFeudalism Killed Capitalism

 

Posted on

Heartsick Breakup With the West

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad, 2025

It is pointless, even, to make the obvious analogies, to imagine the response had almost any other country on earth killed hundreds or thousands of civilians on a hostage rescue mission, or flattened every hospital in a city on the hunt for a terror group, and then bragged about its success. Pointless because such things assume a conversation anchored in facts or reason or even the thinnest presupposition that the people being killed, like those killed on October 7 (2023), are human beings, their loss an utter indictment of the systems and leaders and world that allowed it. Instead, as the scope and scale of annihilation intensifies, an opposite presupposition becomes necessary, one that imposes on the dead the appropriate mendacity to justify their killing. A few weeks in, the notion that Palestinians deserve to die because some of them voted for Hamas becomes insufficient to hold up the body count. Soon Palestinians become indistinguishable from Nazis, and then worse than Nazis. As their eradication continues, they must be transformed into the worst human beings on earth, the weight of their deaths only then sufficiently lightened.

Everyone involved–the dead, their killers, the arbiters of the exchange rate–knows this for what it is. In 2014, when an Israeli newspaper runs an opinion piece in which the writer describes Palestinian children as “the explosives of the future,” there’s no ambiguity as to what is happening, what is desired to happen. Seven months before the Hamas attacks of October 2023, when the same newspaper publishes and then quickly deletes a post titled “When Genocide Is Permissible,” the bedrock of polite intellectual discourse that liberalism so desperately and invariably see as a hallmark of its own enlightenment is shown to be a phantom thing–a premise that, when most needed, cedes the floor to the concrete vocabulary of violence.  And then following the attacks, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant says Israel is fighting “human animals,” it is not a statement of belief so much as permission. When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility.

…Tomorrow, more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment. Indeed, in many of these places, what will have a real economic effect is if the bombing stops. In social and professional circles there will be limited tolerance for any talk about the fortunes of some exotic, dangerous-sounding people. In the context of self interest–and maybe there never was any other context–it is utter madness to risk one’s own prospects standing up for people who can offer nothing in return. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die. Just for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human.

Two Parties in America

And yet there is a deranged honesty about the cult to which the likes of Pence–and former South Carolinian governor Nikki Haley, who signed her own message, “Finish Them!,” to similar bombs belong. American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness from which the fascistic iteration of the modern Republican Party is fully free. There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party’s relationship with progressivism so often ends at the lawn sign: Proclaim support for this minority group or that. Hang a rainbow flag one month a year from some White House window. Most important, remind everyone at every turn of how much worse the alternative would be.

Against such hollow gesturing, even the most unhinged Republican will always be able to say: Look, these people have no interest in your suffering, only in empty gestures. I’ll do away with gestures, and make the right people suffer. It is an astonishingly effective technique, but would not be if the leadership of the Democratic Party had come to realize that sloganeering without concrete action means nothing.

Don’t let the Biden administration’s endorsement of mass murder distract from the reality that a Trump administration would be so much worse.

…It can’t be the case that the Supreme Court is an unaccountable neoconservative body intent on rendering the whole country unrecognizable and that there’s simply no way to do anything significant about it. It can’t be that climate change is the single most important issue facing the world, with our entire species at risk, and drilling licenses need to continue. It can’t be that innocent Palestinians have faced unbearable suffering and we care very deeply about their plight, and absolutely nothing will stop the arming of the nation responsible. It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.

…Suddenly an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me too.”..Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters.

To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque, To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take picture. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables . To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down’s syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

written at Guantanamo Bay in 2008.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.  Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

A few months into the genocide, protestors are regularly interrupting Democratic Party events, Dozens of major universities across the country come to a standstill as students build encampments to protest the killing. It harkens most clearly to the anti-apartheid movement of the eighties and the antiwar and civil rights protests of the sixties–all of them, too, led overwhelmingly by young people and derided as naive and inconsequential until they weren’t, until they became central facets of the story the United States tells itself about how, inevitably, justice prevails.

It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.

Whatever derangement currently occupies conservative American politics is, at least, something of very real consequence: the minority groups they want to legislate out of every facet of society, the books they want to ban, the mechanisms of democracy they want to subvert–none of it is hypothetical…every Republican will always be able to say, truthfully: At least there’s no contradiction between what I am, what I claim concerns me, and what I plan to do.

A growing number of people ask a different question; the world asks a different question, The world, full of people who factor not one iota in the calculus of those morning meetings (Democratic Party talking points of the day), looks upon this and asks, simply: Beyond self interest, what do you believe in? And every morning the answer, dressed up in anesthetic euphemism and dependent on our collective capacity for resignation to lessor of two evils, is: Nothing.

How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservationism, and somehow managed to make it close.

Imperialism

Maybe the real fear is that, when one begins to consider the root systems of small-scale, sometimes state supported, but often stateless evil, there’s an obligation to apply the same rigor to the large scale machinery of imperial evil. And in doing so, one might find that what drives and absolves the state of so much evil isn’t the fear that not doing so will allow some terrorist to destroy the fabric of free society. But rather that the evil itself is necessary to the system it protects. That in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest.

Leavetaking – Death in Palestine

In a hospital, In a refugee camp. In their beds. While make dinner for their children. While holding their siblings. While cycling. While playing on a beach. In a Market. In an incubator. Struggling to breathe, under the rubble. While trying to drag a loved one from the middle of the road. While burying the dead. While scavenging for food. While selling vegetable. While swimming in the sea, trying to catch fish. While playing soccer. While waving a white flag. With their hands raised in surrender. With their hands tied. While running away. At a checkpoint. In a torture camp. In a safe zone. In a school. While delivering aid. While waiting on aid. While performing surgery. While sitting down in a chair. By drone, from the safety of a great distance. Live on air. Away from sight.

Posted on

Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King Outside the South

King of the North, Martin Luther King Jr’s Life Struggle outside the South, Jeanne Theoharis, 2025

A new history of the Kings to correct the impression of previous biographies, news reporting, and northern and national politicians attempt to minimize the north’s Jim Crow wide spread school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination and of the Kings efforts to address these abuses.

The book documents the Kings extensive time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago trying to get political action to address these problems in a national fight against racism, poverty, and war.

An important book correcting  the general impression that Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, war on poverty,  Great Society actually accomplished much of anything to address these problems, even in the face of the 1965 LA Watts riots that soon spread throughout the north.

The book particularly focused on Chicago where the Kings moved to a west side ghetto to try to fight  mayor Daley’s racist machine. This book reports that Daley’s critical support of LBJs 1968 reelection  may have prevented LBJ from acting and promoting critical legislation to address these issues in the north, particularly his failure to pass the 1966 Civil Rights Act.

In addition to the many local and state and federal politicians who stonewalled attempts to reform the racist policies of these major cities was the equally abysmal coverage of the Kings and events by the major national newspapers from the New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and others. These papers had in place policies limiting their coverage of serious black and Latino movements and actions and marches complete with regular editorials disparaging and villainizing King.

On Sept 28, 1963 the New York Times ran an editorial entitled Strike Against Santa Claus  13 days after the KKK bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killing four girls and wounding more than a dozen. The piece slammed the bus boycott plan as “singularly inappropriate”, “dangerous”, and “self defeating”. Such a boycott, the Times claimed, would turn Christmas into “a day of hate” and put civil rights activists on the same level as those who did the church bombing”.  This from the Times paper of record!

The book includes extensive coverage of the efforts of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI to spy on the Kings and the movement, to infiltrate, tap phones, and leak salacious information to the press and to LBJ who received regular FBI briefings on MLK.

The book emphasized the critical role of Coretta Scott King in supporting, educating, and collaborating with King while at the same time raising the couple’s children (in Atlanta) while balance family wife with extensive work on her own globally in support of nuclear disarmament, the end to wars, and opposition to continued colonizing behavior by the big powers. The book criticizes the lack of women leadership in the movements both international and domestic. Coretta Scott emerges here as a force to be reckoned with.

The couple fully understood the constant threats to their lives including the 1963 bombing of their home In Birmingham early in the bus strike. They had extensive discussions about how to protect their children in the event of a death of either or both.

A book well worth reading to fully understand the extent of racial hatred in the north supported by active political policies including policing to enforce continued subjugation and suppression.