Here’s the one where some of the world’s largest billionaire grant-writing foundations put tens of millions of dollars into research grants and institutions to study the problems of global capitalism:

Shared Article from nytimes.com

What Can Replace Free Markets? Groups Pledge $41 Million to Find…

Two foundations committed funding for economic and policy research focused on alternatives to traditional economic thinking.

nytimes.com

There are some respects in which the present system of political economy is pretty bad. I have for some time maintained the view that it ought to be replaced, and the political systems that uphold it ought to be altered or abolished. That said — it is of course passing strange to describe anything about this enterprise as if it were looking into a question like What Can Replace Free Markets? For something to be replaced, you have to have it first, and the contention that modern global capitalism has them all over the place is transparently, fundamentally absurd.

Modern global capitalism has markets, to be sure. Just not that kind. Markets under modern global capitalism are highly regulated, cartelized and concentrated, border-ridden, copyrighted, trashed by large-scale programs of moralistic prohibition, juiced by trillion-dollar subsidies, insulated by trillion-dollar bailouts, policed by a trillion-dollar worldwide military-industrial complex and on the whole thoroughly fettered, leashed and trained to government demands. You could always argue that that is the way things ought to be — certainly, that’s what most normal people who write about the global economy do argue. But then it is precious, if not petulant and mendacious, to go around fobbing off the evils of the present system as the sad consequences of some ubiquitous, hegemonic Free Markets. As if they were all around us! Research that begins from the notion that the problems of neoliberalism are best ascribed to the defects or the contextual limitations of free markets will have to offer some kind of argument to show that this is not simply fantasy or imagineering about distant possible worlds; certainly, the claim, whether true or false, cannot be grounded in anything remotely resembling empirical real-world examples.

After 24 long years of struggle, the FDA has finally agreed to relax the strict standardization rules that have — in the interest of protecting the helpless and vulnerable consumer from fraud and adulteration — banned any variation or experimentation in the ingredients for salad dressings labeled as French dressing.

Shared Article from Reason.com

The FDA Finally Liberates French Dressing from 72-Year-Old Ingre…

Why? A better question was why they were ever involved in the first place.

Scott Shackford @ reason.com

Here’s the latest from the New York Times Opinion Section:

Shared Article from nytimes.com

Opinion | We’re Edging Closer to Civil War

I see too many uneasy parallels between what was happening nearly 200 years ago and what is happening now over abortion.

nytimes.com

. . . In Calhoun’s view, the states had the right to control and oppress Black bodies as they saw fit, regardless of any actions to the contrary on the federal level. States, he felt, should be able to choose whether or not they wanted slavery.

I see too many uneasy parallels between what was happening nearly 200 years ago and what is happening now. I see this country on the verge of another civil war, as the Calhounian impulse is reborn.

There are enormous, obvious differences, of course. The civil war I see is not the kind that would leave hundreds of thousands of young men dead in combat. That is not to say that we aren’t seeing spates of violence but rather that this new war will be fought in courts, statehouses and ballot boxes, rather than in the fields.

— Charles M. Blow, We’re Edging Closer to Civil War
New York Times, 12 December 2021.

The new civil war that Charles Blow sees is, that is to say, the kind that we call not a civil war at all.^[1]

1. ^[1]Because it’s not the kind that has any warfare in it. Just a pile of DCCC direct-mail fundraisers overflowing a human postal box, forever.↩

Shared Article from 8 NewsNow

Large groups of migrants using drains under border barriers to sneak into U.S.

SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — Border Patrol agents have been seeing larger groups of undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. at once, putting a stra…

Salvador Rivera @ 8newsnow.com

[Border Patrol Agent Justin] De La Torre said smugglers are pushing the migrants into large drains that have been built to help the flow of water from one side of the border to the other.

Typically, they are entering through storm drains underneath the border fence, De la Torre said. Quite frankly, when they bring in large groups at one time, it drains our resources so now our agents are spread thin and it leaves the border a bit more vulnerable in that period of time.^[1] . . . According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the large groups of migrants using the drains are mostly from Brazil and Venezuela, and some from Portugal. . . . They’re bringing people through these storm drains, they risk severe injury drowning, falling from steep terrain. Just this year alone, we’ve had 12 fatalities that we know of in this area of migrants being trafficked and smuggled into the area. The Border Patrol’s job is to keep people safe, keep American people safe, our agents safe and to keep the migrants safe as well.^[2] … The smugglers, they don’t have that goal; all they care about is making money.

De la Torre says the gates are kept closed when it’s not raining, but agents must open them when storms arrive as a way to maintain the water’s natural flow from Mexico into the U.S.

On the runoff systems we have grates and have put in bars to keep people from coming through, however, the smugglers go down there with power tools and cut through those bars and facilitate illegal entry for the migrants.

As always, border policies and the border cops who enforce them impose horrendous suffering on innocent people, for the sake of inflicting the deplorable, invasive and violent means to an utterly worthless political end. Then they turn around and look at the humanitarian crisis that they themselves have created, they contort their faces into a grotesque mask of feigned pity, and they talk on and on about how it is all so awful, and the smugglers and traffickers are to blame, and the politicians in Washington and the paramilitary patrol on the border all care so, so much and they are all so, so sorry, and this only shows how much harder they need to work at shutting crossings systematically, relentlessly, and completely. So that they can make damned sure to enforce all the laws that keep forcing peaceful, harmless people into these awful conditions over and over again. There is no policy that is worth this, no system of control and enforcement that could justify or even excuse hunting people and leaving them no escape but to crawl through the drains under a goddamned apartheid wall that never should have been built. There is no crisis on the border that is not the direct result of the crisis of the border, no humanitarian disaster that would not be instantly and forever wiped away just by letting people cross peacefully where they want to cross, and letting them stay anywhere that they can find a place or a person willing to have them. All you need to do is stand down, let these people cross freely and openly where they choose, and leave them alone.

See also.

• GT 2021-11-23: Let Them Out
• GT 2021-11-22: Let Them In
• GT 2021-09-20: US Officials Defend Deportation of Thousands: The Biden Government’s Massive Show of Force Against Haitian migrants, Del Rio, Texas
• GT 2020-02-28: The Half-Century Queue
• GT 2019-06-28: No Decency

1. ^[1][Good. —R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][Sic. —R.G.]↩