Fresh audio product: Mark Fisher and climate austerity
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): August 25, 2022 Matt Colquhoun talks about Mark Fisher on the reissue of his essay collection Ghosts of My Life, and Matt Huber, author of this review, criticizes the climate austerity camp
Underscoring the “con” in semiconductors
Well that didn’t take long. Just nine days ago I wrote about how Washington was picking up the check for the semiconductor industry’s aggressive stock buyback programs, distributing billions in subsidies to an industry that could have funded itself if it hadn’t chosen to shower its shareholders with cash. And despite the passage of the wittily named CHIPS Act, which was supposed to encourage real investment in research and production, they’re turning the taps on the cash shower on again. The Financial Times reports: On the same day that Congress passed the law, Intel,… Read More
Fresh audio product: nuclear power and the Russian & Ukrainian ruling classes
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): August 11, 2022 Leigh Phillips on why nuclear power has to be part of any serious decarbonization program • Volodymyr Ishchenko on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as part of a bid to consolidate power, and how the ruling classes of both countries are political capitalists of a sort unknown in the West
Productivity stinker
In yesterday’s post about chronically low levels of investment, I concluded that they’ve “given us stagnant productivity growth and a collapsing infrastructure.” This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) confirmed the productivity part. For the year ending in the second quarter, it was down 2.5%, the worst in the series’ 75-year history. Productivity sounds like one of those things only the orthodox worry about, but it doesn’t have to be. Its most common form, labor productivity, is a measure of how much a worker can produce in an hour on the job. While… Read More
Washington will pick up the check
Semiconductor firms are about to get showered with cash thanks to a new bill, The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022—CHIPS standing for, cleverly, The CREATING HELPFUL INCENTIVES TO PRODUCE SEMICONDUCTORS Act. Because it involved free money for capitalists, 17 Republicans (out of 50) voted for it despite their habit of voting against almost anything supported by Democrats except money for the Pentagon. Biden is scheduled to sign it on Tuesday, August 9. It’s a $280 billion package designed to encourage semiconductor manufacturing and research in the US. Pundits and generals have… Read More
America: the rot goes on
It’s been a while since I looked at one of the major reasons for the pervasive sense of rot about the US: the low level of investment—investment in real things, that is, not crypto. It’s barely keeping up with the forces of decay. If you’re wondering why nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart, here are some explanations. First a definition: investment is spending by businesses, governments, and individuals on long-lived physical assets like buildings and machinery. Gross investment is the dollar value of such spending; net is what remains… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 