while directing a growing share of innovative effort toward goals with benefits, such as cleaner air, that don’t translate into gross domestic product.
.. What’s left, he says, are diseases such as Alzheimer’s for which scientists lack a useful theory of treatment
.. 40% are for “orphan” drugs which address diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 people.
.. In 1960, 7% of U.S. R&D was devoted to health care. By 2007, it was 25%
.. Thus, health research is displacing R&D that could have gone toward more mundane consumer products. Indeed, Mr. Jones predicts the rising value of human life virtually dictates slower growth in regular consumer goods and services—and they constitute the bulk of measured GDP.
.. Electric cars don’t yet offer a “value proposition that resonates with the mainstream customer,” says John Viera, head of sustainability at Ford Motor Co. He contrasts that with EcoBoost, a Ford-developed gasoline injection technology that achieves the same power with fewer cylinders. “The beauty is you get the fuel economy improvement with no loss in performance,” he says. “It does add cost, but the customer is willing to pay for that technology unlike with the electrified vehicle.”
.. in the past decade the cost of one critical component, the gyroscope that keeps the vehicle level, plunged as the devices were developed for smartphones. Yet commercial drone operation was illegal, with some exemptions, because it required Federal Aviation Administration approval.. the average internet retailer generates $1.3 million in sales per employee, compared with the average brick-and-mortar retailer’s $279,000. As Amazon’s market share has grown, that has lifted the entire industry’s productivity performance. Retail output per hour rose 3%.. productivity growth has accelerated at “frontier” companies, which use the most efficient processes and technology, while slowing at the remainder of firms... new technologies are in fact amalgams of technologies and business processes that are difficult to replicate and often patent protected. Many digital companies are “platforms” that invest heavily in proprietary algorithms to more efficiently match customers to what they need.. So long as the frontier firm continues to innovate, that doesn’t hold back productivity. The risk is that once a firm becomes dominant, no competitor can match its network and innovation is less necessary to retain customers... Then last May, Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Ohio resident, was killed when his Tesla hit a tractor trailer while operating under Tesla’s “autopilot” mode. The incident could have triggered a regulatory crackdown that brought deployment of the technology to a halt. Instead, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in September announced nonbinding guidance on how manufacturers should ensure their systems are as safe as possible.
Trump’s CIA pick is seen as both a fierce partisan and serious student of national security issues
In closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill, Pompeo has been an intense critic of a covert CIA program to train and arm moderate rebel forces in Syria, according to U.S. officials who said that dismantling the program — or at least subjecting it to a major re-evaluation — would likely be at the top of his agenda if he is confirmed.
.. Pompeo is not widely known among the CIA rank and file but that his nomination was greeted at least initially as a reassuring development at a spy agency that has been treated largely with disdain by Trump.
.. Pompeo’s ties to the arch-conservative tea party movement and scant background on intelligence issues were also cited as a cause for concern among some CIA veterans.
“The tea party owns the drones now,”
.. He attended a dinner this week with CIA Director John Brennan at the home of former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, who had previously been seen as a leading candidate for the CIA job under Trump. The gathering included cast and producers of the CIA-themed show “Homeland,” according to a person familiar with the event.
.. Pompeo reportedly has close ties to the Koch family, Kansas billionaires ..
.. Articles in Kansas papers indicate that Pompeo built much of his wealth with investment funds from Koch industries and that his campaigns for Congress have been backed by Koch money.
.. In just five years in Congress, he has built a political following by staking extreme positions in polarizing debates
.. Pompeo was one of the more outspoken Republican members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, saying that the Obama administration was guilty of a scandal “worse than Watergate.”
..
During hearings, his questions to administration witnesses were often among the most accusatory. In October 2015, when Clinton testified for the second time, Pompeo grilled her on her relationship with slain U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. He asked a series of rapid-fire questions about why Stevens did not have her personal telephone number, did not know her personal home address and had never “stopped by your house.”
.. Separately, in remarks that drew sharp criticism from U.S. Muslim organizations, Pompeo said that Muslim leaders who fail to denounce acts of terrorism done in the name of Islam were “potentially complicit” in the attacks.
.. Pompeo cautioned against equating all Muslims with terrorism, saying that a “line needs to be drawn between those who are on the side of extremism and those who are fighting against them.”
The Urge to Splurge
Why is it so hard to reduce the Pentagon budget? (Via TomDispatch.)
To put this figure in perspective: despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office.
.. What accounts for the Department of Defense’s ability to keep a stranglehold on your tax dollars year after endless year?
Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to do with its military, you won’t see Pentagon spending brought under real control.
.. Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: having subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying
.. In such periods, getting Americans behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has generally required a heavy dose of fear.
.. the U.S. aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.
.. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for a policy based on the global “containment” of communism and grounded in a plan to encircle the Soviet Union with U.S. military forces, bases, and alliances.
.. Senator Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to “scare the hell out of the American people” to win support for a $400 million aid plan for Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower would later describe as “a permanent arms establishment of vast proportions.”
.. the disastrous Vietnam War, which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the “Vietnam syndrome” by interventionists ..
.. perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an “arms establishment of vast proportions” came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly half-a-century
.. General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and the arms complex when he said, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.”
.. but the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a “peace dividend” could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the “rogue state” doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be focused on “regional hegemons” like Iraq and North Korea.
.. After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue state doctrine morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT)
.. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld evensuggested that Saddam was like Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the resources to conquer the globe.
.. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy, one might call Obama’s approach “politically sustainable warfare,” since it involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable number of private contractors.
.. Recent terror attacks against Western targets from Brussels, Paris, and Nice to San Bernardino and Orlando have offered the national security state and the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be useless in preventing such attacks.
The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with fighting terrorism.
.. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by acknowledging that more than half of the $58.8 billion war budget is being used to pay for non-war costs.
.. That slush fund is also enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down payment on the department’s proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines.
.. The size of a Clinton buildup is less clear, but she has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget. If that were done and the war fund continued to be stuffed with non-war-related items, one thing is certain: the Pentagon and its contractors will be sitting pretty.
.. fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is embedded in Washington.
Hidden assets, hidden costs
These mostly concerned the alleged smuggling of $65 million out of Argentina on behalf of its President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – hardly startling news if true, given the country and the person but the documents also included what really mattered: full corporate information on the 123 name-plate-only (“shell”) companies that were used to zig-zag the money surreptitiously around the world, all of them formed by a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca.
.. Not even the ultra-formidable billionaire Paul Singer, who had bought up heavily discounted Argentine debt .. could do anything about the $65 million sitting tantalizingly close to him in Nevada – but now all the data was revealed (too late for Singer because Argentina’s new President, Mauricio Macri, also a Mossack Fonseca client as it happens, had already decided to settle and pay him off, along with all the other hold-out claimants).
.. This was the beginning of a flood of 11.5 million documents containing the records of the formation and transactions of 214,000 nameplate companies, including full documentation of their initiators (passport data page scans, etc), all of whom are, or are serving, tax avoiders – in ways legal, but unethical and duplicitous
.. this is an extremely important book – this decade’s most important rather than this year’s
.. because it offers an entirely new perspective on the greatest question of the age: why has income distribution in the more developed economies become increasingly unequal pari passu with the advance of globalization?
.. disregarding the overwhelming evidence that much of that consists of the transfer of income from lower-income people in higher-income countries to higher-income people in lower-income countries.
.. we now know that globalization has caused rising inequality in quite another way than the transfer of higher-paying manufacturing jobs and all other such phenomena
.. Mossack Fonseca’s 214,000 offshore companies alone (and there are many other such shell companies, formed by many other law firms) handled not millions or billions but trillions of dollars in their totality
.. When the less affluent must pay their payroll taxes and income taxes in full, while the more affluent with offshore companies do not pay their own taxes, the total effect of the taxation system is regressive
.. Once we recognize the sheer magnitude of “offshored” income flows, and once we take into account the strongly regressive effects of supposedly progressive taxation systems, the phenomenon of rising inequality in affluent societies may not need much additional explaining – and it hardly matters if those were tax-avoidance or tax-evasion trillions.
.. Much less surprising is the abundance of Mossack Fonseca clients in the leadership of UEFA and FIFA: because football earnings are so very large it stands to reason that they should be offshored rather than wasted in paying taxes.
.. If Putin wants someone’s Moscow mega-mansion, for example, he need only let the owner know whether he wants it as it is, or cleared of furniture, and the same is true of anything else in Russia: his power is limited only by his own considerable restraint.
.. it is the outright crooks, drug-traffickers and such, who are more honest fiscally at least, because most would dearly love to pay income taxes on their earnings, if only they could do so without being arrested, thereby acquiring legal wealth they could enjoy and show off
.. the same authorities that routinely identify, track and remotely kill individual terrorists in distant countries, which they occasionally bomb for one reason or another, profess themselves impotent before the blithely meretricious officials of micro-countries that contain little else but banks that conduct no local business, whose only raison d’être is very plainly to facilitate avoidance and collude in evasion.
.. only the German tax authorities seem ready to buy it from the thieves without making a fuss, thereby recovering billions for a few million