Source: The Daily Economy
by Andrew Byers
“The US is a remarkably stable global military power. Attempts to anchor us to key moments of past are usually lazy intellectual shortcuts, with sinister intentions.” (11/15/24)
Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“Today, for a number of senior Marines — including 22 retired four-star generals — the fight is intramural. It concerns the U.S. Marine Corps’s future. And its understanding of itself, which is rooted in the past century, in major battles in major wars: e.g., Belleau Wood (1918), Iwo Jima (1945), the Tet Offensive (1968), Fallujah (2004). The Corps’s intensely practical, and perhaps perishable, elan is at stake in the heated debate about how Marines fit into the nation’s security strategy. In March 2020, the USMC announced Force Design 2030, a 10-year plan to reconfigure the Corps and shrink it by 12,000 (currently there are 174,500 Marines) to conform to a national defense plan primarily — too much, critics of Force Design contend — focused somewhat on Russia but mostly on China.” (11/15/24)
Source: Common Dreams
by Yoav Litvin
“In what war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called ‘history’s greatest comeback,’ sexual predator, game show host and former Wrestlemania idol Donald Trump was re-elected as US President. Netanyahu, ever quick to kiss Trump’s ring, has been scheming toward this very moment since last October when Hamas fighters embarrassed his government by breaking out of Gaza’s prison walls and attacking Israeli military bases. Indeed, Netanyahu’s investment paid off. Trump’s re-election reshuffles the Middle East colonial deck in Netanyahu’s favour, shifting US policy from the Democratic Party’s hypocritical complicity with and denial of Zionist genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity to a shameless embrace and encouragement of these malevolent actions.” (11/16/24)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-netanyahu-fascists
Source: CounterPunch
by David S D’Amato
“The term state capitalism does not have a single definition that is used with consistency and uniformity. The definitions that have been used depend on the context of the discussion, both historically and in terms of discipline or field, and the ideological commitments of the speaker or author. To understand state capitalism, it is necessary to survey the ways the state has shaped and participated in economic life within capitalist frameworks. Today, state actors around the world are adopting an aggressive economic strategy, investing heavily across sectors to position themselves optimally within the global capitalist system. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) have proliferated dramatically in recent years, growing in number and increasingly occupying positions as some of the top companies in the world.” (11/15/24)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/15/deconstructing-state-capitalism
Source: Orange County Register
by Steven Greenhut
“If California progressivism were the answer to Donald Trump’s MAGA-inspired populist bluster, then we’d be watching news of President-elect Kamala Harris’[s] Cabinet appointments. Instead Trump swept the swing states, won the popular vote and saw Republicans secure control of both houses of Congress. The message voters sent might not be entirely clear, but they certainly didn’t say, ‘We want California values!’ Harris, of course, was a product of the San Francisco Bay Area political machine. Her tenure in the U.S. Senate was marked by support for standard-issue progressive platitudes. She wisely tacked to the center, but never detailed a compelling alternative agenda – although she did walk back some of her more-liberal positions. One cannot defeat something with nothing, even if the something is ominous.” (11/15/24)
Source: The Bleeding Heart Libertarian
by Matt Zwolinski
“Now that Trump has won the election, Lina Khan’s days as head of the Federal Trade Commission are almost certainly numbered. A lot of libertarians and conservatives are pretty happy about this. Khan is a committed leftist, with roots in Yale’s Law and Political Economy Project (see my earlier essay here). She has been an aggressive proponent of antitrust, using her position to closely scrutinize mergers and the market power of big tech corporations. Critics like Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown argue that this has been bad for business and bad for consumers. But I’m not so sure. On their face, a lot of Khan’s reforms seem pretty consumer-friendly.” (11/15/24)
https://bleedingheartlibertarian.substack.com/p/two-cheers-for-lina-khan
Source: Washington Examiner
by Salena Zito
“President-elect Donald Trump’s win last week in Pennsylvania was always right in front of you if you were objectively listening to the concerns of the people and the data showing the most important, misread trend of all: The Republican Party had now become the party of work. In interview after interview, waitresses, welders, rank-and-file union members, plumbers, HVAC small-business owners, hairdressers, and barbers would tell national news reporters, including me, that they were voting for Trump. No matter how often these voters said this, it often was dismissed as an outlier. Or it was placed in a silo of race, meaning it was only the white working class. The blindness among reporters and Democrats was they thought it was only white middle-class voters behaving that way, missing that working-class voters of all races were voting shoulder to shoulder.” (11/16/24)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3231622/joe-biden-was-fluke-2020-not-donald-trump-2016/
Source: Semafor
by David Weigel
“The vast majority of votes from this election have been counted, with just a few million ballots outstanding in western states. Total turnout is on track to fall just short of 2020, well ahead of some observers’ expectations on Election Night, when conspiracy theories about more than 10 million ‘missing Biden voters’ flourished among Democrats. Harris will win fewer votes than President Joe Biden did four years ago — but the decline was significantly steeper in safely red or blue states than in swing states. Where there was no national campaign spending on turnout, and where voters knew that they were unlikely to change the outcome, Harris ran further behind Biden.” (11/15/24)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, ‘The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a ‘warrior board’ of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.’ The article cites Trump’s vow to fire ‘woke generals’ — that is, generals who are reputed to be promoting ‘diversity’ in the military at the expense of readiness. There is another possibility, however, one that is much more discomforting — that Trump is consolidating his power as president and knows that a loyal military establishment will solidify and reinforce that consolidation of power.” (11/15/24)
https://www.fff.org/2024/11/15/why-trump-wants-his-own-generals/
Source: mint
by James Mackintosh
“The election lit the rocket that crypto enthusiasts hope will take prices to the moon. They are anticipating that President-elect Donald Trump will follow through on his pledge to defenestrate the anti-crypto chief of Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, ease regulations on crypto-company listings, exchanges, finance and mining, and create a national stash of bitcoin. Easier regulations should in principle push up prices by making it easier to attract buyers. Because cryptocurrencies aren’t backed by income or an economy, in the absence of any fundamentals they are driven entirely by supply and sentiment-driven demand. More buyers means a higher price. Yet, dig deeper into the argument, and it is hard to see why bitcoin should benefit so much.” (11/15/24)