Links are at the end, drowning their sorrows in the links pub.
We’re paying for universal health care in Ukraine.1 This is fine. It’s the kind of thing we should be doing for all our clients, maybe even for our own citizens. You don’t hear any Invisible Hand bozos screaming about it. Sixty percent of the funding approved for Ukraine is going into pockets belonging to U.S. weapon makers, the Pentagon, and related dependents of both, so it’s only fair. (The fact checker says that breakdown is misleading, but it actually is not.)2
It’s been a loooong week and while we’ve not been posting, the reading has continued unabated. More’s the pity, really, as this is where depression already had a room of its own.
“If he had been born with a sunnier temperament, Hayek might have come out as a libertarian socialist, a bohemian existentialist, an anarchist hippy, or a small-is-beautiful beatnik, without abandoning his economic principles. He might even have glimpsed the possibility that liberal values will never be safe without socialism.”
That’s from a long London Review of Books piece by Jonathan Rée, writing about the first volume of a newly published Friedrich/Frederick Hayek biography by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger. (The essay is not paywalled.)3
Rée is a socialist who has somewhat grudgingly renounced planned economies of the Soviet style, which Hayek and his demented mentor Ludwig von Mises denounced in positively giddy terms, although Mises later did the same to The Road to Serfdom author when the latter allowed as how some state intervention in markets was necessary and good.
Rée has no use at all for Mises, but does give some credit to Hayek for recognizing the brutality of untamed capital. This is not to say that Hayek wasn’t down with a bit of brutality when he thought it appropriately applied.
As he grew older his political opinions became weirder and wilder: he praised Pinochet as a protector of individual freedom, for example, and urged Thatcher to bomb Argentina. Rose Friedman [Milton’s spouse and intellectual collaborator] must have been thinking of him when she said she had always found she could ‘predict an economist’s positive views from my knowledge of his political orientation’, whereas ‘I have never been able to persuade myself that the political orientation was the consequence of the positive views.’ Hayek’s insights into the economic importance of dispersed, implicit, local knowledge could certainly be turned against any absolute doctrine of central planning, but they count equally against centralised management of large firms, and also against the economic power of remote bankers, financiers, consultants and accountants.
Admiring Pinochet has become a litmus test for reactionaries, i.e. Republicans, over here, mostly for his economic ‘reforms’ but not incidentally for having dissidents tossed from helicopters at great heights. Hayek’s wildness and weirdness is now de riguerer for half our country, even if most of them haven’t ever heard of him.
[Charlie Javice] enlisted a data scientist to make up a few million customers, basically, and JPMorgan, which has about 240,000 employees and pays its CEO $34.5m for his expertise, didn’t seem to spot this in its due diligence.
That’s from a Guardian story about various frauds perpetrated by alumni of the Forbes “30 Under 30” list. Javice was the dynamic face of a startup called Frank, which purported to have helped millions of current and prospective college students navigate the financial aid maze. That was somewhat inaccurate, as the famed investment bank learned to its sorrow. Javice, no doubt to her own sorrow, is now facing charges that could lead to more than 30 years in prison.4
Forbes has also honored infamous pharma bro Martin Shkreli (2012); current crypto villain Sam Bankman-Fried, known as SBF but unlike some of his fellow three-initial perps, not a serial killer (2021); and Bankman-Fried’s colleague and one-time romantic partner, Caroline Ellison.
One of the names you’d expect to find on the list of criminal alums isn’t there, but lies (in more ways than one) adjacent to it.
While Elizabeth Holmes never actually made the 30 Under 30 list, she did headline the Forbes Under 30 Summit, so she gets an honorary mention. So does Trevor Milton, the founder of a hydrogen-powered truck company called Nikola, who was on a 2020 Forbes list called 12 under 40, listing the youngest billionaires on the Forbes 400. “Trevor Milton, the 38-year-old college dropout behind zero-emission truckmaker Nikola Motor, joins the ranks of America’s richest millennials after tripling his net worth in less than a year,” the piece gushed. You know how he got rich so quick? You guessed it: with just a little sprinkling of crime. Perhaps most notably, Nikola made a demo video showing its non-functional truck rolling downhill but tilted the camera to make it look like it was traveling under its own power on a flat road. Milton has been convicted of fraud and is awaiting sentencing in June. No doubt if he does go to jail he’ll get out after a few months and start a green energy podcast.
A podcast or a foundation. There’s a foundation in the future of every one of these hearty grifters. It’s what the market longs for.
In February, the world’s largest sailing yacht and the largest yacht built in the Netherlands underwent sea trials. Koru is expected to be joined by her support vessel, Abeona, the largest in the world of its kind, built by Damen Yachting.
Koru is Jeff Bezos’s modest little schooner, coming in at 400-plus feet stem to stern and costing more than $500 million (plus operating costs), and to be accompanied by a modest, 200-plus feet, $75 million motor launch. Abeona hosts the required helipad and other essentials one wouldn’t want cluttering the typically tight spaces on a sailboat.5
Koru is a fine-looking ship and its owner might make for a tasty London broil on the afterdeck.
At any moment, Congress could intervene and limit the length of trains. If it did, independent experts say, there’d be more trains, moving faster with fewer breakdowns and derailments, and customer service would improve. But the rail companies, which move 40% of the country’s cargo, have a lot of leverage.
Congress could intervene but won’t because railroad companies are among the federal legislature’s many co-owners. ProPublica’s story on long-train derailments6 got considerably less attention than their piece on the millions in treats Clarence Thomas got7 from possible Nazi sympathizer8 and definite reactionary billionaire Harlan Crow.
You've probably seen about all there is to see on the overt corruption of our favorite "who, me?" supreme court justice, so we'll just deal with the train stuff. You may remember the generous coverage we gave to Democrats joining in the successful congressional effort to screw rail workers, and why that sucked so bad.9 The safety issues associated with undermanned freight trains which can be more than two miles long are among the grievances that went unaddressed in that forced contract with the railroads.
Across the country, worried state lawmakers have tried to cap the lengths of trains that roll through their communities. Since 2019, in Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Georgia, Nebraska, Washington, Arizona and other states, lawmakers have proposed maximum lengths of 1.4 to about 1.6 miles. But every proposal has died before becoming law. Opponents, which include Class 1 railroad companies, claim that the efforts are driven by unions to create jobs and that the proposals would violate interstate commerce laws.
Creating jobs isn’t really an accurate description of what the unions want to do, which is restoring jobs that the railroads cut in the name of efficiency. Courts aren’t involved in that issue (because why would they be, when railroads can rely on Congress to step in and bigfoot the unions), but they’ve uniformly upheld the interstate commerce suits, and the federal regulatory agency primarily responsible for checking the rail companies has been mostly AWOL on the long train issue.
Today, the rail administration says it lacks enough evidence that long trains pose a particular risk. But ProPublica discovered it is a quandary of the agency’s own making: It doesn’t require companies to provide certain basic information after accidents — notably, the length of the train — that would allow it to assess once and for all the extent of the danger.
“It’s one of our biggest frustrations, without question,” said Jared Cassity, the alternate national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, or SMART. The union representative said the agency can track train length for accidents “and they’ve chosen not to.”
The story is in response to a series of long-train derailments across two decades, most recently the 1.7-mile train which poisoned East Palestine, Ohio, and is anchored by a 2-mile long train derailment that narrowly missed obliterating the town of Hyndman, Pennsylvania, 150 miles from East Palestine, in 2017.
For residents of Hyndman and surrounding Londonderry Township the crash scenes from Ohio could not help but bring back memories of August 2, 2017, when 30 cars of a CSX train derailed in Hyndman Borough.
Seventy cars of the 178-car train were carrying hazardous materials. One exploded and caught fire, forcing residents to evacuate.
Among those who had to flee was Borough Councilman Royce Coughenour and his family.
“This most definitely brought back to memory the derailment and explosion of August 2, 2017, and waking up that morning to seeing fire outside our windows. In the immediate aftermath, we had to grab our kids and pets and evacuate, not knowing if the leaking train would explode again,” Cougenour recalled.10
The National Transportation Safety Board made several recommendations to CSX, the railroad company responsible for the Hyndman disaster, but the company declined to implement them—or even respond to the agency, which had asked for a reply within 90 days—for more than two years, when ProPublica began poking around, and still insists, as other companies do, that precision scheduled railroading (PSR), the practice which led to the wholesale slaughter of rail worker jobs, has nothing to do with any of the company’s train mishaps.
[T]his disaster, thought Bobby Walls, Hyndman’s 36-year-old emergency manager, was something else. He’d grown up in Hyndman, starting a family in the green, peaceful valley. Now a flaming geyser towered over the rooftops, and Walls wondered: Was anyone dead? As he ran toward the blaze in his firefighting gear, Walls didn’t know that the tanker car at its center contained propane — enough that if it erupted and set off the six others around it, the explosion could engulf the entire town of some 900 people.
The tanker car still howled about seven hours later as Walls and a number of first responders waited in a cinderblock-walled classroom for word from a train company crew that was monitoring the fire. Then, the door flung open. The room quieted as a CSX worker hustled to the whiteboard and began to write.
The tanker car is rapidly failing.
An explosion is imminent.
We need to evacuate now.
The propane tanker ultimately didn’t explode, but the heat had expanded the walls of it to the point that the metal was within a millimeter of failing by the time the fire was extinguished.
As always, the people most at risk from train derailments are among the least prosperous in the country. Ah well, one might say, as many people already do.
Nationalize the fucking railroads. The feds really can’t do worse.
Roughly 9.2 million lead pipes carry water into homes across the U.S., and alarmingly, most of them are in Florida, according to a new survey from the EPA.
“Most” is inaccurate, but more than 10 percent of those nine million lead pipes are located in Florida, which we can’t help but think explains—but doesn't exculpate—Florida Man and his adventures.11
The EPA survey is preparatory to the Biden administration’s laudable but inadequately-funded effort to replace lead pipes with less harmful ones, but Associated Press reports that the agency is unable to pinpoint the location of many pipes because some among the affected states—which is all of them—and municipalities have no idea where the pipes are, and may miss out on the funds that would make a survey feasible.12
Ah well.
Researchers found that 34% of the Army's 99,335 trainees in 2017 sustained at least one musculoskeletal injury. Half of those injured were from eight states in the South, namely Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Southern discomfort, one might say. Four of the top five contributors to the military are southern states—Hawai’i is the exception to the rule even though we are the southernmost state—and fully half the reported injuries are suffered by recruits from the confederate states.13
Researchers found that 34% of the Army's 99,335 trainees in 2017 sustained at least one musculoskeletal injury. Half of those injured were from eight states in the South, namely Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina.
. . .
Army planners in recent years have become increasingly concerned over new recruits' declining physical fitness. Participation in high school sports has dropped in recent years while childhood obesity rates have reached "epidemic levels," according to research from the National Library of Medicine. 17% of U.S. children are obese, the research found, a number that has been steadily rising for decades.Nationally, the South has the highest prevalence of obesity, something researchers have attributed to a slew of factors including restrictions on access to health care, high-quality fitness facilities and healthy food. Large swaths of the South also have relatively low household incomes -- putting easy access to fitness training and healthy foods even further out of reach.
Not that helping the military stock up on high quality cannon fodder is a priority here at the newsletter, but universal health care and a more robust social welfare system generally would address a lot of their woes, although providing for the needs of potential recruits would probably erode the number who go through with an enlistment.
Gloomy music
Portishead’s Glory Box is the opening and closing music at the millennial speakeasy next door to Bad Crow Review world headquarters, and Dummy is where it lives. The other two artists are in the Portishead mold, so if you like one you’ll probably like the others.
Portishead, “Dummy;”14 Hooverphonic, "Hidden Stories;"15 Olive, "Extra Virgin+."16
That, Comrades, is all there is
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Take care, be well.