Saikat Chakrabarti Runs for Pelosi's Congressional Seat + Thomas Ferguson evaluates Democratic failure

You'll read all about conventional Democrat Weiner running for Pelosi's congressional seat in the "lame-stream" news, but the absolute minimum about the progressive challenger, Saikat Chakrabarti. He's come from AOC's staff, and is very clear about the progressive goals he embraces. For the full story, read or listen to his interview with The Intercept.

One excerpt:"So the thing I’ve been working on at my think tank New Consensus, we’re calling it the “Mission for America.” And it really harkens back to basically what FDR did during the New Deal, but also during the mobilization for World War II to build a whole new economy because I think that’s ultimately the way we defeat authoritarianism. Because back in the 1930s, we had a really powerful, far right in this country. We were actually seeing Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden, it was filling the stadium.

"And the way we defeated that was FDR came in with the New Deal movement. He built this whole new economy and a whole new society that improved people’s lives so dramatically, it just killed this idea that you need an authoritarian to do it for you.

"He proved democracy can work. And he did that through the social safety net. But he also did that by building an industrial base that created the modern-day middle class. So that’s really what the “Mission for America” is. It’s basically taking a lot of the institutions and the lessons from that era and saying, how do we do that today? Because I argue that it’s not just about some policies; it’s actually this whole other kind of governing that we had back then." 

Meanwhile, Thomas Ferguson evaluates Democratic chances here Hint: follow the money.  

Excerpt:

"The old line continues in a new way as people try to understand the Trump economy. Paul Krugman and many others continue to maintain that Biden left a good economy that Trump is ruining. The very last months of Biden’s term were somewhat better, but the dominant tendency is a deepening of the dual economy Storm and I spotlighted with the continuing stock market boom. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston just put out a study of wealth, income, and consumption spending. It concludes that it’s the rich who are benefiting hugely in both wage growth and spending, not the lower-income groups. Other studies confirm this. 

"Indeed, segments of the business press now routinely refer to the “K-shaped economy,” alluding to the divergence between top and bottom in income and wealth. Most stories manage not to mention quantitative easing and the Fed’s role, but they document very clearly the way retail sales and other spending divide in our dual economy. That tendency became stronger during Biden’s term, especially once the relief programs were withdrawn and access to health insurance fell. Even the Wall Street Journal has come around on this point.

"The process has been going on for quite a long time, yet Democratic Party elites mostly felt comfortable discussing it in terms of second-order effects suffused in references to racism and gender. You could see that very clearly in 2016, where virtually everybody’s election analysis focused on race and gender. By contrast, in the analysis that Ben Page and my colleagues and I did, we were very clear that Trump’s ascent was first of all an economic story. You only had to listen to him talk to realize that race and gender were also playing big roles in his electoral appeals. But the importance of the economic squeeze on many Americans was clear from day one, as was the disenchantment of many Democratic voters with the party.

"It’s not getting better. Little in the “abundance agenda” now touted by many Democrats addresses the real problems. The recent paper from economists at the San Francisco Fed showing that supply constraints don’t explain housing construction and prices in US cities is devastating, for example. So is the evidence Storm and I presented about electricity rates; you don’t explain those by NIMBYism. Electricity prices are classic cases of money in politics distorting regulation."

Nick French

"To summarize where that leaves the Democrats right now: They still push this narrative that Biden had a great economy, that he delivered for workers. He only lost because the workers are confused by social media or because they don’t care about economic issues…

Thomas Ferguson

"Or the party has somehow not found a message. That’s another nonsense bromide. The Democrats failed to deliver for most Americans who were not rich, full stop."

 

Advantage: China

 

I finally got a chance to read this fascinating paper on productivity in China by Weijian Shan, a man who's had an incredible life, starting as a Cultural Revolution worker in the Gobi desert to today one of the world's most respected investors.

One statistic blew my mind. In… https://t.co/5H5tHY4SY1

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 12, 2025

 

...worth expanding. The text describes how Chinese workers produce 14 times more than American workers. This is odd because the Chinese work for lower pay than the Americans. But China's commitment to infrastructure, particularly transit and green energy, makes this possible. The US has set up its economy as a series of toll booths, so worker need higher pay just to live their lives. The privatization of everything essential to survival from food, to housing, to healthcare, to education, etc. -- all of that makes just day-to-day living more expensive, and not incidentally, the US less competitive internationally.

Material Conditions Matter: Slavery, the Fall of Rome, and the American Civil War

(c) by Mark Dempsey

A recent article about the fall of Rome cites the corruption and lack of civic consciousness of the elites as some of the causes of (Western) Rome's fall in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. However, it overlooks one important material cause of Rome's decline: food shortages. Material conditions matter.

Early Roman farmers practiced sustainable agriculture, maintaining soil fertility as they grew their crops. As more conquests produced more slaves, however, they abandoned those techniques to farm with slaves. Slaves don't care if they deplete the soil.

The depleted soil meant declining food production for Rome, which became more dependent on imported food, particularly from its North African colonies. The Vandals battled their way down the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa and shut off that food source. When the barbarians came to Rome, the hungry population opened the gates for them.*

One reason farming with slaves came to the New World in the American South was because Old World diseases like malaria and yellow fever decimated populations that might have otherwise supplied workers.** Africans had resistance to these diseases, so slavery made economic sense in a New World short of human labor, and was particularly necessary in the areas where the yellow fever and malaria vectors (mosquitoes) existed--roughly from the Mason-Dixon line to the northern border of Argentina.

Those diseases may also be the reason Napoleon's soldiers couldn't defeat a 1791–1804 slave revolt in Haiti. An army with too many deaths from illness is much easier to defeat.

Plantation operators solved the depleted soil problem in the New World not by planting soil-restoring crops like peanuts, but by moving to new territory and "mining" that soil. As the US expanded westward, the debate about whether the new territories would allow slavery was one of existential importance, at least to the South, where soils were degrading thanks to slave-based farming. The South's economic dependence on soil fertility trumped all the moralizing from abolitionists.

Farming cotton with slaves is perilous for other reasons too. Andrew Jackson's administration stole much of the Southeastern US from its native inhabitants despite Supreme Courts in Georgia and Washington D.C. confirming that the natives owned the land. Jackson dared the Supreme Court to enforce its order, and evicted the tribes from their land with a march called the "Trail of Tears." Note: Trump is not the first president to defy the courts.

This defiance made lots of new territory available for cotton farmers who occupied the land and borrowed to buy new slaves. But the income with which they expected to pay those loans did not materialize because they produced so much cotton that the price descended to new lows, even though they warehoused 60% of the crop.

Their difficulties were further compounded because, in 1835, Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt entirely and revoked the charter for the National Bank. That meant there was no public currency. People did their business with specie (monetized gold) and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability. 

It was a business nightmare, and many planters lost everything because they lost their dollar savings and couldn't pay slave loans with either their cotton income or those savings. A wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures – the "Panic of 1837"– ensued.

These events set the stage for the American Civil War. That war impoverished the South even more since, after the South lost, all its banks failed, and its Confederate currency was worthless. 

The postwar period was full of predatory lending from suppliers – the "furnishing man" later shortened to "The Man" – and the Gilded Age of predatory capitalism met with populist resistance from the only partly successful Farmers’ Alliance and the People's Party.

Both Rome and the American South illustrate how social inequality leads to a deterioration of civic life and the danger of social collapse. Currently, the US is experiencing massive social inequality, and even echoes Rome's dependence on imported food.

"Sustainability" is a watchword for some public policy candidates, but there's seldom any interest in a comprehensive pursuit of that goal. Even the way the US builds its cities--"suburban sprawl" – means maintenance expenses grow faster than the tax base, so our particular Ponzi scheme is literally cast in concrete. 

The rhyme of history may not be the one we want to hear.

*This simplifies some complex history, but if you're interested in the details, read Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.

**See Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Deaths of Despair

 

Incarceration across the US & World

 

Defense Spending Exposed (Australian edition)

 

Reference 👇pic.twitter.com/QIypouBZrL

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 4, 2025

No Fooling

 "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman 

It's humbling to admit how easy we are to fool. Give a hypnotist ten minutes and he can have a crowd of people clucking like chickens. 

The ubiquitous marketing we encounter is always trying to fool us, to get us to buy things we may or may not need and believe things that are or aren't true. It's smoke and mirrors, bullshit and manipulation, the lipstick on the pig.

Part of the problem is that basic human knowledge depends on a narrative, language, or vocabulary to perceive the world. The visual cortex in our brains gets only ten percent of its nerves from data (the optic nerve). The rest is connected to language and memory. Even sight requires a vocabulary, and is susceptible to optical illusions.

Another source of deception is supernormal stimulus--something like buggy biological software. Here's a concise introduction to the concept in a comic by Stuart McMillan. 

 

Our bodies navigate the world with many algorithms. For example, if you stand up after lying down, your heart will (automatically) start pumping harder to make sure your blood pressure to your brain doesn't decline enough to make you faint. This kind of "software" manages everything from respiration to reproduction, walking to balancing on one foot, and like all software, is prone to defects--bugs.

Refined sugar takes advantage of one such bug. You can drink one of those gigantic sugary drinks all day long and the usual mechanisms that tell you that you've had enough to eat simply don't work. McMillan notes such bugs are not exclusive to humans--animals have them too--and they make them act in counter-productive ways. In humans, the seven deadly sins--Pride, Wrath, Greed, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth and Lust--are likely such bugs. 

We can also add the appetite for infinite fairness frequently on display in young children. Creditors often take advantage of interest compounding--which goes to infinity--and the feeling of obligation even though the source of repayment is finite, so people often willingly submit to debt peonage.

The effect of bugs on computer programs is to weaken the computer's computational power, and possibly even crash the machine. People angry about politics may vote for an opponent simply because that opponent is the only available alternative. 

"I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates" said Boss Tweed (the corrupt manager of Tammany Hall). Political parties count on their marketing to make their candidates the only alternative.

As one Australian said "You Yanks don't consult the wisdom of democracy; you enable mobs." 

 Despite Abe Lincoln's old saying that you can't fool all the people all the time, Bridget Read's Little Bosses Everywhere, an exposee of multi-level marketing reminds us that fooling can persist for decades. Here's an excerpt:

"If the story of multilevel marketing sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. The parable of homespun Yankee ingenuity and the power of free enterprise that MLM has been telling for the better part of acentury contains inventions and elisions that have gone largely unchecked through fourteen U.S. presidential administrations and may constitute one of the most devastating, long-running scams in modern history." 

So...let's be careful (and humble) out there.