Tooze. 

How ESG Investors Helped Saudi Aramco (the world’s most powerful oil company) Raise Billions

For subscribers only

It's from Bloomberg, If you sign up for an email from Matt Levine you don't have to pay a thing, but you miss all the offhand cultural references and the art. 

Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, has become an unlikely beneficiary of funds earmarked for sustainable investments thanks to a complex web of financial structures it used to raise money from its pipelines. …

The unlikely tie-up between Aramco and ESG began with the creation of two subsidiaries — the Aramco Oil Pipelines Company and the Aramco Gas Pipelines Company. Aramco sold 49% of the shares in each unit to consortiums led by EIG Global Energy Partners LLC and BlackRock Inc., respectively. These investors used bridge loans from banks to fund those transactions. 

In order to generate cash to repay the bank loans, the EIG and BlackRock consortiums created two special purpose vehicles: EIG Pearl Holdings and GreenSaif Pipelines Bidco, both registered at the same Luxembourg address. These SPVs then sold bonds, which, since they had no direct links to the fossil-fuel industry, ended up getting an above-average score in a widely-used JPMorgan Chase & Co. sustainability screening based on third-party ESG scores. 

From there, the bonds made their way into JPMorgan’s ESG indexes, which are cumulatively tracked by about $40 billion of assets under management. Investors in the SPV bonds include funds managed by UBS Group AG, Legal & General Investment Management and the investment arm of HSBC Holdings Plc.

Tooze at Substack "recommends" Jeremy Ney's American Inequality: Harvard, MIT and "privacy @google". And "Brooklyn" of course

Privacy at google is an oxymoron, and so is equality. 

“For a “big green state” to be conceivable, we have to imagine not just different instruments of policy and a greater degree of state involvement, we have to imagine a shift in the balance of class power.” https://t.co/91cC3oLn8S

— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) June 17, 2023

A shift of class power to whom?

Finally, if it is abstract and ahistorical to ignore this wider agenda behind the IRA that makes it more than merely the continuation of derisking in another guise, it is abstract and ahistorical also to ignore the remarkable fusion within the Biden administration between economic policy and the national security state. As Grey Anderson points out in a brilliant contribution in Sidecar, it is a sign of the times that the programmatic statement on economic policy of the Biden administration should be made by the National Security Advisor. Meanwhile, the Treasury Secretary gives speeches on economic relations with China, framed by the question of whether the two countries can avoid war. And the connection runs all the way down the hierarchy. Last week Jigar Shah, of the Department of Energy, tweeted out an image of Rosie the Riveter framed by wind turbines, with an appeal for Americans of today to emulate the greatest generation, who in a matter of a few short years turned American from a military non-valeur into the greatest superpower the world has ever seen.

Shah was tweeting the cover article in The New Republic by Bill McKibben, from September 2016 

"A World at War: We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII."

Rosie is drawn like a character out of PRC propaganda, and her face is Asian. It's hard to say if the illustrator was editorializing, or if he's just more familiar with Asian graphics. And Tooze doesn't mention or link to McKibben's piece. 

Streeck's reply to Tooze in the LRB

Adam Tooze’s outpouring is material for a future anatomy of the class rhetoric of faux cosmopolitanism as it flourishes among a soul-searching urban-academic middle class in the post-Brexit moment (LRB, 5 January). Those of us who do not meet the demanding standards of universalist utopianism can find solace in the fact that when it comes to earthly matters, even the inhabitants of the moral high ground have in the past shown a sense of healthy pragmatism, for example by abstaining from calling for Britain to join the European Monetary Union or the Dublin or Schengen agreements, making one suspect that they, too, distinguish between different institutional constructions of Europeanism or globalism, and between different national needs and interests in relation to them.

My comment on Tooze's post

"we have to imagine a shift in the balance of class power". Yes, a massive increase in the power of technocratic leadership. That has nothing to do with democracy, which is why China leads the green transition.

The EU was designed by an elite playing lip service to democracy while feeding itself, liberals believing their own lies while the poor and the periphery suffer. The leaders of the PRC have no interest in democracy but they like stability, and they worry about the people they rule. Honest realism carries a moral weight; idealism and hypocrisy not so much. 

The Tactical Notebook, a Substack page, "recommended" by Adam Tooze. 

The author's bio at the Modern War Institute at West Point

Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson is an historian who studies innovation in contemporary land forces and the way that the armies of the last two centuries have dealt with the challenges and opportunities of radical change. His books on this subject include Stormtroop Tactics, On Artillery, On Armor, and (with John English) the second edition of On Infantry. Dr. Gudmundsson is also the author of a pair of books about the British Expeditionary Force of the First World War, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 4: Logistics, and the concept paper Operational Maneuver from the Sea. His most recent major article, “The Education of the Enlightened Soldier,” is the first in a planned series on the use of the applicatory method in professional military education.

“The Education of the Enlightened Soldier”

The whole page is a fucking disaster.

repeats, as always.

And here's some tasteful but sophisticated mainstream left-liberalism from 1965, that's no longer mainstream, tasteful, or left-liberal

A long now deleted comment at Zachary Carter's review of DeLong's book (mentioned previously)  We had a back and forth, and at the end of my last comment I said I was going to close my paid account because I didn't want to troll him. And then he deleted everything.

From your review in Dissent 

"For India, one price of expanded trade with the British Isles was the deliberate deindustrialization of the Indian economy. India ceased to manufacture its own textiles, and instead provided raw materials to Britain, which handled the factory work. Under the traditional free trade theory of comparative advantage, this process should have maximized the wealth of both countries."

The last sentence shouldn't have made it past the editor. There is no free trade between masters and subjects.  Everything Delong celebrates is founded of mountains of the dead among Europe's subject peoples. You could have at least mentioned the famines.

"DeLong’s story of hegemony as a driver of stability and growth is extremely compelling—but it’s also a nice way of saying that imperialism isn’t so bad when it works. The neoliberalization of the world that began in the late 1970s not only undermined U.S. fiscal policy management, it decimated America’s effectiveness as an international economic hegemon—a fact that is obscured by the expansion of American military operations over the same period."

Any historian of the of the violence of the post war era is left to shrug.

Korea. It's been called genocide. [the links are repeats]

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.

Cambodia 

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed — not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.

...To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history. 

Tooze in the FT is at least somewhat better

DeLong’s version of the 20th century is more parochial than either of those. [books by Hobsbawm and Milanovic] It is centred on the political battles that raged around the growth regime of modern American capitalism and continue to shape policy debate in governments and central banks today. This is, you might say, the in-house, post-Clintonian history of the 20th century....

Slouching Towards Utopia reads less like a history than a richly decked out time capsule, a nostalgic throwback... 

The so called serious American intellectual left—the class that used to scorn the NYT-has become more provincial than it was 40 years ago.  DeLong is an arch nationalist "A rising not a setting sun" was his tagline. He was famous for his attacks on the left, his fondness for Gregory Clark's racial Darwinism, and encomiums for war criminals  

"R.I.P. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

...She was a good friend to my grandfather Earl. She was an American and a world patriot: her counsel--even at its most boneheaded--was always devoted to advancing the security of the United States and the cause of liberty and prosperity around the world."

Jeane Kirkpatrick was not interested in liberty and prosperity around the world. She defended American power.

He replied. Substack forwards comments. I have the email.

You have based this comment on a 180 degree misunderstanding of that line. The entire point is that the traditional theory is wrong. 

He's referring to the line about comparative advantage, as if I were defending it.

I replied saying that most people still assume it's a bad idea to keep all your eggs in one basket, and that systems engineers—of mechanical systems not intellectual ones (the existence of "financial engineers" builds on the same fantasy)—know that efficiency and stability operate in inverse proportion, and that redundancy is key to long term survival, but that even if the logic of comparative advantage made sense it was irrelevant here, because there is no free trade between masters and subjects.

His reply, again from the email

If you'd prefer to say "specialization" rather than "free trade," fine. And you're right, I could have mentioned the famines. There were a lot of them with different causes, and I decided to stick to a simple critique of de-industrialization for brevity's sake, assuming that my audience was familiar with the general outline of British imperial history.

At this point I lost it. Again this is approximate.

I don't know what to say about discussions of the inequality that results from you breaking into my home, killing my father, raping my mother, taking everything we own and putting me and my siblings to work in your factory.  The history of European modernity is founded on European barbarism, mostly but not entirely elsewhere. The inequality that exists now is merely the result. And here we are today.

I added the transcript of Javier Blas, with Joe Weisenthal

Well, clearly the ability of Europe to tap the LNG market has really saved the day for Europe. If this had happened only 10, 15 years ago where the global LNG market was not nearly as developed as it is today. And the ability to reroute cargos was much lower, particularly on the spot market Europe would have had a big problem. And the dependency on Russia was much, much higher.

So the LNG market is offering a relief to Europe in so many ways. One of the things that we are seeing that to me is very interesting is Europe at the moment is outbidding everyone else on the market, taking the LNG. That's one of the reasons we have these very high prices in the market. I mean, on fundamentals as Alex was pointing out, we should not probably have 200 euros per megahour of gas because the inventories are building in the right direction and we should have enough gas if Putin was to keep the flows. But obviously we need to continue outbidding the whole market for LNG supplies.

And for that, we need to sustain very high prices in Europe for that to happen. What's happening there is that a number of countries that were starting to rely on the global LNG market for supplies, middle income and poor countries thinking the likes of Pakistan or Bangladesh, or even India... they're seen now that European nations and European utilities can pay much higher prices.

So they're not getting the cargos that they were expecting. Some of the cargos that would be going into Asia at the moment are rerouted into Europe. And we are seeing power supply problems in Bangladesh or Pakistan, which is affecting the textile industry. So in a way it may be a case where Europe avoids the blackouts that many of us have been talking, but only because the blackouts move somewhere else, where they cannot

really pay the price that Europe is paying for the LNG. And then the blackouts are happening in Pakistan or Bangladesh. And that global LNG market is allowing that arbitrage to happen. Without it, well, it will not be happening. And the blackouts would be happening in Europe because we will not be able to get enough gas

I added another comment that I didn't want to hang out just to troll him so I'd close my account in a day or two. I guess the snark was a bit much. 

Koppelman, then and now. [both SSRN]. His theory of religious exceptionalism has bitten him in the ass.

At Balkinization he sends us to the libertarian shitshow at Volokh

The First Amendment provides in pertinent part: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court read this provision narrowly, holding that burdens on religion do not in themselves create any presumptive right to exemption from generally applicable laws. However, the Court later explained in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah (1993), "the protections of the Free Exercise Clause pertain if the law at issue discriminates against some or all religious beliefs or regulates or prohibits conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons." Lukumi held that, although religion is entitled to no special privileges, it is protected from discrimination.

Since then, the Court has construed that protection with increasing breadth. It now embraces what has been called the "most-favored-nation" theory (hereinafter MFN), which holds that the denial of a religious exemption is presumptively unconstitutional if the state "treats some comparable secular activities more favorably." That made sense in the context in which it was originally formulated, but the theory has mutated.

"the theory has mutated." That's what they do. It's how language works. And that's the reason for not opening the fucking door. 

And again the stupidity of saying that SCOTUS tells us what the Constitution says, rather than that it defines the legal definition for the present. Decisions are a matter of law not truth.  To say that the court "later explained" makes it seem like the court is consistent and that decisions are additive, and result are cumulative.  You have to take politics seriously to take law seriously.  This shit is why he has a tag. The history is there.

Lawyers who read too much philosophy: Milhiser should know better; Feder, of Jones Day, sat happily on a stage with Gorsuch  

Milhiser: "In retrospect, it was the eight day of law school, when I learned about the “reasonable person” test, when I started to realize how much of law is fake"

The only response:

"Former friends have recounted that Loughner had a fixation for grammar and words, saying that he challenged Giffords at a previous public meeting with the impenetrable question: 'What is government if words have no meaning?'"

Law is "fake" because words have only the meanings we agree on as a community. Money is fake too.

Well it is a vertiginous realization isn’t it? That money is not backed by “anything.” I’ve shocked year after year of smart college students by forcing them to face that reality. There are always a significant minority who cling to some version of the gold standard. They actually do believe that when you “take the note to the central bank,” you will get “something” in exchange. It’s not an easy idea to give up. It’s not unlike the vertiginous feeling that is engendered by realizing that language is not “backed” by anything. We are familiar with solutions to this problem. Create a physical object that can be used as a reference for a word, a definition, a standard, etc.

“For Fukuyama it is this double demonstration, of the magnetism of representative institutions and of competitive markets, that has sealed the victory of liberal capitalism.”

One of the images above is an image of stability. The other illustrates the quote. Markets are only as liberal as the people who control them. The end of history is the end of time.

It would be simpler if Fukuyama tried to make the case that what's ended for now is the fantasy of the politics of utopia. But that would require him to face those who would argue that this is a return of history as the word is understood by historians as opposed to millenarians, to secularism and materialism as practiced, and the fading of the authority of philosophy as such. But his definition of liberalism is founded on ideas, to which acts are made to fit. Idealists are first idealists about themselves. And Anderson can't call bullshit on fantasies without calling bullshit on his own.

  

It still amazes me how so much self-defined "intellectual" debate reduces to theology, the relations of ideas coded as words woven into a web that's then labeled, without a wink or a smile, "True Map of the World".  It annoyed me when Arendt referred to "authority","power", "force",  "strength", as if they were elements in the periodic table. And Shklar refers to "radical" in the same way.

Tooze says Anderson's essay was a revelation. I don't fucking understand these people. His review works best as philology, but that's now it was intended. A Zone of Engagement includes a piece on Marshall Berman, another romantic liberal individualist. This shit is tiresome.

Tooze

One of humanity’s recurring hopes has been that through history we might escape war. Since World War II Western Europe in particular has been invested in the idea of consigning war to the past. That is a hope that is based not just on a humanitarian impulse, but also on the sense that the basic questions of international politics were resolved and that for the settlement of whatever remained, the modern instruments of war – most notably nuclear weapons – were likely counterproductive. The era of military history was thus consigned to an earlier developmental phase.

He quotes Hochuli and Hoare’s The End of the End of History 

In Hegel’s view, the specific historic gain of the French Revolution was to reveal the universal character of human freedom, that is, the claim that freedom is in fact part of being human. Freedom was thus not merely an abstract philosophical proposition, but a political proposition that could be realized in concrete institutions. This was Hegel’s original meaning of the End of History – that whatever followed the French Revolution had to be based on the universal claims of human freedom. This in turn meant that no social or political order could ever be fully stable. The significance of this insight is that freedom cannot be limited or appended to one specific regime or order, as it is precisely the expansiveness and restlessness of human freedom that exceeds any one specific set of political and social institutions.

I've said it for 40 years: modern philosophy is the product of theologians struggling to come to terms with the absence of god, and therefore of purpose. And Nietzsche's anti-Christianity is predicated on the existence of what it struggles to oppose: Nietzsche's is a slave mentality in rebellion against itself. It's all so boring. 

I wrote somewhere recently that post-humanism describes the situation in Europe for the past 2000 years. Hegel's "insight" is important only in marking the fading of Christian teleology.

The end of history was the end of the age of Europeans fighting with each other; history returned when they began fighting each other again. It only makes sense that Hochuli and Hoare (and Cunliffe) would be useless on Israel. Liberals throw up their hands and walk away when conflicts make them uncomfortable. They lose the ability to analyze. There's more, but it's not worth it. He's a fan of Timothy Brennan. And I've mocked Lee Fang enough that he almost deserves his own tag.

Gordon Brown is calling for a new Nuremberg-style trial for Putin. Liberalism does make nihilism attractive.

Intellegenter and Idealisticer

"How Adam Tooze beat Chapo Frat House"  How a professor at Columbia "supplanted" the son of a New Yorker editor and his crew. Published in New York Magazine. 

“Is there a word for members of the Adam Tooze fandom,” wondered journalist Brendan O’Connor on Twitter last fall. What to call them? Tooze Boys, Tooze Bros, Tooze Hounds, Tooze Heads, Tooze Dudes, Toozers. (“Tooze Bro,” in my experience, seems to come up most often in relation to online fans, “Tooze Boy” in relation to students. I have heard, secondhand, of a complaint that everyone says “Tooze Bros” and no one says “History Boys.”) The name is contentious, the appeal inarguable. “For the Tooze Bros, what Adam does is he validates the little-boy interest in big machines and great men playing Risk while also embracing all the left-wing, anti-imperial, 21st-century politics we’re supposed to have,” said Ethan Winter, an analyst at the think tank Data for Progress. “That’s very fun.”

The media contingent of Tooze's fan base are readers who relish a chance to "feel marginally superior to Matt Yglesias," as journalist Alex Pareene put it.

The need to be fans and the need to have them. The need to be popular. The desperate need to belong.

In the seven years that he has been tweeting “intensively,” Tooze believes he has managed to avoid significantly offending anyone. For him, the app has provided a cordial and sustaining intellectual community. “Those are my peeps,” he said. Twitter has “become far more important for me than academic seminars.” Lately, he said, the writing he enjoys most is “the short tempos” — the articles, newsletters, and other commentary. He suspects the climate book he is working on now will be the last he writes for some time. Since the beginning of 2022, Tooze has published eight articles in The New Statesman, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian; 40 editions of Chartbook (not including link roundups); and 1,500 tweets. 

Written by a woman; that's how the irony creeps in, small and not enough. It's a puff piece. It it were written by a man it would be unbearable. She mentions his wife's business but not his role as a tour guide. Fans who could afford it would love to be led around Tuscany or Provence by their hero.

The shrinks and the house in the Bahamas are a nice touch. 

The best response to Mearsheimer I've read is the comment by a non-white non-American that his loudest critics have never gotten over his arguments about the Israel lobby.

Tooze in the New Statesman: "John Mearsheimer and the dark origins of realism"

Realism is as old as politics. "Realism” is the bastard child of political pragmatism and liberal idealism, invented by ideological optimists who wanted to rule the world and congratulate themselves on their willingness to bear the burden. It's fundamentally European and Christian. Remember that Mearsheimer is a Kantian: it was immoral to ally with Stalin against Hitler. The pic above is at the top of the article, chosen as an image of fear and earnest moral concern. In defense of what?

The USSR post-war was not expansionist. Its policy was defensive. It was realist to see the cold war as predictable but stupid, and that backing dictators and empire to protect against democracy and maintain your own power would only result in a more popular dictatorship opposing you. Realism is knowing that power corrupts, that people are weak, foolish, vain, and easily manipulated. 

“You never beat us on the battlefield.”  “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

The tragedy is that in the end, Nike won the war. That was predictable too.

Some realism from Raquel Welch

Sending girls like me to Vietnam to entertain the troops is like teasing a caged lion with a piece of raw meat,’ she said. ‘I’m not criticizing our boys’ thoughts or feelings one bit, I’m just telling you that I know what is going through their minds. There they are, fighting an aimless war in a foreign land where they aren’t wanted. . . . Deep down inside, I think it would be best if stars like me stayed home and the Government sent off troupes of prostitutes instead.

It's hard to find the source of the quote now. I remember hearing it as a 7 year old; my father, spitting it out in a rage. The original source in footnote is Mark Jury, The Vietnam Photo Book. I think my parents had a copy. I remember looking at the photographs of prostitutes.

Blyth

Long Thread Alert: As ever, Adam does a great job dissecting the Mearsheimer 'the west is at fault' critique.

But I think he misses one point. 

It's not just a question of agency and responsibility being dissolved by structural forces. Its also about the possibilities each perspective opens and closes. If we take Mearsheimer's line that its the West's fault...

Then there are things we can do to end this. Namely, do NATO and the EU differently = problem solved. Personally, I think this is wrong, but go with the argument...

Now, if we take the other perspective, that this a 19th Century blood and soil crusade by an unhinged dictator...

then we can't end this by our actions...Instead, the result has to be escalation with no clear exit for any side.

Ironically then, Mearsheimer's structuralism gives us the possibility of ending this, while the (probably) more accurate view contains no such path. Just sayin...

The need to moralize, in otherwise intelligent people, amazes me.  "Let us recount the sequence of events."

Tooze doubles as a well-paid tour guide for the 10%, and now he's married to his boss. Blyth makes offhand comments about the fate of his "hedge-fund friends", because he has them. Milanovic likes dining alone in our "utopia with a twist..." with "stains of human passions... lost amid the chromium gleam.". Nir Rosen thinks "some of you people take this war too personally." And all of my money, what's left of it, for now is in oil and gas. 

"Crypto and the politics of money", Tooze and Morozov 

EM: The whole new field of “cryptoeconomics” seems to ignore the macro-level and just focuses on getting the Homo Economicus to behave through better-designed incentives… If one were to write an intellectual history of cryptoeconomics, it’s going to be almost exclusively dominated by mechanism/market design and game theory, its non-existent macro-economics stuck in denial somewhere between the extremes (all on the far-right) of someone like Murray Rothbard and his libertarian opponents who preach Free Banking. This ignorance of the macrofinancial is premised on what seem like wrong-headed ideas about the nature of fiat money and it not being “backed” by anything… Could you briefly tell us why in your opinion the standard crypto critique of fiat money makes a mistake in ignoring the ways in which the structures of macrofinance actually do back, say, the US dollar?

AT: Well it is a vertiginous realization isn’t it? That money is not backed by “anything.” I’ve shocked year after year of smart college students by forcing them to face that reality. There are always a significant minority who cling to some version of the gold standard. They actually do believe that when you “take the note to the central bank,” you will get “something” in exchange. It’s not an easy idea to give up. It’s not unlike the vertiginous feeling that is engendered by realizing that language is not “backed” by anything. We are familiar with solutions to this problem. Create a physical object that can be used as a reference for a word, a definition, a standard, etc.

I pasted the above a week ago and set it aside. It made me laugh. I had that "vertiginous feeling" a long, time ago, but I wanted to put this to good use.

Leiter just posted "Realism About Precedent" to SSRN 

In jurisdictions with a doctrine of precedent (or stare decisis), later courts are supposed to be bound by the decisions (the ratio or holding) of earlier courts, either those above them in a chain of authority (vertical precedent) or their own earlier decisions (horizontal precedent, where the later incarnation of the same court usually retains the option of overruling its earlier decision). The later court, in either the vertical or horizontal cases, is bound only by those decisions which are “on point” or “the same in relevant respects” to the case currently before the court. Since cases are never identical in all particulars, this always requires figuring out which general categories that subsume the particulars of different cases are the relevant ones: I will call this “relevant similarity” in what follows. Relevant similarity is typically assessed in light of either the reasons the earlier court actually gave for the decision or the reasons that can be imputed to the earlier court based on the legal decision that court reached. Analogical reasoning figures crucially in ascertaining whether an earlier case that might be precedent is, in fact, “relevantly similar.” Indeed, there is no doctrine of precedent without analogical reasoning, since in any jurisdiction with a doctrine of stare decisis, any earlier decision by a court is a possible precedent for a later court considering the same legal question, and any earlier decision considering the same legal question is potentially distinguishable as involving facts that are not “relevantly similar.” Uncontroversial judgments of relevant similarity deal with most of the former cases. 

Leiter pretends to be an observer, not a player; he thinks his arguments are "backed" by something more than pedantry. Using his own definition, trial lawyers are the only legal realists. 

My only real comment on Morozov is from 2013, but his name's come up a few times. I'll give him a tag

Brexit

Guardian

There’s a lady I’ve been thinking about for the past few days, even though we’ve never met. She’s the central character in a true story told by the Europe expert Anand Menon. He was in Newcastle just before the referendum to debate the impact of Britain leaving the EU. Invoking the gods of economics, the King’s College London professor invited the audience to imagine the likely plunge in the UK’s GDP. Back yelled the woman: “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.”

Barrons

Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on servicing oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the U.K. is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.

From my twitter days

Adam Tooze in FP : In a little-noticed speech this week, China permanently changed the global fight against climate change. 

“China will scale up its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions by adopting more vigorous policies and measures. We aim to have [carbon dioxide] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.” 

Xi Jinping’s speech via video link to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22 was not widely trailed in advance. But with those two short sentences China’s leader may have redefined the future prospects for humanity. 

That may sound like hyperbole, but in the world of climate politics it is hard to exaggerate China’s centrality. Thanks to the gigantic surge in economic growth since 2000 and its reliance on coal-fired electricity generation, China is now by far the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. At about 28 percent of the global total, the carbon dioxide produced in China (as opposed to that consumed in the form of Chinese exports) is about as much as that produced by the United States, European Union, and India combined. Per capita, its emissions are now greater than those of the EU if we count carbon dioxide emissions on a production rather than a consumption basis. 

Global warming is produced not by the annual flows of carbon but by the stocks that have accumulated over time in the Earth’s atmosphere. Allowing an equal ration for every person on the planet, it remains the case that the historic responsibility for excessive carbon accumulation lies overwhelmingly with the United States and Europe. Still today China’s emissions per capita are less than half those of the United States. But as far as future emissions are concerned, everything hinges on China. As concerned as Europeans and Americans may be with climate policy, they are essentially bystanders in a future determined by the decisions made by the large, rapidly growing Asian economies, with China far in the lead. China’s rapid rebound from the COVID-19 shock only reinforces that point. With his terse remarks, Xi has mapped out a large part of the future path ahead.

Bertram again.

I know you’ve all been waiting expectantly …. My book Do States Have the Right to Exclude Immigrants? is published in the UK today by Polity Press (those of you in North America will have to wait until Wiley publish it in July). The book challenges the assumption that lies behind most debates on immigration, namely that states have a discretion to do pretty much as they like and may set their policy according to the interests of their own citizens.

The book has three chapters....

The first commenter nails it. “This sounds like a job for InnatelySolomonicBourgeoisMan.”

one repeat among others: Bertram on Wolfgang Streeck.

Compare, now, Varoufakis on Italy.

Had President Mattarella refused Mr Salvini the post of Interior Minister, on the basis that he rejects such a monstrous project, I would be compelled to support him. But, no, Mr Mattarella had no such qualms. Not even for a moment did he consider vetoing the formation of a 5S-Lega government on the basis that there is no place in a European country for scenes involving security forces rounding up hundreds of thousands of people, caging them, and forcing them into trains, buses and ferries before expelling them goodness knows where.

No, Mr Mattarella vetoed the formation of a government backed by an absolute majority of lawmakers for another reason: His disapproval of the Finance Minister designate. And what was this disapproval based on? The fact that the said gentleman, while fully qualified for the job, and despite his declaration that he would abide by the EU’s eurozone rules, has in the past expressed doubts about the eurozone’s architecture and has favoured a plan of euro exit just in case it is needed. It was as if President Mattarella were to declare that reasonableness in a prospective Finance Minister constitutes grounds for his or her exclusion from the post! 

Barrons: Italy Without the Euro Would Not Be Argentina or Turkey—It Would Be the U.K.

Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on servicing oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the U.K. is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.

Venezuelan refugees are a bigger and bigger issue in Colombia and elsewhere. Migrants from Zimbabwe are threatened in South Africa. I've heard nothing, ever, from Bertram and his ilk about the rights of Palestinian refugees, long term residents in Lebanon and Jordan, or about Syrian refugees in those states now. Bangladesh is struggling with the Rohingya. Oxbridge, or European, technocratic universalism is a form of exceptionalism.

Linked in the repeat above, Adam Tooze reviews Streeck's How Will Capitalism End? in the LRB

The weird geometry of Streeck’s Staatsvolk-Marktvolk juxtaposition points to an inconsistency at the heart of his agenda. When Streeck says he wants to put society in control he can expect general agreement. This, indeed, is pure Habermas, reasserting the lifeworld against the system. It is the boilerplate of social democracy. But the question it dodges is the all-important one: who or what is ‘the social’? The disagreement between Habermas and Streeck, put in Habermas’s terms, is whether to move up and forwards to a future cosmopolitan order, or down and backwards to the nation. But as Streeck himself asks when he has his critical sociology hat on, what about class divisions within the social, whether at the local, national or European level? In some of the best passages in How Will Capitalism End? Streeck explains that the distinction between ‘society’ and ‘economy’ that has structured the discipline of sociology, the dyad that made it possible to speak so confidently of putting ‘society’ in charge of the ‘economy’, was in fact an artefact of the peculiar class balance of the 1950s and 1960s. Streeck’s entire narrative rests on the claim that this class balance was ruptured in the 1970s. Thatcher let the cat out of the bag with her declaration that ‘there is no such thing’ as society, just ‘individual men and women and … families’. To which the response of critical theory should not be a pantomimic ‘Oh yes there is and it should be in charge,’ but to ask what configuration of social forces made it possible for Thatcher to make that claim and how might it be reversed.

Sebald. The inability to mourn, to be fully human. Streeck is trying to describe, hoping for, a normal Germany, to match Greece, Italy et al.  Tooze promotes a crap universalism.

Adam Tooze "holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute...."

Travel Partnership

New York is home, but once you are bitten the Wanderlust never dies, and Adam is a regular guide on historical and culinary tours in Europe organized by the exclusive tour operator Conley & Silvers. Our featured tour in 2017 is Wine Roads and War Stories – a luxurious trip through Champagne, Alsace and Burgundy. Plans for the future include Switzerland and the Italian lakes and historic Spain.

"The Hamptons is not a defensible position... Very hard to defend a low-lying beach. Eventually people will come for you."

Tooze deleted the travel page and then later changed it to link to a post mentioning the trip. archive.org

More from Blyth.

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The first paragraph of Streeck's reply. Same link as above; scroll down. 

Adam Tooze’s outpouring is material for a future anatomy of the class rhetoric of faux cosmopolitanism as it flourishes among a soul-searching urban-academic middle class in the post-Brexit moment (LRB, 5 January). Those of us who do not meet the demanding standards of universalist utopianism can find solace in the fact that when it comes to earthly matters, even the inhabitants of the moral high ground have in the past shown a sense of healthy pragmatism, for example by abstaining from calling for Britain to join the European Monetary Union or the Dublin or Schengen agreements, making one suspect that they, too, distinguish between different institutional constructions of Europeanism or globalism, and between different national needs and interests in relation to them.

The first paragraph of Trump and the Trumpists, by Wolfgang Streeck

Strange personalities arise in the cracks of disintegrating institutions. They are often marked by extravagant dress, inflated rhetoric, and a show of sexual power. The first Trumper of the postwar era was the Danish tax rebel, Mogens Glistrup, the founder of the nationalist Progress Party, who, having put his principles into practice, went to prison for tax evasion. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Boris Johnson in England are hairstyle Trumpers. Pim Fortuyn and Jörg Haider were both dandies. They died in their finery. Beppe Grillo, Nigel Farage, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, are each one third of a full Trump.

At CT, commenter "Engels" quotes Streeck

Nations are imagined communities. Nation building entailed the creation of formal institutions extending previously informal, communal bonds of solidarity to all co-nationals. Globalization favors the equal access of everyone to worldwide markets. It has no use for national citizenship or national citizens. Another moral system is at work. Cultural reeducation is required to erase traditional solidarity and replace it with a morality of equal access and equal opportunity regardless of status (such as “race, creed, and national origin”). Justice is served as soon as market access is equalized. The replacement of class solidarity by status rights demands flexible adjustment to changing market conditions. The morality of marketization entails a categoric delegitimization of distinctions. Empathy and benevolence become moral duties with respect to everyone, rather than one’s neighbor. Social rights are displaced by civil rights, a process which, as Hannah Arendt saw clearly in 1948, inevitably dilutes to near-invisibility any system of effective social protection.

For the domestic politics of a nation-state undergoing neoliberal redefinition, this has profound consequences. Classes struggling over the correction of markets give way to status groups struggling over access to them. At issue are not the terms of exchange and cooperation between conflicting class interests, or the limits of exploitation of one class by another, but status groups with established market access excluding status groups without it from competition. Political morality lies in opening up competition by removing barriers to entry, not in containing it through institutionalized limits to commodification. For groups that already have market access, this means a moral duty, in the name of equality, to allow themselves to be challenged by newcomers, whoever they may be—fellow citizens, immigrants, or residents of other countries—at the risk of being outcompeted and having their lives disrupted as a result. ...

Bertram replies

are you commending that Streeck piece to us or just noting it? I had thought of posting something here about it. Streeck imagines the American working class, or rather “the silenced majority of a disorganized class” in a highly racialized way. He only sees the whites. In fact this is quite explicit in the same paragraph, because they are the ones “deprived of an accessible identity”, (unlike black American members of the working class). One might say that this is all purely descriptive, but to my mind the piece oozes solidaristic compassion with a racially-typed group. So of course the question arises, why feel that towards this particular group but then explicitly sneer at liberal concern for other groups? I’m sure Streeck doesn’t think of himself as racist, but his social typology, transferred across from his writings on Germany, counterposes a national working class with the immigrant other. That’s already problematic enough to my mind, but in the context of the US it is disastrous.

Engels responding to another commenter

I’m not sure I understand exactly what Streeck is saying in the statement about ‘civil rights’ vs ‘social rights’

Teh ‘pedia: 

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one’s ability to participate in the civil and political life of the society and state without discrimination or repression.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_and_political_rights

Economic, social and cultural rights are socio-economic human rights, such as the right to education, right to housing, right to adequate standard of living, right to health and the right to science and culture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic,_social_and_cultural_rights

Bertram goes so far as to disemvowel a comment that accuses him of intellectual dishonesty in his response to an obvious point. Someone else links a critical review of Steeck's recent book by Adam Tooze in the LRB

Teh ‘pedia, but not Immanuel Kant. So much has been lost.

The inability to think beyond the individual: the British model of "humanism", technocratic Benthamism. White liberals feel contempt for poor white trash and pity for minorities, but both are objects of concern from above. Poor and lower middle class whites sense the difference, see themselves shut out, as Palestinians do by the the earnest, guilty and thus self-regarding concern of otherwise anti-Semitic whites for the new Jewish state.

Objectivity is a claim to authority by those who already have power.  The powerful choose who and what deserves support, secure in their own bourgeois moralism. "It is quite obvious" they say, "that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism."

Streeck. "Social rights are displaced by civil rights, a process which, as Hannah Arendt saw clearly in 1948, inevitably dilutes to near-invisibility any system of effective social protection."

Bertram, "Engels" et al. have no understanding of social rights because they have no understanding the social.

The end of the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism.

How great our calamity actually is can be gauged from the fact that to achieve even so simple a task as the prevention of murder, we are forced to doubt the unchallenged existence of the basic tenets of morality upon which the whole structure of our life rests and which none of the great revolutionaries, from Robespierre to Lenin, ever seriously questioned. We can no longer believe with Lenin that “people will gradually become accustomed to the observance of the elementary rules of social life that have been . . repeated for thousands of years” (State and Revolution) and we must therefore try for what Burke’s great common sense deemed impossible: “new discoveries . . . in morality . . . or in the ideas of liberty” (Reflections on the Revolution in France). The trouble is that if we do not attempt this, there are plenty of indications that the mob, which more than once during the last fifty years has proved its superior ability to read the signs of the times, will take over and destroy where we were unable to produce. For the first disastrous result of man’s coming of age is that modern man has come to resent everything given, even his own existence – to resent the very fact that he is not the creator of the universe and himself. In this fundamental resentment, he refuses to see rhyme or reason in the given world. In his resentment of all laws merely given to him, he proclaims openly that everything is permitted and believes secretly that everything is possible. And since he knows that he is a law-creating being, and that his task, according to all standards of past history, is “superhuman,” he resents even his nihilistic convictions, as though they were forced upon him by some cruel joke of the devil. 

The alternative to this resentment, which is the psychological basis of contemporary nihilism, would be a fundamental gratitude for the few elementary things that indeed are invariably given us, such as life itself, the existence of man and the world. Neo-humanists, in their understandable yearning for the stable world of the past when law and order were given entities, and in their vain efforts to re-establish such stability by making man the measure of all things human, have confused the issue, which is the choice between resentment and gratitude as basic possible modern attitudes, and increased the fear of Man, this most unknown and most unpredictable being on earth. Generally speaking, such gratitude expects nothing except – in the worlds of Faulkner – one ’s “own one anonymous chance to perform something passionate and brave and austere not just in but into man’s enduring chronicle . . . in gratitude for the gift of time in it.” In the sphere of politics, gratitude emphasizes that we are not alone in the world. We can reconcile ourselves to the variety of mankind, to the differences between human beings – which are frightening precisely because of the essential equality of rights of all men and our consequent responsibility for all deeds and misdeeds committed by people different from ourselves – only through insight into the tremendous bliss that man was created with the power of procreation, that not a single man but Men inhabit the earth.

Only a consciously planned beginning of history, only a consciously devised new polity, will eventually be able to reintegrate those who in ever increasing numbers are being expelled from humanity and severed from the human condition. The recognition of the crime against humanity will, by itself, achieve neither liberty nor justice, for these are the concern of the daily strife of all citizens: it can only secure the participation of all men in the strife. The concept of human rights can again be meaningful only if they are redefined as a right to the human condition itself, which depends upon belonging to some human community, the right never to be dependent upon some inborn human dignity which ipso facto,  aside from its guarantee by fellow-men not only does not must but is the last and possibly most arrogant myth we have invented in our long history. The Rights of Man can be implemented only if they become the pre-political foundation of a new polity, the pre-legal basis of a new legal structure, the, so to speak, pre-historical fundament from which the history of mankind will derive its essential meaning in much the same way Western civilization did from its own fundamental origin myths.

In the meantime, it may have been useful to find the origin, and to contemplate the forms, of those new movements which pretend to have discovered the solution to our problems, and whose fantastic claims to having founded thousand-year empires and Messianic ages are believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, because they respond, albeit in a radically destructive way, to the terrible challenge of the century. This, certainly, cannot establish a new law on earth, but it is one way toward a new form of universal solidarity.

For those who were expelled from humanity and from human history and thereby deprived of their human condition need the solidarity of all men to assure them of their rightful place in “man’s enduring chronicle.” At least we can cry out to each one of those who rightly is in despair: “Do thyself no harm; for we are all here.” (Acts, 16:28)

addendum