This is what life is like in Venezuela when the lights go out

On March 15, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

CARACAS — If you’ve ever been inconvenienced by a power outage, imagine living in a complete blackout amid a food shortage, a medicine shortage, and a political power struggle that has pitted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s embattled government against the U.S.-backed opposition party.

That’s what many Venezuelans have been facing every evening since March 7, when a massive blackout plunged most of the country into darkness. And while power has has been almost fully restored, according to the country’s communications minister, Venezuelans are still coming to terms with a historic outage that left millions of people in the dark.

Some people went without electricity for more than 96 hours. Schools were closed, hospitals struggled to keep patients alive, and basic necessities like clean water and fresh food became even harder to come by.

“I handed out the food so it wouldn’t go to waste,” Luisa Changir, a 60-year-old Caracas resident, told VICE News on Monday. “Water is pumped with electricity, so we don’t have any now.”

Changir is a diabetic, and being without power also meant having to use insulin that had not been properly refrigerated.

“Things are looking quite bleak for us here,” she said.

Maduro’s government said a failure of the automatic control system at the Guri hydroelectric plant — the country’s main producer of electricity — was behind the power outage. He blamed the failure on his opponents, whom he accused of trying to “sabotage” him. But Guri’s facilities have long been overstretched, and blackouts are not new to Venezuela: In the state of Zulia, for example, people have been dealing with multiple daily power outages for more than a year.

“We don’t have any accurate information about when the service will return to normal,” Changir said.

Still, Maduro has reason to be worried if the blackouts continue. With his grip on power already threatened by an increasingly popular opposition candidate, prolonged national power outages could finally push the military, whose support is crucial to Maduro’s rule, against the embattled president.

This segment originally aired March 12, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

Argument preview: Justices to weigh allegations of racial discrimination in jury selection

On March 15, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

During jury selection, some potential jurors can be removed “for cause” – that is, when a judge believes that a juror cannot be impartial in deciding the case. The lawyers trying the case also have a certain number of “peremptory strikes,” which allow them to reject jurors without providing a reason. However, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that prosecutors cannot use their peremptory strikes to remove prospective jurors from the jury pool based only on the jurors’ race. Next week the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the case of a Mississippi death-row inmate who was convicted by a jury that included just one African-American juror. The inmate, Curtis Flowers, argues that the jury selection in his case violated the Constitution; in particular, he contends, the lower courts should have considered the lead prosecutor’s history of racially motivated strikes.

The 2010 trial at the heart of the Supreme Court proceedings was the sixth time that Flowers – who is African American – had been tried for the 1996 murders of four people in a Mississippi furniture store. The local district attorney, Doug Evans, served as the lead prosecutor at all six of the trials.

At each of his first two trials, Flowers faced only a single murder charge. Evans used his peremptory strikes to eliminate all 10 potential African-American jurors. Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death, but both convictions were later reversed by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which found that Evans had engaged in intentional misconduct, such as introducing evidence of the other murders.

At his third trial, Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of all four victims. But the Mississippi Supreme Court also overturned those convictions. Evans had used all 15 of his peremptory strikes to remove African-American members of the jury pool, the state court ruled, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Batson.

When Flowers stood trial a fourth time, Evans used 11 peremptory strikes to remove potential African-American jurors, resulting in a jury with seven whites and five African-Americans. That jury deadlocked, as did the jury in Flowers’ fifth trial; Evans used five peremptory strikes in that trial, but there is no record of the race of the jurors whom he struck.

At Flowers’ sixth trial, six of the 26 potential jurors in the jury pool were African-American. Evans allowed the first one to be seated but then struck the next five prospective African-American jurors, resulting in a jury of 11 white jurors and just one African-American. Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death for all four murders.

After the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Flowers’ conviction and sentence, Flowers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in. The justices sent the case back for the state courts to take another look in light of their 2016 decision in Foster v. Chatman, holding that the use of peremptory strikes to remove potential African-American jurors, as reflected in prosecutors’ notes, was unconstitutional. On remand, the state court again upheld Flowers’ conviction and sentence. Flowers returned to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed last fall to take up his case.

In their briefs in the Supreme Court, Flowers and his supporters emphasize that Evans has a “lengthy and stark” record of striking African-American jurors. During his 25 years in the district attorney’s office, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund notes, Evans has “used peremptory challenges on African American jurors at 4.4 times the rate of white jurors.” And in his prosecutions of Flowers specifically, Flowers stresses, Evans used his peremptory challenges to strike virtually all the African-American jurors that he could. During the first four trials, he struck 36 African-American jurors; during the sixth trial, he allowed the first African-American juror to serve – no doubt, Flowers suggests, because Evans had learned from the previous trials, in which Flowers’ convictions had been reversed, and wanted to hide his true motives. But Evans then struck the remaining five, offering what Flowers characterizes as excuses for removing them.

What’s more, Flowers continues, Evans asked potential African-American jurors more questions than their white counterparts, presumably to look for possible bias: He asked the five potential African-American jurors whom he struck a total of 145 questions, while he asked the 11 white jurors who were seated on the jury a total of 12 questions. And Evans cited relationships with either Flowers’ family members or defense witnesses as reasons for striking African-American jurors, even though white jurors who were seated on the jury also knew family members or defense witnesses. Evans also “made no effort to follow up when white panelists disclosed facts or circumstances suggestive of bias,” Flowers says, but Evans “worked hard” to show that African-American jurors were biased because they had been sued over money owed to the business where the crime occurred, even though the lawsuits had been resolved long ago.

The Mississippi Supreme Court should have looked at all this evidence, Flowers contends. Instead, it regarded Evans’ track record of peremptory strikes as irrelevant and focused on whether Evans had offered a reason, unrelated to race, that “was neither directly contradicted by the record nor squarely applicable to a white juror he did not strike” – which, in the state court’s view, he had. But if you look at all the evidence, Flowers insists, keeping in mind Evans’ history, it’s clear that “race, once more, was the determining factor in both his questioning and his strikes.”

Flowers concedes that Evans’ history of discrimination does not, standing alone, show that Evans discriminated when he struck potential African-American jurors in Flowers’ sixth trial. But, Flowers adds, that history should definitely be considered when determining whether Evans’ explanations for those strikes “should be accepted as truthful or rejected as pretexts for discrimination.”

The state urges the justices to allow Flowers’ convictions and death sentence to stand. If Flowers were to win here, it argues, it would essentially mean the end of any peremptory challenges whenever a prosecutor has ever violated Batson in the past. But that can’t be right, the state asserts. When the Mississippi Supreme Court found that Evans had violated Batson during Flowers’ third trial, Flowers got a new trial. Flowers should not automatically be entitled to another new trial now based on that same violation, the state maintains. Instead, what matters is what happened in his sixth and most recent trial.

Of course, the state acknowledges, a prosecutor’s past can be considered if it is relevant – and the lower courts did consider it in this case. But, as the lower courts concluded, Evans had valid reasons, unrelated to race, for striking each of the five African-American jurors. For example, one juror worked with Flowers’ father and had been sued by the furniture store after the murders. Another juror worked with Flowers’ sister and raised doubts in her jury questionnaire about whether she would impose the death penalty. By contrast, none of the white jurors who were seated on the jury worked with any of Flowers’ family members, had been sued by the furniture store or expressed doubts about the death penalty.

Finally, the state stresses that appellate courts should defer to the trial court’s conclusions about whether a prosecutor’s decision to strike a juror was truly unrelated to race. Because the trial court is able to observe the prosecutor in person and is therefore in the best position to review the prosecutor’s credibility and demeanor, the state explains, appeals courts should only overrule the trial court’s conclusions when they are clearly wrong – which, the state argues, they were not in this case.

A decision is expected by summer.

This post was originally published at Howe on the Court.

***

Past cases linked to in this post:

Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986)
Foster v. Chatman, 136 S. Ct. 1737 (2016)

The post Argument preview: Justices to weigh allegations of racial discrimination in jury selection appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

Edward Abbey – Cowboys

On March 15, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXk6ectaLn4]

The Atlantic Daily: One Virus That Seems to Break All the Rules

On March 15, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

What We’re Following

The GOP-led Senate voted to block President Donald Trump’s national-emergency declaration—a mostly symbolic move, since Trump is all but certain to nullify it with a veto, the first of his presidency. For his part, Trump seemed to have put surprisingly little effort into the politicking of getting Republicans in the chamber to go along with his norm-breaking move. That wasn’t the only rebuke the Senate delivered to the White House this week: On Wednesday, it directed Trump to end American support of the Saudi Arabia–led war in Yemen, a resolution the president has also said he would veto should it pass the Democrat-led House.

A stunning new discovery upends the existing scientific understanding of viruses. Researchers have long presumed that all of a virus’s genes need to be present in a host cell for the former to reproduce. But one type of virus that infects legumes has its genes split among eight different capsules—and yet the virus can still reproduce, even if all of the gene segments don’t make it into a host. How is that possible? Though the virus’s genes could be stuck in a neighboring cell, the proteins made by those genes can travel back and forth to different cells to help with capsule-making and DNA-copying. The discovery could change how researchers approach less idiosyncratic viruses that afflict humans, such as influenza.

NASA could go to the moon next year. The agency has spent the past decade building the world’s most powerful rocket—the billion-dollar, 200,000-pound Space Launch System that started under the Obama administration—toward that goal. As the June 2020 target nears, NASA has a problem: The rocket isn’t ready. Officials at the agency are scrambling to find an alternative, and are considering a rocket from a commercial agency such as SpaceX. That the U.S. is willing to cast aside NASA’s own rocket for an alternative shows how eager the Trump administration is to preside over sending astronauts to the moon once again.

—Saahil Desai

Evening Reads

(Shutterstock)

To surreptitiously communicate with one another during class, some teens today aren’t passing paper notes, but are instead using the chat function in … Google Docs:

“Sometimes they’ll use the service’s live-chat function, which doesn’t open by default, and which many teachers don’t even know exists. Or they’ll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They’ll clone a teacher’s shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the casual viewer that they’re just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the Resolve button, and the entire thread will disappear.”

→ Read the rest

(SOT / Getty)

Much of the rest of the world has had a love affair with the hearty chickpea for millennia, but Americans are just catching on:

“The number of Americans who eschew meat or animal products altogether has held roughly steady in recent decades, but the amount of meat eaten by Americans overall has declined: From 2005 to 2014, red-meat consumption in America dropped by almost one-fifth. The concerns about health and the environment that drove that drop have only intensified in the five years since. Chickpeas are inexpensive and broadly available, and the global cuisines they commonly appear in are ones that de-emphasize meat in ways that Americans are starting to see as more valuable. People in the United States aren’t trying anything new. Instead, they’re regressing to the global mean after generations of profligate meat consumption that many now consider unwise.”

→ Read the rest

Urban Developments

(Wikimedia Commons)

Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie and Jessica Lee Martin share today’s top stories:

After 20 years of planning and more than $130 million, a proposed light-rail project in North Carolina to connect cities in the Research Triangle is all but dead, after Duke University pulled its support. Local city leaders are furious.

“Gropius’s aim was to introduce soul into the age of the machine. The Nazis’ was to introduce the machine into the soul.” Nearly 100 years later, here’s how the Bauhaus art school resisted Nazi Germany. It’s just one story in a special CityLab series exploring the school’s ongoing legacy.

Cities are desperate to tame the sidewalk chaos of the dockless electric-scooter industry. One start-up offers a hot, new, solar-powered solution: docks.

Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Subscribe to the CityLab Daily newsletter.

Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here.

Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email newsletters editor Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com

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The Boeing 737 Max 8: a Case Study in Uncreative Destruction

On March 15, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

On October 29, 2018, a Boeing 737 Max 8 belonging to Lion Air in Indonesia crashed into the Java Sea 12 minutes after take-off. All 189 passengers and crew members were killed instantly. It is extremely unusual for planes to suffer such accidents in clear weather after having reached their cruising altitude. Flight experts concluded that the pilots were not adequately trained in the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a robotics technology that lowers the nose of a plane to prevent a stall. Although there is no definitive judgement on exactly what happened, it appears to be a combination of inadequate training for the pilots and a malfunctioning MCAS.

On Sunday, another 737 Max 8 owned by Ethiopian Airlines had the same kind of accident resulting in the death of 157 passengers and crew members. In the aftermath of the tragedy, this has led to Australia, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom grounding the planes.

Looking at these two horrible tragedies that will make me think twice about getting on a plane again, I keep thinking of the title of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s classic “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. In essence, the use of MCAS is akin to an experimental, driverless car owned by Uber killing a pedestrian who was jaywalking on a dark road in Tempe, Arizona on May 18, 2018. The back-up driver, who was supposed to keep a sharp eye on the road to prevent such an accident, was watching reruns of the reality TV show “The Voice” at the time.

Despite such incidents (there have been 4 fatalities already), the bourgeoisie is determined to push ahead since the savings in labor costs will make up for the collateral damage of dead pedestrians. While I am skeptical that completely driverless cars will ever become the norm for Uber or Lyft, I can see people with little driving experience being paid minimum wage just to be a back-up to the computer system—as long as they don’t watch TV on the job. (Fat chance with such a boring job.)

This morning Donald Trump tweeted about the airline crash. “Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are….”

To begin with, the issue is not planes becoming too complex. It is rather that they are becoming too simple in terms of the amount of deskilling the airlines favor. As for the issue of replacing human labor with robots, he is all for it—reflecting the priorities of a ruling class bent on driving down wages.

In a US News and World Report article titled “The Race Is On After Feds Pave Way for Driverless Trucks”, we learn:

The most optimistic analysts project that trucks with empty cabs and a computer at the wheel will travel on U.S. highways in as little as two years with no escort or safety driver in sight now that the Trump administration has signaled its willingness to let tractor-trailers to become truly driverless.

The U.S. Department of Transportation this month announced that it will “no longer assume” that the driver of a commercial truck is human, and the agency will even “adapt the definitions of ‘driver’ and ‘operator’ to recognize that such terms do not refer exclusively to a human, but may in fact include an automated system.”

Already, automated truck developers such as Embark and TuSimple have made freight deliveries where the computer takes control on the highway, overseen by a human “safety driver.” Companies have also successfully tested “platooning,” where a truck with a human driver leads a convoy of as many as five computer-driven trucks following at close distance to reduce drag and save fuel.

The technologies promise big savings, with driverless trucks potentially slashing 40 percent from the cost of long-haul freight – much of it in saved labor expenses – and platooning cutting 10 to 15 percent in fuel costs.

If it is good for cars and trucks, why not airplanes?

Two years before the Indonesian 737 crash, the Guardian published an article titled “Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster” that it clearly anticipated. Interestingly enough, it was not even a Boeing plane that was discussed in the article. It was an Airbus 330 that had the same kind of systems as the Boeing NCAS. With pilots much more used to relying on automation than manual control of the plane, they failed to override the system that was forcing the plane to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009 at about 125 miles an hour. Everyone on board, 228 passengers and crew, died instantly.

While pilots flying to major airports will continue to be highly paid, the wages of those working for regional airlines has fallen drastically. In 2010, the Guardian reported on “A pilot’s life: exhausting hours for meagre wages”. They lead a decidedly unglamorous life:

Many are forced to fly half way around the country before they even begin work. Others sleep in trailers at the back of Los Angeles airport, in airline lounges across the country or even on the floors of their own planes. Some co-pilots, who typically take home about $20,000 (£12,500) a year, hold down second jobs to make ends meet.

All that will change when airplanes go the route of driverless cars as the NY Times reported last July in an article titled “Are You Ready to Fly Without a Human Pilot?” In the same fashion that Trump backed driverless trucks, the move toward pilotless planes seems inexorable:

Regulators are already taking steps toward downsizing the role of humans on the flight deck. The bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration included language to provide funding to study single-pilot operations for cargo planes, a move that the Air Line Pilots Association opposed. Captain Canoll said that a single-pilot aircraft must be safe to fly without anyone at the controls in case the pilot takes a bathroom break or becomes incapacitated.

At the recently concluded World Economic Forum, there was a big focus on artificial intelligence and robotics. On the website, you can findbreathless articlesabout “Meet Stan: the robot valet that parks your car at the airport” and “US companies created a record number of robot workers in 2018”. In a Washington Post article on the WEF, the title betrayed a certain unease about the replacement of human beings by robots: ‘The aristocrats are out of touch’: Davos elites believe the answer to inequality is ‘upskilling’.It cited Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman about how to keep the masses docile: “The lack of education in those areas in digital is absolutely shocking. That has to be changed. That will very much lessen the inequalities that people have in terms of job opportunities.”

What world are these people living in? Schwarzman has a 32-room penthouse in 740 Park Avenue and spent $5 million for his birthday party in 2017. He just made a gift of $1 billion to MIT to launch a new school for Artificial Intelligence. Is that supposed to create jobs? Maybe for someone with an MIT degree who will go to work writing software to replace the people working for Jeff Bezos’s slave labor-like warehouses with machines but what is someone out of a job at an Amazon warehouse then supposed to do? Apply to MIT?

The handwriting is on the wall. The USA is moving into a two-tiered system. In places like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, you get people working in high-tech industries that in contrast to the Fordist model of the 1930s employ far fewer bodies. Meanwhile, in Detroit, Cleveland, and other places where Fordism once held sway, the jobs are there if you are willing to work at Walmarts, at local hospitals emptying bedpans or as guards in a jail or prison. Class divisions between those with advanced technology skills and those left out will only increase, leading to the kind of showdown taking place in France between the neoliberal state and the Yellow Vests.

You get a feel for the Two Americas reading a March 7^thNY Times article titled “Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive”:

In cities like Oakland and Berkeley and San Francisco, millennials obsess over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter and attend Democratic Socialists of America meetings. But the socialist passion doesn’t seem to have impacted the city’s zeal for I.P.O. parties, which the party planning community says are going to surpass past booms.

Jay Siegan, a former live music club owner who now curates private entertainment and music, is gearing up. He has worked on events for many of the I.P.O. hopefuls, including Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Postmates and Lyft.

“We see multiple parties per I.P.O. for the company that is I.P.O.ing, as well as firms that are associated to them,” Mr. Siegan said. Budgets for start-up parties, he said, can easily go above $10 million. “They’re wanting to bring in A-list celebrities to perform at the dinner tables for the executives. They want ballet performers.”

The only comment I would add to this tale of two cities is that it would not be surprising if some of these high-flying technology workers might also plan to vote for Bernie Sanders. They probably don’t feel happy about living in a city where their wealth has driven up the cost of housing to the point that homelessness is an epidemic. Whether President Sanders can do much about these class divisions is open to debate.

The replacement of human labor by machinery has been described as “creative destruction”. The assumption is that the temporary pain is worth it since there will always be the growth of new jobs. As my seventh grade social studies put it, the invention of the automobile put the blacksmith out of work but it created far more jobs in a Ford plant.

On May 12, 2010, the New York Times ran an article by economics editor Catherine Rampell titled “The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind”that focused on the largely middle-aged unemployed who will probably never work again. For example, 52 year old administrative assistant Cynthia Norton has been working part-time at Walmart while sending resumes everywhere but nobody gets back to her. She is part of a much bigger picture:

Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that occupation by the end of last year. There have also been outsize job losses in other occupation categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by 40 percent.

But Ms. Rampell finds the silver lining in this dark cloud:

This “creative destruction” in the job market can benefit the economy.

Pruning relatively less-efficient employees like clerks and travel agents, whose work can be done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes American businesses more efficient. Year over year, productivity growth was at its highest level in over 50 years last quarter, pushing corporate profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.

The term “creative destruction” might ring a bell. It was coined by Werner Sombart in his 1913 book “War and Capitalism”. When he was young, Sombart considered himself a Marxist. His notion of creative destruction was obviously drawn from Karl Marx, who, according to some, saw capitalism in terms of the business cycle. With busts following booms, like night follows day, a new round of capital accumulation can begin. This interpretation is particularly associated with Volume Two of Capital that examines this process in great detail. Looking at this material, some Marxists like Eduard Bernstein drew the conclusion that capitalism is an infinitely self-sustaining system.

By 1913, Sombart had dumped the Marxist commitment to social revolution but still retained the idea that there was a basis in Karl Marx for upholding the need for “creative destruction”, a view buttressed by an overly positive interpretation of this passage in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

By the 1930s, Sombart had adapted himself fairly well to the Nazi system although he was not gung-ho like Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt. The wiki on Sombart notes:

In 1934 he published Deutscher Sozialismus where he claimed a “new spirit” was beginning to “rule mankind”. The age of capitalism and proletarian socialism was over and with “German socialism” (National-Socialism) taking over.

But despite this, he remained critical. In 1938 he wrote an anthropology text that found fault with the Nazi system and many of his Jewish students remained fond of him.

I suspect, however, that Rampell is familiar with Joseph Schumpeter’s use of the term rather than Sombart since Schumpeter was an economist, her chosen discipline. In 1942, he wrote a book titled Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that, like Sombart, retained much of Karl Marx’s methodology but without the political imperative to destroy the system that utilized “creative destruction”. He wrote:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

The wiki on Schumpeter claims that this theory is wedded to Nikolai Kondratiev’s “long wave” hypothesis that rests on the idea that there are 50 year cycles in which capitalism grows, decays and enters a crisis until a new round of capital accumulation opens up. Not only was the idea attractive to Schumpeter, it was a key part of Ernest Mandel’s economic theories. Unlike Schumpeter, Mandel was on the lookout for social agencies that could break the cycle and put development on a new footing, one based on human need rather than private profit.

Returning to Rampell’s article, there is one dimension entirely missing. She assumes that “creative destruction” will operate once again in order to foster a new upswing in the capitalist business cycle. But how exactly will that manifest itself? All the signs point to a general decline in business activity unless there is some kind of technological breakthrough equivalent to the computer revolution that fueled growth for decades. Does anybody believe that “green manufacturing” will play the same role? I don’t myself.

One thing does occur to me. Sombart’s book was written in 1913, one year before WWI and was even titled eerily enough “War and Capitalism”. One wonders if the Great War would be seen as part and parcel of “creative destruction”. War, after all, does have a knack for clearing the playing field with even more finality than layoffs. Schumpeter wrote his in 1942, one year into WWII. My guess is that he did not theorize war as the ultimate (and necessary?) instrument of creative destruction but history will record that WWII did introduce a whole rafter of new technology, including aluminum, radar, nuclear power, etc., while bombing old modes of production into oblivion. What a great opportunity it was for capitalism to rebuild Japan, especially after firebombing and atomic bombs did their lovely work.

In my view, there’s something disgusting about this “creative destruction” business especially when it is articulated by a young, pro-capitalist Princeton graduate like Catherine Rampell who wrote for Slate, the Village Voice and other such b-list publications before crawling her way up into an editorial job at the NYT. She clearly has learned how to cater her reporting to the ideological needs of the newspaper of record, growing more and more reactionary as the crisis of capitalism deepens.