January 2

 Good Day-After-New-Year's Day Though for some ( some govt. workers, the stock market, and such are closed) the holiday continues.

Robert Reich made an observation he refers to today and notes that he got some push back. He wrote that when the U.S. had an expanding middle class, strong unions, and a good education system we were protected from fascism. He didn't specify what arguments were made against his conclusion promising to go into it later today. I can think of one line of critique. This is a case of "that was then; this is now." Conditions have changed. Since around 1985 labor unions declined, the percentage of national income going to labor began to decline, middle class status was maintained by borrowing, and investment in education stagnated while the political intrusion into what is taught and how increased. But all of his rose-tinted view of the past was built on an expanding economy and the economy isn't expanding as reliably (if it isn't actually contracting.) And I would also contend that all of the measures we use to gauge the health of the economy are skewed to show growth and any contradictory stats have been dismissed.

Naked Capitalism has a good, sobering post on the hype around that "successful" fusion experiment a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how many out there are old enough to remember the hype over nuclear power generation. It was supposed to provide electricity "too cheap to meter." It never did. And it never really made a profit without the government subsidies it got. And we still haven't solved the problem of the waste. Note in the article that the notion that the experiment yielded more energy than was put into it only if you carefully select what you count as the energy input. And any possible scaling up to provide reliable energy to large numbers of people is decades away (if ever). Another "subsidy dumpster" (credit the term to John Michael Greer).