Bill Black — Will the Chilean People Save the U.S. by Electing Michelle Bachelet?

The effort by corporate CEOs to dominate the global economy and global government is reaching the end-game stage. Corporate CEOs view government and democracy as their gravest threats and are constantly seeking to discredit and hamstring government and democratic decision-making. CEOs are particularly eager to discredit, destroy, or capture regulation and they have enlisted enormous support in both major U.S. parties and many of the world’s dominant parties for these efforts. President Obama has continued and made worse the effort of President Bush to betray our nation, our democracy, and our people through the secret, draft Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. In this first column on TPP I explain that while there is no realistic chance of convincing Obama to repudiate the TPP, there is a chance that the people of Chile will save our democracy and our national sovereignty....

Once TPP is adopted, democratic rights and national sovereignty will be extinguished by corporate power which can be exerted, again in secret, before a tribunal run by private lawyers (what I call the “plutocracy panels”) with strong conflicts of interest that lead them to favor corporate interests.

New Economic Perspectives

Will the Chilean People Save the U.S. by Electing Michelle Bachelet?
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in the Department of Economics and the School of Law

Bill agrees that capitalism as economic liberalism and democracy as political liberalism are incompatible. Government of the people, by the people and for the people is not compatible with concentrated class power, which concentrated wealth and control of the means of production results in.

BTW, in case anyone missed this, Bill is becoming the (MMT-savvy) successor to aging Noam Chomsky as the public intellectual on the left, ranging over the social, political and economic spectrum of affairs and carefully crafting and documenting his arguments. His grasp and treatment of the dimension of issues and their interrelatedness is indeed impressive.