In a telephone survey of more than 1100 randomly selected U.S. adults last Spring, the New York Times reported, the paper and CBS found that the U.S. citizenry stands to the progressive and populist left on numerous key political-economic issues. Pollsters working for the two corporate media giants learned that:
*Two-thirds (66%) of Americans think that the distribution of money and wealth should be more evenly distributed among more people in the U.S.
*61% of Americans believe that in today’s economy it’s mainly just a few people at the top who have a chance to get ahead.
*83% of Americans think the gap between the rich and the poor is a problem.
*67% of Americans think the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be addressed immediately, not as some point in the future.
*57% of Americans think the U.S. government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S.
*“Almost three-quarters [74%] of respondents say that large corporations have too much influence in the county, about the double the amount that said the same of unions.”
*68% of Americans favor raising taxes on people “earning” – the pollsters’ term (a better one would be “taking”) – more than $1 million per year.
*50% of Americans support limits on money “earned” by top executives at large corporations.
*“Americans [are] skeptical of [so-called] free trade. Nearly two-thirds [63%] favored some form of trade restrictions, and more than half opposed giving the president [fast-track] authority to negotiate trade agreements that Congress could only vote up or down without amendments.”So why don't they have it? Plutocracy.
“Plutocracy” seems almost mild to describe the rotten, dollar-drenched deep state of affairs. I am reminded of Marx’s phrase “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” of Edward Herman and David Peterson’s notion that America is ruled by “an unelected dictatorship of money,” and of the late Sheldon Wolin’s notion that the United States was a “corporate-managed democracy” advancing a populace-demobilizing “inverted totalitarianism” of concentrated capitalist and imperial power. Also relevant is former Republican Congressional staffer Mark Lofgren’s suggestion that Wall Street is “the ultimate owner” of the “Deep State” that rules America beneath the more “visible” surface state and “marionette theater” of parliamentary politics and campaigns. This is because “it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice— certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee…. The corridor between lower Manhattan and Washington,” Lofgren observes, “is a well-trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and many others.” Examples are not limited to top government staff “connected with the purely financial operations of the government.” Take former leading and legendary U.S. General David Patraeus, whose perceived skills at peddling Deep State influence garnered him a highly rewarding position at a giant Wall Street private equity firm (KKR) after he left “public service” in disgrace. As Lofgren notes, “the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable.” The pay grade is much, much higher in “industry,” or, more commonly, in finance.The only thing new is the faces.
Eighty-four years ago, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey significantly observed that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.”Counterpunch
Yesterday Senator Bernie Sanders gave an important speech in which he invoked President Roosevelt’s “second bill of rights” in defense of his platform. As Bernie rightly pointed out, all of Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs to which we have become accustomed, were tagged as “socialism”—just as pundits are branding Bernie’s proposals as dangerous socialist ideas. You can see Bernie’s prepared remarks here.
Just before Bernie’s speech, I was asked to do an interview with Alex Jensen, on TBS eFM’s “This Morning” English radio program in Seoul, Korea. I was sent a list of questions and jotted down very brief responses. Unfortunately, in our radio interview we were only able to get through a few of these. You can listen to the interview (uses iTunes) here. My interview is #8, Name: 1119 Issue Today with Professor L.R. Wray
As you will see, we mostly talked about the platform of Senator Sanders, and why his proposals have caught the imagination of the US population.
Here is the full set of questions and my brief (written) answers.…Concise and to the point. Good elevator speech.
What's funny is that Sanders might be gearing up to make this very argument [for overt money financing by government]. His chief economic adviser, University of Missouri-Kansas City economist Stephanie Kelton, is a fan of something called modern monetary theory: a batch of ideas that sketches out a very similar case to the one above.
“He can’t possibly win the nomination,” is the phrase heard most often when Washington insiders mention either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.
Yet as enthusiasm for the bombastic billionaire and the socialist senior continues to build within each party, the political establishment is mystified.
They don’t understand that the biggest political phenomenon in America today is a revolt against the “ruling class” of insiders that have dominated Washington for more than three decades.
In two very different ways, Trump and Sanders are agents of this revolt. I’ll explain the two ways in a moment.
If there’s one indication of the radical new direction in which Sanders plans to take the Budget Committee, consider the most eye-popping minority staff hire so far. As his committee staff’s chief economist, Sanders chose Stephanie Kelton, a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). It was Kelton who coined the term “deficit owl,”—in contrast to “deficit hawks” and “deficit doves”—to describe those, like her, who “don’t concede we need to balance [the budget] at all,” according to the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews.
Matthews writes that “owls” such as Kelton and the University of Texas’s James K.Galbraith “see government spending that leads to deficits as integral to economic growth, even in good times.”
The MMT has existed far outside the Overton window of fiscal policies pushed by either party. Galbraith described being “laughed at” by “hundreds” of “economists” during a panel at the White House in April of 2000 for his assertion that the surplus then run by the government posed a danger.
Reporters suggest the hiring of Kelton by Sanders was a move towards this school of economics.
Not so according to Sanders’s staff. Sanders does believe that deficits matter, they insist. When I raised MMT on two separate occasions, Sanders aides chafed at the notion, proclaiming their boss, far from an “owl,” is a “deficit hawk.”
I’d also love to know what Keynesians think of the Dems having a socialist as their lead member on the Senate Budget Committee, who then appoints a MMTer to be chief economist. And Krugman says the GOP relies on voodoo economics!The Money Illusion
Here’s a summary of the plan Bernie Sanders has set out, along with my comments (in italics).Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
