Jonathan Tepper — Competition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It

We need a revolution to cast off monopolies and restore entrepreneurial freedom. First of two excerpts from “The Myth of Capitalism.”

Bloomberg Opinion
Competition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It

Jonathan Tepper

See also a short review of The Myth of Capitalism

A lot of times, when you read reviews about books on the economy, you end up wondering what the reviewer’s ‘priors’ are as people like to say in economics. You read the review and wonder where the biases of the reviewer are, because that can tell you a lot about the review.

So I’m going to lay it out there.

The ‘Corporatist’ is a kleptocrat masquerading as a believer in liberty. He uses terminology based in liberty to construct an ideology solely as a means of furthering the gains of a specific strata of society allied with the corporatist and at the expense of other strata, by coercion if necessary.

That’s me, seven years ago on this very website in a post I called Corporatism masquerading as Liberty. So, those are my priors coming into this; I’m someone who sees the ‘ideology’ of freedom and liberty being used as a cloak and shield for people who are almost entirely self-interested. And what I believe has happened is that ideology has been injected into our form of capitalism as a way of disarming naysayers and allowing the ‘Corporatist’ to benefit at everyone’s expense.

So when I read “The Myth of Capitalism" (henceforth The MOC) was subtitled “Monopolies and the Death of Competition", I was intrigued because the question for me was how self-interested people are able to reap all the gains of our system, while avoiding a lot of the downsides....

econintersect
"The Myth Of Capitalism"
Edward Harrison, Credit Writedowns

See also

"Freedom" at the tip of a missile. Making the world "safe" for capitalism American style, or else.

AntiWar
Pompeo Promises New Liberal World Order – New Wine In Old Bottles?

Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams

See also

Huawei chief financial officer Wanzhou Meng is facing extradition to the United States after being arrested in Canada on suspicion of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, the Globe and Mail reports.

Making the world safe.

Axios

Top Huawei executive arrested on suspicion of violating Iran sanctions

Zachary Basu

also

Mere hours after Chinese officials finally affirmed President Trump's description of Saturday's trade 'truce' - this after fears that the true nature of the agreement might have been "lost in translation" helped trigger the worst one-day market selloff since October - the DOJ has gone ahead and kicked the hornet's nest, seriously jeopardizing the prospects for a prolonged trade detente between the world's two biggest economies....

Zero Hedge
Trade Truce Over? Canada Arrests Huawei CFO At US Request

Tyler Durden

Olivia Solon — Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web

The inventor of the world wide web warns over concentration of power among a few companies ‘controlling which ideas are shared’

The Guardian
Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web

Olivia Solon

While the chattering class is obsessing over social media, the deep state is operating behind the scenes.

Advanced capitalism leads to corporate statism, the symbiotic relationship between the state and capital, which is the definition of fascism.

"It can't happen here."

Insurge Intelligence — Medium
How the CIA made Google — Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 1

Why Google made the NSA — Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 2

Nafeez Ahmed

also

World Economic Forum
This is the future of the internet

Paul Laudicina | Chairman, A.T. Kearney Global Business Policy Council

also

Moscow also building alternative Domain Name System

Asia Times
Russia could disconnect from global internet in event of war: Putin advisor

Also

Disobedient Media
On The Weaponization Of Artificial Intelligence And Its Ties To The ‘Paypal Mafia’
Elizabeth Vos

Moon of Alabama — Google Does Evil

Why you should be using DuckDuckGo.

Moon of Alabama

Google Does Evil
b

Pam and Russ Martens — Wall Street Is the Most Dangerous Example of Corporate Domination

As if someone had quietly turned on a light bulb last month illuminating the corporate takeover of America, a series of articles from multiple outlets chronicled the demise of American democracy under the jackboot of the corporate state.

David Dayen at the New Republic wrote:

“Far from selfless arbiters of right and wrong, CEOs are as responsible as anyone in America for skyrocketing inequality, climate crisis, waves of consumer fraud, and the biggest financial meltdown since the Depression. Condemning the unpopular views of an unpopular president whom they see as an inferior businessman is no sacrifice, especially when they are simultaneously plotting with administration officials to win as many perks as possible. CEOs aren’t ‘finding their voice’; they’re finding a way to control government like a marionette, while hiding the strings.”

…..

Wall Street On Parade
Wall Street Is the Most Dangerous Example of Corporate Domination

Pam Martens and Russ Martens

William I. Robinson — Global Capitalism: Reflections on a Brave New World

We are in the throes of a transition to a qualitatively new stage of world capitalism. Its essence is the emergence of truly transnational capital, a transnational capitalist class (TCC) made up of the owners and managers of transnational corporations, and transnational state apparatuses through which the TCC attempts to exercise global political authority. This corporate-driven globalization has brought a vast new round of global enclosures as hundreds of millions of people have been uprooted and converted into surplus humanity. The extreme global inequality that has resulted erodes social cohesion and fuels unrest. In response, the more enlightened members of the transnational elite clamor for a powerful transnational state to resolve the ecological, social, economic, and political crises of global capitalism, but instead a global war economy and a global police state may be in the offing. If we are to avoid a civilizational collapse and reach a Great Transition, we will need an accurate reading of the new global capitalism to guide our social practice....

Tags: #global capitalism, #transnational capitalist class, #transnational corporate totalitarianism, #corporate statism, #fascism

Someone tell the people.

BTW, this is a really good article. If no time now, save it for the weekend.

It underscores what I have been saying for some time. Just looking at national economies in a globalized world is insufficient. Economics now must be pursued from the perspective of closed globalized economy rather than a collection of open national economies.

This is the way that the transnational capitalist class, "Davos man," is already viewing it. These are people commanding integrated supply chains and global markets, to whom borders are inconveniences.

Global capitalism does not consist of the aggregation of “national” economies, but their integration into a greater transnational whole.…

Economic globalization entails the fragmentation and decentralization of complex production chains and the worldwide dispersal and functional integration of the different segments in these chains. Yet this fragmentation and decentralization is countered by a reverse movement: the centralization and concentration of worldwide economic management, control, and decision-making power in a handful of ever more powerful transnational corporations (TNCs).

It's pretty clear from the article that socialism of some type is needed to counter the trend. This actually accords with the principle of dialectical logic that a form is not subsumed by the dominant emerging form in the succeeding moment until the initial form has exhausted its potential and succumbs to rising internal contradictions.

Radical Political Economy

Global Capitalism: Reflections on a Brave New World
William I. Robinson | Professor of Sociology, Global Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara

New Directions

Like many good books, Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium is about One Big Idea, though the implications take a while to work through. It’s basically a story of how technology and media are changing politics.…Gurri really won my heart when he brought this insight together with the work of the great anthropologist Mary Douglas, who had an uncanny knack for creating powerful and useful analytical frameworks:

Andrew Batson's Blog
So far, my favorite book about the 2016 election is one that came out in 2014

Andrew Batson

The crawl toward despotism within a failed democracy is always incremental. No regime planning to utterly extinguish civil liberties advertises its intentions in advance. It pays lip service to liberty and justice while obliterating the institutions and laws that make them possible. Its opponents, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist, but week by week, month by month, the despot and his reactionary allies methodically consolidate power. Those inside the machinery of government and the courts who assert the rule of law are purged. Critics, including the press, are attacked, ridiculed and silenced. The state is reconfigured until the edifice of tyranny is unassailable.

Truthdig
A Last Chance for Resistance

Chris Hedges

Leticia Miranda — How States Are Fighting to Keep Towns From Offering Their Own Broadband

More fascism corporate statism.

Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission voted to ease the way for cities to become Internet service providers. So-called municipal broadband is already a reality in a few towns, often providing Internet access and faster service to rural communities that cable companies don’t serve. 

The cable and telecommunications industry have long lobbied against city-run broadband, arguing that taxpayer money should not fund potential competitors to private companies.

The telecom companies have what may seem like an unlikely ally: states. Roughly 20 states have restrictions against municipal broadband....

As the New York Times detailed last year, state attorneys general have become a major target of corporate lobbyists and contributors including AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile.

ProPublica
How States Are Fighting to Keep Towns From Offering Their Own Broadband
Leticia Miranda

Chris Hedges — We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy

A ruling elite that accrues for itself total power, history has shown, eventually uses it

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power — one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed — a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating — is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty....

The goals of corporate capitalism are increasingly indistinguishable from the goals of the state. The political and economic systems are subservient to corporate profit. Debate between conventional liberals and conservatives has been replaced by empty political theater and spectacle. Corporations, no matter which politicians are in office, loot the Treasury, escape taxation, push down wages, break unions, dismantle civil society, gut regulation and legal oversight, control information, prosecute endless war and dismantle public institutions and programs that include schools, welfare and Social Security. And elected officials, enriched through our form of legalized corporate bribery, have no intention of halting the process.

The government, by ignoring the rights and needs of ordinary citizens, is jeopardizing its legitimacy. This is dangerous. When a citizenry no longer feels that it can find justice within the organs of power, when it feels that the organs of power are the enemies of freedom and economic advancement, it makes war on those organs. Those of us who are condemned as radicals, idealists and dreamers call for basic reforms that, if enacted, will make peaceful reform possible. But corporate capitalists, now unchecked by state power and dismissive of the popular will, do not see the fires they are igniting. The Supreme Court ruling on our challenge is one more signpost on the road to dystopia.

It is capitalism, not government, that is the problem. The fusion of corporate and state power means that government is broken. It is little more than a protection racket for Wall Street. And it is our job to wrest government back. This will come only through the building of mass movements.

“It is futile to be ‘anti-Fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism,” George Orwell wrote. “Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism.”...

These masters have set in place laws that, when we rise up — and they expect us to rise up — will permit the state to herd us like sheep into military detention camps. Section 1021(b)(2) is but one piece of the legal tyranny now in place to ensure total corporate control. The corporate state also oversees the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. It can order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It has abolished habeas corpus. It uses secret evidence to imprison dissidents, such as the Palestinian academic Mazen Al-Najjar. It employs the Espionage Act to criminalize those who expose abuses of power. A ruling elite that accrues for itself this kind of total power, history has shown, eventually uses it.

AlterNet
Chris Hedges: We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy

Fred Guerin — Privacy as the New Free-Trade Zone of Corporate Exploitation

What is the precise connection between human surveillance, the collection of different forms of data and metadata, and a system of corporate capitalism? Many have argued that the increasing push to collect private information or metadata is for the sake of our national security, and only secondarily, about commercial interests. However, this line of argument would be much more persuasive if the boundary between government and corporate interests were clear and unambiguous. It is not. In fact, as corporate capitalism becomes globalized, the distinction between government power and corporate power is all but erased.

Given this, it is not difficult to imagine that the surveillance infrastructure designed and built by powerful communications and tech industries, and implemented and enforced by way of government institutions and bureaucratic systems, would tend to serve the interests of the corporation first and foremost, with governments playing a parasitic or subsidiary role. To properly address the question of whether government or corporate interests are at the center, we need to first think about how to visualize or articulate the boundary between public and private....

It is crucial to understand here that the free-trade zone of individual privacy is not merely the creation of a new capitalist commodity or the realization of an untapped potential for profit. At the human level of lived experience, the eradication of privacy also creates a widespread sense of impotence, powerlessness and apathy before powerful governmental institutions and corporate hegemonies. This state of affairs will be pivotally important in the furtherance of rampant capitalist exploitation. Why? Precisely because eradicating the private sphere is also extinguishing the possibility that individuals can act in concert to resist what is happening to them. The truth is that we discover and sustain our sense of solidarity and commonality with others when we grasp that we are unique and irreplaceable beings who need to relate to ourselves and to each other in both a private and a public way. The condition of possibility for individual reflection, for community, for acting in concert, is that the distinction between the private and the public remains inviolable. The corporate capitalist system has achieved its singular totalitarian purpose when it is able to violate the inviolable.

Truthout | Op-Ed

Privacy as the New Free-Trade Zone of Corporate Exploitation

Fred Guerin

Brad Friedman — Snowden on the Dangers of the 'Privatized' National Security State, in the Interview the U.S. 'News' Networks Didn't Bother to Show You

I'm not the only one that thinks we are living in a fascist corporatist state.

Brad Blog
Snowden on the Dangers of the 'Privatized' National Security State, in the Interview the U.S. 'News' Networks Didn't Bother to Show You
Brad Friedman

C.J. Polychroniou — Costas Lapavitsas Discusses the Financialization of Capitalism

The neoliberal capture of the state has laid the ground for the financialization of capitalism, a stage of capitalism that cannot be reversed without developing new methods of public provision in housing, education, health, pensions and the other sources financialization has used to create profit.

Truthout
Costas Lapavitsas Discusses the Financialization of Capitalism
C.J. Polychroniou interviews Costas Lapavitsas, Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

I find Mirowski's argument that neoliberalism is not the enemy of the state and nor does it genuinely ascribe to the simple opposition "state versus market," very persuasive. Neoliberalism is, rather, about capturing and using the state to achieve pro-market changes across society. The neoliberal capture of the state has laid the ground for the financialization of capitalism....

Finance can extract profits from any money income and stock of money - its profits are not limited to the fresh flows of value produced annually. During the past four decades, it has become expert at making zero-sum profits that involve transfers from one economic agent to another. Financial profits have become an incredible proportion of total profits - particularly in the USA for which we have relevant data. The exploitative outlook of finance in relation to households and individual workers is also evident. This is a characteristic feature of financialization and marks it out as a historical period in the development of capitalism....

The characteristic feature of the new regulation is that it has been shaped by the financial institutions themselves, and its purpose has been to ensure the ability of the financial system to grow and extract profits. It has not contributed in the slightest to avoiding financial bubbles nor to imposing the costs of financial crises onto those responsible for them. On the contrary, contemporary regulation has led to society bearing the brunt of financial disasters, while private individuals associated with finance have reaped the benefits of expansion. Society has little to expect from more regulation of the type we have known for four decades now.

In confronting financialization, it is vital to start with the recognition that it does not represent "progress" in human affairs.

 Financialization does not amount to a socially productive expansion of the forces of production that could potentially benefit society, if it was brought under control through a series of bold measures and interventions. Financialization ought to be reversed. To this purpose, regulation alone is not enough, particularly when one bears in mind that financialization is a historical period of capitalism. Confronting it inevitably raises issues of ownership, but also of broader policy and social relations.

Joshua Holland — Elizabeth Warren, Third Way and the Battle Over American Liberalism (via Moyers & Company)

Elizabeth Warren, Third Way and the Battle Over American Liberalism (via Moyers & Company)

Since Barack Obama’s election, Democrats have been united by an increasingly reactionary oppposition. But beneath that veneer of tranquility, longstanding  political and philosophical differences over the role the government should play in our economy…

---

Theresa Riley, Bill Moyers & Company — Wisconsin Democrat who infiltrated ALEC: ‘They don’t want people involved in the political process’

I'd be shocked it this were not already so well documented. But here is a first hand report by an "infiltrator" on the neoliberal mind in action.

Here's an illustration of their idea of representative democracy."

One guy I was talking to, who was from one of these right wing think tanks was saying we need to curb Obama’s reckless power with these administrative regulations, and he wanted a federal constitutional amendment saying Congress has to approve federal regulations. I said, I don’t think most people are going to want to amend the Constitution for that. I don’t think that ignites people. Maybe it does on the far right, but most people don’t really care about that. And he said, “Oh, well, you really don’t need people to do this. You just need control over the legislature and you need money, and we have both.”

That sentiment was underscored so many times to me, that they don’t want people involved in the political process, or in the policy process. And that seems to be the intent in a lot of ways: You have a think tank in every state and all they do is come up with these very, very regressive policies, you have corporations who are going to benefit so they fund it all, and then you have the legislators as your foot soldiers to carry out the tasks.

The best government that money can buy. And the best equipped security force to enforce it. The difference between fascism and communism is that fascism is corporate statism, and communism is corporate statism. Just a matter of emphasis. A neo-feudal elite are in control in both.

 I was really impressed by their infrastructure. I mean, we would never duplicate something like this on the left because, first of all, we would never take instructions from corporations, but the coordination that they have between these policy think tanks, the money and the legislators, in terms of just driving an agenda, it’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m fascinated by it because I’ve never seen anything like it from the left. I was the public policy director at Planned Parenthood, so I’m very familiar with building infrastructure. We did a lot of that in the state of Wisconsin. But we have nothing that I know of on the national front that connects all these things.

It is a well-oiled machine. They’re really organized, they’re really coordinated and they have the resources. And they’re not afraid to push it when they have the opportunities. Now they have 24 state legislatures that are Republican controlled and they have Republican governors. So they’ve had incredible success. They’ve had 71 bills introduced just this year that make it harder for most people who are injured to access the courts. We’ve certainly seen that here in Wisconsin. That was one of the first things that Walker did when he came in was push this tort reform through.

The Raw Story
Wisconsin Democrat who infiltrated ALEC: ‘They don’t want people involved in the political process’
Theresa Riley, Bill Moyers & Company

Noam Chomsky — How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces That Threaten Our Existence?

We need a worldwide struggle to preserve the global commons....

The blurring of borders and these challenges to the legitimacy of states bring to the fore serious questions about who owns the Earth. Who owns the global atmosphere being polluted by the heat-trapping gases that have just passed an especially perilous threshold, as we learned in May? Or to adopt the phrase used by indigenous people throughout much of the world, Who will defend the Earth? Who will uphold the rights of nature? Who will adopt the role of steward of the commons, our collective possession? That the Earth now desperately needs defense from impending environmental catastrophe is surely obvious to any rational and literate person. The different reactions to the crisis are a most remarkable feature of current history. At the forefront of the defense of nature are those often called “primitive”: members of indigenous and tribal groups, like the First Nations in Canada or the Aborigines in Australia - the remnants of peoples who have survived the imperial onslaught. At the forefront of the assault on nature are those who call themselves the most advanced and civilized: the richest and most powerful nations. 

AlterNet
Chomsky: How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces That Threaten Our Existence?

April M. Short — Facing 13 Years in Prison for Denouncing the Bank Bailouts—Using Kids' Chalk?

The ruling judge has stripped the defendant of his First Amendment rights.

AlterNet
Facing 13 Years in Prison for Denouncing the Bank Bailouts—Using Kids' Chalk?
April M. Short

Welcome to Amerika. Teaching a lesson in intimidation.

San Diego’s mayor, Bob Filner, called the trial “a misuse and waste of taxpayer money” in a June 20 memo to City Attorney Jan Goldsmith.

He wrote: “It could also be characterized as an abuse of power that infringes on First Amendment, particularly when it is arbitrarily applied to some, but not all, similar speech."

Exactly, selective prosecution is abuse of power, that is, use of power largely or solely to the advantage of the power elite.

Wake up, America. It's getting late in the game. Neoliberalism is fascism and the enemy of democracy. Economic liberalism is the enemy of political freedom.

See also, Digby, This Really Is Big Brother: The Leak Nobody's Noticed, at Hullaballo, cross-posted at AlterNet.

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy [Newspapers] illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

“Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

system failure — Middle class civil war in Greece: latest update and conclusions

More evidence that neoliberal capitalism is incompatible with democracy. Democracy must be controlled for neoliberal capitalism to function across the cycle of booms and busts that modern capitalism inevitably creates due to inherent financial instability.

the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens
Middle class civil war in Greece: latest update and conclusions
system failure

(promoted from the comments)

Michael Snyder — Corporatism: A System Of Control Designed By The Monopoly Men Of The Global Elite

In early America, most states had strict laws governing the size and scope of corporations. Individuals and small businesses thrived in such an environment, and the United States experienced a period of explosive economic growth. We showed the rest of the world that capitalism really works, and we eventually built the largest middle class that the world had ever seen.

But now we have replaced capitalism with something that I like to call "corporatism". In many ways, it shares a lot of characteristics with communism, and that is why nations such as communist China have embraced it so readily. Under "corporatism", monolithic predator corporations run around sucking up as much wealth and economic power as they possibly can. Most individuals and small businesses cannot compete and end up getting absorbed by the corporations. These mammoth collectivist institutions are in private hands rather than in government hands (as would be the case under a pure form of communism), but the results are pretty much the same either way. A tiny elite at the top gets almost all of the economic rewards.

There are some out there that would suggest that the answer to our problems is to move more in the direction of "socialism", but to be honest that wouldn't be the solution to anything. It would just change how the table scraps that the rest of us are getting are distributed.

If we truly wanted a return to prosperity, we need to dramatically shift the rules of the game so that they are tilted back in favor of individuals and small businesses. A much more pure form of capitalism would mean more wealth, less poverty and a more equitable distribution of the economic rewards in this country

The Economic Collapse
Corporatism: A System Of Control Designed By The Monopoly Men Of The Global Elite
Michael Snyder
(h/t Zero Hedge)

Dennis Marker — Teaching People to Hate Their Own Govt. Is at the Core of the Project to Destroy the Middle Class

The following is an excerpt from Dennis Marker's new book15 Steps to Corporate Feudalism , published this year. In the text below, Marker shares one of the steps he sees as central to the destruction of the middle class since Ronald Reagan took over.
Your goal for this step is to figure out how to teach the middle class to hate their own government using a strategy that takes into consideration the political climate of the United States of thirty years ago.

Teaching the middle class to hate their government was an essential part of the plan to implement Corporate Feudalism. A middle class cannot exist without a strong government. This is because only a government has the power to stand up to the giant corporations of today’s world, or the powerful individuals and private armies of earlier times. It is the government that enforces the laws to protect the middle class from those who would like to become their economic rulers. That is why prior to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the middle class all economies were run according to some version of the feudal system. If you want to put an end to the middle class and replace it with a feudal republic, you would need to change people’s perception of their government.

AlterNet
Teaching People to Hate Their Own Govt. Is at the Core of the Project to Destroy the Middle Class
Dennis Marker