David Fields — Capitalism is national & transnational, but what about the money?

Marxians picking up on MMT.

Radical Political Economy
Capitalism is national & transnational, but what about the money?
David Fields

Chris Hedges — The Great Unraveling

The ideological and physical hold of American imperial power, buttressed by the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism, is unraveling. Most, including many of those at the heart of the American empire, recognize that every promise made by the proponents of neoliberalism is a lie. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, has been funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, creating vast economic inequality. The working poor, whose unions and rights have been taken from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment, making their lives one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $2.1 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes. And the neoliberal order, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, has hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans.

Democracy, especially in the United States, is a farce, vomiting up right-wing demagogues such as Donald Trump, who has a chance to become the Republican presidential nominee and perhaps even president, or slick, dishonest corporate stooges such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and, if he follows through on his promise to support the Democratic nominee, even Bernie Sanders. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order. Political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the demands of corporations and empire. They are facilitators, along with most of the media and most of academia, of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

How could I not post a link to an article with a lede like that?

Truthdig
The Great Unraveling
Chris Hedges

ht Don Quijones at Naked Bull-Shit

Joseph E. Stiglitz — Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics....

We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece. 

But, again, it’s not about the money. It’s about using “deadlines” to force Greece to knuckle under, and to accept the unacceptable – not only austerity measures, but other regressive and punitive policies....

The not-so-hidden agenda.


Good post, especially considering most of what is published at Project Syndicate is neoliberal nonsense.

Project Syndicate
Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy
Joseph E. Stiglitz | Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank

See also

Nobel laureate tells TIME that the institutions and countries that have enforced cost-cutting on Greece "have criminal responsibility"Time

Time

Joseph Stiglitz to Greece’s Creditors: Abandon Austerity Or Face Global Fallout

Simon Schuster

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten — Confirmed by Kiev: Ukrainian Land Being Transferred to Oligarchs and Seed Companies

Just like Michael Hudson has been saying from the get-go.

This was the plan all along and when the previous government got in the way of it, it was replaced by coup. Perhaps worst was the willingness to use neo-Nazi nationalists to conduct the coup and to cut them in on the deal.

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten via Russia Insider

Confirmed by Kiev: Ukrainian Land Being Transferred to Oligarchs and Seed Companies

Translated by Anita Zalaldinova

If you read German, Kredite aus Steuergeldern: Saatgut-Konzerne kaufen Land in der Ukraine

Michael Perelman: Globalization, “Free Trade,” and Food as a Strategic Weapon

In 1969, Charles Kindleberger presciently observed the rise of corporate power relative to the government within the context of international trade, predicting, “the nation state is just about through as an economic unit.” 

More recently Wolfgang Reinicke went further, concluding: “Global corporate networks challenge a state’s internal sovereignty by altering the relationship between the private and public sectors. By inducing corporations to fuse national markets, globalization creates an economic geography that subsumes multiple political geographies. A government no longer has a monopoly of the legitimate power over the territory within which corporations operate, as the rising incidence of regulatory and tax arbitrage attests.” 

Reinicke even suggested that this globalization was trending toward a form of anarchy. If anarchy constitutes the absence of government, this aspect of globalization might seem to be a move toward a special kind of anarchy what may be called anarchism for the rich and powerful. 

In his “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber suggested a broader interpretation of this seeming anarchism. After citing Trotsky saying, “Every state is founded on force,” he went on to note, “The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.” From Weber’s perspective, globalization is actually empowering the state. 

The same progress in information technologies that that created a utopian belief in the possibility of worldwide democracy, facilitated the growth of globalization that made the new anarchy possible is also being used around the world to rapidly increase authoritarian powers, which now have the capacity to monitor virtually everything that ordinary people do. So, while one part of society enjoys the privacy that this new regime of secrecy provides, the rest of society has been rapidly losing what little remains of its privacy. 

In effect, alongside the global redistribution of wealth and income, globalization also seems to be redistributing people’s rights. So far, I have been unable to detect any effective response to this troubling trend.…

Oligarchic anarchism.

Naked Capitalism
Globalization, “Free Trade,” and Food as a Strategic Weapon
Michael Perelman | Professor of Economics at California State University, Chico

Don Quijones — Sir James Goldsmith, An Unlikely Defender of the Common Man

“The economy is there to serve the fundamental needs of society, which are prosperity, stability and contentment… If you have a situation whereby the economy grows but you create poverty and unemployment and you destabilise society, you’re in trouble."

The above quote comes from the least likely of sources: the late Sir James Goldsmith, one of the wealthiest and most influential business magnates of the late 20th century. The year was 1994, the occasion an interview with Charlie Rose on the potential impact of the soon-to-be-signed General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade(GATT).

Goldsmith laid out in simple terms the dangers of what he saw as unfettered globalisation, warning of the perils of NAFTA, GATT and the merging of sovereign European nations into the EU. He predicted that the only possible beneficiaries of unbridled global free trade would be the major multinational corporations who would have free rein to roam the globe in pursuit of the cheapest labor:

Raging Bull-shitSir James Goldsmith, An Unlikely Defender of the Common Man
Don Quijones

These ‘free trade’ ideologues are economically incompetent. They do not know that the justification for free trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage, which means that a country specializes in those economic activities in which it performs best and trades for those goods that other countries do best. Instead, the ideologues think that free trade means the freedom of capital to seek absolute advantage abroad in lowest factor cost. In other words, the free trade incompetents have never read David Ricardo, who formalized the case for free trade.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is in Trouble Thanks to Grassroots Pressure (via Moyers & Company)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is in Trouble Thanks to Grassroots Pressure (via Moyers & Company)

Greg Sargent reports for The Washington Post: Progressives and liberal lawmakers who are working hard to block the massive free trade deal being negotiated by the Obama administration have just gotten a big boost from someone they’d been aggressively…

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Mahilena — When conservatives talk about Constitution they mean the Confederate Constitution

"One grave weakness in the U.S. Constitution is the "general welfare" clause, which the Confederate Constitution eliminated." http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=353

Mahilena's Debunking Libertarianism/Conservatism ...

When conservatives talk about Constitution they mean the Confederate Constitution

That is the sticking point, isn't it? Again, economic liberalism — now neoliberalism — is incompatible with political liberalism — government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Yves Smith — The Global Corporatocracy is Almost Fully Operational

Yves here. I hope you don’t mind additional coverage of the pending trade pacts, this from a European perspective. This is bar none the single most important geopolitical initiative underway, yet it’s getting virtually no media play. While this discussion overlaps with our chat on Bill Moyers, many of you have friends, family members, and colleagues who don’t have time to watch a video but would read an article. Please use whatever route you think will work best with the people you know to get the word out.

Don Quijones [is] a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit

Naked Capitalism
The Global Corporatocracy is Almost Fully Operational
Yves Smith

Elaine Magliaro — President Obama Trying to “Fast Track” the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a Trade Pact That Could Be Worse Than NAFTA

[Lori] Wallach suggests we think of TPP “as a stealthy delivery mechanism for policies that could not survive public scrutiny.” She notes that just two of the twenty-six chapters of the pact cover traditional trade matters. She says the other chapters “embody the most florid dreams of the 1 percent—grandiose new rights and privileges for corporations and permanent constraints on government regulation.” She says TPP includes investor safeguards that would “ease job offshoring and assert control over natural resources”—and adds that it would “severely limit the regulation of financial services, land use, food safety, natural resources, energy, tobacco, healthcare and more.”,,,

President Obama is seeking Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority for TPP. This would permit Obama to sign the trade agreement “without Congressional approval.” The signed agreement would then be sent to Congress to be “voted on after the fact under a special restricted procedure that forces a vote in 90 days, limits debate, and prevents Congress from responding to public pressure to amend the agreement’s most egregious anti-public interest provisions.” Zoë Carpenter says that allowing “fast-track” authorization, would limit the ability of Congress “to address three major concerns with the TPP: the potentially harmful economic impacts of the deal, the very real prospect of the agreement superseding domestic policy in areas ranging from internet privacy to environmental and financial regulations and an unbalanced negotiating process and its likely outcome, both tipped towards corporate rather than public interest.” 

Jonathan Turley
President Obama Trying to “Fast Track” the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a Trade Pact That Could Be Worse Than NAFTA
Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger

More on the myth of free trade. TTP looks to be not a trade agreement but a neoliberal global coup d'etat, effectively setting up a world government by treaty based on corporate rule by a transnational capitalist class.

William Robinson — Crisis of Humanity: Global Capitalism Breeds 21st Century Fascism

The problem:

We are witnessing transitions from social-welfare states to social-control states around the world.

Contemporary capitalism and its characteristics:

Among the qualitative shifts that have taken place in the capitalist system in the face of globalization in recent decades, there are four I want to underscore. 

• First is the rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into a new globalized production and financial system. 
• Second is the appearance of a new transnational capitalist class (TCC). This is a class group grounded in new global circuits of accumulation rather than the older national circuits. 
• Third is the rise of what I term transnational state apparatuses. 
• And fourth is the appearance of novel relations of inequality and domination in global society, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities....

The response to the global financial crisis: the players:

One is what we could call "reformism from above." This reformism is aimed at stabilizing the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below.... 

A second response is popular, grass-roots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world, there appears to be a mounting global revolt....

Yet another response is what I term 21st century fascism. The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organize a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class.... It involves militarism, extreme masculinization, homophobia, racism and a racist mobilization against scapegoats, which includes the search for scapegoats (such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims).

Contemporary neo-fascism exhibits familiar characteristic of previous fascistic episodes.

Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealized and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalizes and glamorizes warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is even portrayed as heroic.

The Issue:

It is important to stress that the need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organized mass social control of the world's surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism.... With this in mind, let us conclude with five points for ongoing debate with regard to policing global capitalism.

The New Road to Serfdom:

From social consent to social control to social coercion by a police state in service of global capitalism made necessary by the contradictions inherent in global capitalism resulting from privilege and inequality.

Truthout | News
Crisis of Humanity: Global Capitalism Breeds 21st Century Fascism
William Robinson