Michael Hudson — In a struggle between oligarchy and democracy, something must give

Until Nevada, all the presidential candidates except for Bernie Sanders were playing for a brokered convention. The party’s candidates seemed likely to be chosen by the Donor Class, the One Percent and its proxies, not the voting class (the 99 Percent). If, as Mayor Bloomberg has assumed, the DNC will sell the presidency to the highest bidder, this poses the great question: Can the myth that the Democrats represent the working/middle class survive? Or, will the Donor Class trump the voting class?

This could be thought of as “election interference” – not from Russia but from the DNC on behalf of its Donor Class. That scenario would make the Democrats’ slogan for 2020 “No Hope or Change.” That is, no change from today’s economic trends that are sweeping wealth up to the One Percent.

All this sounds like Rome at the end of the Republic in the 1st century BC....

Markets in everything, including political office.

Note: I am refraining from posting links to overtly political posts or articles. While Michael Hudson's post is heavily political in one sense, being about the crisis in the Democratic Party, it is more than that in that it is really a post about political economy, a discipline that has been overshadowed by conventional economics and needs to be revived. While Michael Hudson has a degree in economics and has been involved in finance professionally, it is one of the few political economists operating in this environment, more remarkably as a closet Marxist.

Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism
In a struggle between oligarchy and democracy, something must give
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

Also

Important tidbit about US politics.

"Everyone knows" that US general elections are dominated by swing states that are in play. But not many also realize that it comes down in the end to a few swing counties that are in play.

Econospeak

Who Wins Prairie du Chien Wins the White House
J. Barkley Rosser | Professor of Economics and Business Administration James Madison University