Marshall Auerback — It’s Class, Stupid, Not Race

To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists and whilst his GOP colleagues publicly recoiled in horror, there is no question that Trump was merely making explicit what Republicans had been doing for decades – since the days of Nixon in 1968. The dog whistle was merely replaced by a bull horn.

But that alone doesn’t explain Trump’s success. As I wrote in an earlier analysis of the Trump phenomenon, he became the voice for an increasing number of Americans, who counted themselves amongst the biggest losers of globalization and free trade. In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years. That’s why so many Americans have simply stopped voting (and this year was no different, as it looks like a mere 57.9% of the voter eligible population turned out). And perhaps Trump is a faux populist, who is merely deploying bait and switch tactics, but he explicitly addressed his campaign to those who have been marginalized by the neo-liberal policies dominant in both parties.…

The establishment, especially the Democratic Party establishment, keeps enforcing what divides people rather than what unites people by embracing identity politics and ignoring class. Yes, a huge majority of women were offended by Trump’s “locker room talk”, but a large chunk still voted for him, and larger numbers of Hispanics voted for Trump than Romney. Doesn’t that suggest that identity politics has reached some sort of limit? Why not find common ground on the issue of class?…

The real issue is class power and class privilege.  Class power and class privilege arise from social status and the networking based on it that gets amplified and stratified by wealth.

America has become a plutonomous oligarchy that won't change much without campaign finance reform, ending corporate lobbying, and locking the revolving door. This is, take way the tools of class power and privilege that enable government capture.

It is true that this process is likely to be resisted by the donor class and it may well take another financial crisis before their power is fully broken. Voters crave effective action to reverse long term economic decline and runaway economic inequality, but nothing on the scale required will be offered to them by either of America’s money-driven major parties. This is likely only to accelerate the disintegration of the political system and economic system until the elephant in the room – class – is honestly and comprehensively addressed.

Counterpunch
It’s Class, Stupid, Not Race

Marshall Auerback

Mike Whitney — Patrick Caddell; The Pollster Who ‘Got it Right’

While I admire Caddell’s insights about the emerging class war across America, I’m not sure that he’s right when he says “the old rules of politics are collapsing”. The rules aren’t collapsing. What’s happening is that more people are simply aware of what’s going on and who their real enemies are, the bigshots in the deep-state establishment who have no political affiliation and who control just about everything. This new awareness or class consciousness is an essential part of understanding how the world works and who is screwing who, but it’s importance shouldn’t be exaggerated.

Counterpunch

Patrick Caddell; The Pollster Who ‘Got it Right’

Mike Whitney

Daniella Medina— Class Interests & Discordant Politics: Brexit & the Trump Campaign

Levy Institute grad students' blog that is unabashedly leftist.

The ascent of conservative capitalism- in the US under Reagan and George Bush Sr. and in the UK under Thatcher- meant tax cuts, the erosion of labor unions, and new regulations imposed on the economy. These economic regime changes were based on the mainstream theoretical presupposition that what we really needed to do was create an economic environment conducive to unbarred corporate innovation and investment and eagerly accept international policy which, together, opened the proverbial floodgates allowing neoliberalism to leak all over the globe. What a mess.

I would take issue with the phase, "allowing neoliberalism to leak all over the globe." The reality is that this was the intention, and it was imposed internationally by the Anglo-American interests, that is to say, the international finance and translational corporatism the rule the US and UK, along with the deep state bent on global hegemony.

"Allow neoliberalism to leak all over the globe" is not correct way to characterize this. This suggests the natural order that is supposed to arise spontaneously with liberalization, deregulation and privatization, whereas the reality is that neoliberalism was imposed domestically and internationally through oligarchic, plutocratic and militaristic rule masquerading as democracy and government of, by and for the people, in which the elected government acts in the interest of all and spreads the benefits of liberty internationally.

The Minskys
Class Interests & Discordant Politics: Brexit & the Trump Campaign

Daniella Medina

David F. Ruccio — Monopoly straw

That’s precisely what is missing from mainstream economics, including its liberal wing: a theory of the contradictory class dynamics of capitalist firms and of capitalism as a whole.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Monopoly straw
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Mike Whitney — Is This Class Warfare?

Is there a conspiracy to keep wages from rising or is it just plain-old class warfare? 

Check out these charts from a recent report by Deutsche Bank and see what you think….

Do you really think that this relentless upward waterfall of money to uber-rich tycoons (“95% of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1% of the earning population”) is a mistake, that it’s merely the unintended consequence of well-meaning monetary policies that were designed to spur lending and strengthen growth but, by pure happenstance, backfired and triggered the biggest redistribution of wealth to voracious, do-nothing plutocrats in history?

Is that what you think?

Not meritocracy and just deserts based on marginal productivity?

You don’t need to be Leon Trotsky to figure out what’s really going on here. Heck, even Warren Buffett nailed it when he said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s…winning.”
Counterpunch
Is This Class Warfare?

Mike Whitney

Bill Mitchell — The neo-liberal class warfare on the poor and the rest of us

I read a report just released yesterday (March 9, 2016) – The uneven impact of welfare reformby the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, which is located at the Sheffield Hallam University in Britain. It showed that the British Government is successfully prosecuting a class war against the disadvantaged and, increasingly, against segments of ‘middle’ Britain. It confirms the view I formed in 2010 when the Conservative government was elected and announced its first fiscal statement in June of that year that it was intent on pursuing some unfinished business – to wit, entrenching the attacks on workers and income support recipients and redistributing national income in favour of capital. These attacks were somewhat interrupted by the urgency to deal with the meltdown associated with the GFC. Leopards don’t change their spots and the Conservatives are intent on finishing off the agenda that began back in the 1970s with the attacks on unions and public services. I was thinking about the report as I was reflecting on a radio program I heard the other day about how the Australian National Library is being forced to make severe cuts to its archival services among other things in response to federal government austerity plans. Mindless is the first word that came into my head when I was listening to the program. In the case of Britain, the attacks are being dressed up as ‘welfare reform’. In the case of Australia, the spending cuts are being dressed up as ‘efficiency dividends’. The neo-liberal nomenclature is an attempt to obscure what is really going on – a massive attack on society, its disadvantaged, and its cultural institutions. Neo-liberals hate society and anything that provides inclusive access to all in the benefits that society can deliver. These cuts are deliberately targeted to reduce social inclusion and undermine information access.…

Scroll to the end of the post for the announcement of publication of the MMT textbook that Bill and Randy have been working on for some time. Congratulations to them, and thanks!

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The neo-liberal class warfare on the poor and the rest of us
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Must read — Joel Kotkin: We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress

Must read. Demographics is the real basis of political economy as well as politics.

New Geography
We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress

Joel Kotkin | executive editor of NewGeography.com, the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism

Mark Thoma — Paul Krugman: Voodoo Never Dies

Krugman goes all "Marxist,"sort of, and mentions class warfare — of the rich against the rest — because they can.

The opposition needs to roll out Kansas.

"Voodoo never dies" = "Zombie economics" (ht John Quiggin). The zombies run on money.

Economist’s View
Paul Krugman: Voodoo Never Dies
Mark Thoma | Professor of Economics, University of Oregon

David F. Ruccio — A coming class war?

Ray Fisman and Daniel Markovits suggest that we’re seeing right now, with the insurgent campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and elite hopes that they will just fade away, are “early skirmishes in a coming class war.”

Why? Because their research (along with coauthors Pamela Jakiela and Shachar Kariv, just published in Science) revealed stark differences between attitudes toward economic justice between ordinary Americans and those at the top. Basically, the elites (both intermediate and extreme) are much more likely to be selfish as their compatriots in general. What’s more, elite Americans show a far greater commitment to efficiency over equality than ordinary Americans.…

I'd say it is here already and Occupy kicked it off. The brutal repression of dissent sent a message about just how committed to maintaining the status quo, and expanding it, the upper classes are. That destroyed a lot of illusions.

Now the two populist candidates are pulling ahead, while the Establishment of both parties prepares to roll out the big guns.

Occasional Links & Commentary
A coming class war?
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

Henry A. Giroux — Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies

Right-wing calls for austerity suggest more than a market-driven desire to punish the poor, working class and middle class by distributing wealth upwards to the 1%. They also point to a politics of disposability in which the social provisions, public spheres and institutions that nourish democratic values and social relations are being dismantled, including public and higher education. Neoliberal austerity policies embody an ideology that produces both zones of abandonment and forms of social and civil death while also infusing society with a culture of increasing hardship. It also makes clear that the weapons of class warfare do not reside only in oppressive modes of state terrorism such as the militarization of the police, but also in policies that inflict misery, immiseration and suffering on the vast majority of the population.…

Truthout | News Analysis
Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies
Henry A. Giroux | McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

Allan H. Meltzer — The United States Of Envy

The conservative response to inequality is envy. Who woulda thunk it?

President Obama has openly encouraged envy of the top one percent of income earners. Reducing the share received by the highest earners to provide revenue for larger transfers to the lowest earners has long been a main objective of his administration. We can all expect this theme to be trumpeted loudly by the mainstream press as the mid-term election approaches: Some of us can have more, the argument goes, if we force others to have less.

Support for the alleged social benefits of setting much higher marginal tax rates on the highest incomes has now been endorsed by the International Monetary Fund, based heavily on research by two French economists named Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez. The two worked together on the faculty at MIT, where the current research director of the IMF, Olivier Blanchard, was a professor. Like Piketty and Saez, he is also French. France has, for many years, implemented destructive policies of income redistribution....

Voters who will hear the Obama call for envy and redistribution should ask themselves and others: Would you prefer to live in an America where the market is dynamic and opportunity abounds, or in France, where unemployment is high and tax rates are crushing? Don’t you prefer opportunity to envy?

Human Events

The United States Of Envy

Allan H. Meltzer | Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University

(h/t Charles Hayden)

Michael Lind — The 1 percent wins again: The system’s so fixed that a global class war is only a dream

No, there won’t be a global campaign against global inequality. The wealthy have written the rules to guarantee it

Salon
The 1 percent wins again: The system’s so fixed that a global class war is only a dream
Michael Lind

Noam Chomsky — America Hates Its Poor

This is an excerpt from the just released second edition of Noam Chomsky’s “Occupy: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity,” edited by Greg Ruggiero and published by Zuccotti Park Press.

AlterNet
Noam Chomsky: America Hates Its Poor
Noam Chomsky

The bottom 70 percent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.

Chomsky: Business Elites Are Waging a Brutal Class War in America

The business classes are constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition.

AlterNet
Chomsky: Business Elites Are Waging a Brutal Class War in America
Noam Chomsky
Excerpt from the just released 2nd edition of Noam Chomsky’s OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity, edited by Greg Ruggiero and published by Zuccotti Park Press. Chris Steele interviews Chomsky.

Michael Lind — How the Tea Party Has You Fooled

In recent essays for Salon I have argued that progressives and mainstream pundits are making a profound mistake by treating Tea Party radicalism as an outburst of irrationality by moronic “low information” yokels, rather than understanding it as a calculated (if not necessarily successful) strategy by the regional elite of the South and its allies in other regions.... 

I have also argued that the Tea Party is not a new movement that sprang up as a result of spontaneous populist anger against Wall Street bailouts in the Great Recession, but rather the “newest right,” the most recent incarnation of an evolving right-wing tradition that goes back beyond Reagan and Goldwater to mostly Southern roots.... 

Against progressives and pundits who insist on blaming the white working class for Tea Party radicalism, I have argued that the radical right agenda serves the interest of the economic elites of the South and some areas in the Midwest and other regions — particularly those whose business models are threatened by unions, high minimum wages and environmental regulations....

If it wants to live up to its claim of being “the reality-based community,” the American center-left needs to dispense with the half-century-old anti-working-class mythology of Hofstadter and Adorno and look at real-world electoral and opinion data, for a change. By refusing to recognize that today’s right-wing radicalism serves the interests of elites — in particular, Southern elites — and blaming it erroneously on the non-Southern white working class, progressives only harm themselves, not least by confusing their enemies with their potential allies.

AlterNet
How the Tea Party Has You Fooled
Michael Lind

Originally posted at Salon: Michael Lind, Tea Party is an anti-populist elite tool. And it has progressives fooled

This is not some spontaneous uprising. It's the newest incarnation of a rich, elite, right-wing tradition

Jonathan Larson — Class still matters

It’s an old joke, but it bears repeating: An Oxford professor meets a former student on the street. He asks what he’s been up to lately. The student tells him he’s working on a doctoral thesis about the survival of the class system in the United States. The professor expresses surprise. “I didn’t think there was a class system in the United States,” he says. “Nobody does,” the student replies. “That’s how it survives.” — David Macaray

real economics

Class still matters

Jonathan Larson

Without consideration of class structure and power, economics is jive, and the result is what Michale Hudson as labeled "junk economics."

Bill Mitchell — There is a class warfare and the workers are not winning

The Politics of Envy – that old chestnut from the neo-liberals – is bandied around every time there is any insinuation that the capitalist system produces distributional outcomes that are not remotely proportional to the effort put into production. Whenever governments challenge the distributional outcomes – for example, propose increasing taxes on the higher income recipients (note I don’t use the word “earners”) there is hell to cry and the defense put up always appeals to the old tags – “socialist class warriors undermining incentive”, “envy”, etc. In the 1980s, when privatisation formed the first wave of the neo-liberal onslaught, we all apparently became “capitalists” or “shareholders”. We were told that it was dinosauric to think in terms of the old class categories – labour and capital. That was just so “yesterday” and we should just get over it and realise that we all had a stake in a system where reduced regulation and oversight would produce unimaginable wealth, even if the first manifestations of this new “incentivised” economy channelled increasing shares of real income to the highest percentiles in the distribution. No worries, “trickle-down” would spread the largesse. We know better now – and increasingly the recognition, exemplified in 2006 by Warren Buffett’s suggestion that “There’s class warfare, all right … but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning” (Source), is that class is alive and well and in prosecuting their demands for higher shares of real income, the elites have not only caused the crisis but are now, in recovery, reinstating the dynamics that will lead to the next crisis. The big changes in policy structures that have to be made to avoid another global crisis are not even remotely on the radar.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
There is a class warfare and the workers are not winning
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia

Balanced Fiat Is A Euphemism For Class Warfare.

In response to the mini-essay on PK's "Moment of Dumb Questioness" one new reader wrote in an email:

"You may want to always provide a explanation which is as simple - but as correct - as possible for why there is essentially no such thing as "deficit" with our fiat economy for the broad population. Then, use that concept to point out why the fiat economy is essential to national well-being. For me such commentaries are strongest when they point out whatever is not perfect. In this case, what (far less important) downside effects occur, and when they occur, as a result of our fiat economy 'printing' it's own currency on-demand."

This is progress. One more down. Minimum of another 15 million US citizens to go! (~10% of adult population)

This reader makes a good point. I will try to always add an opening cue for new audiences. Here's a stab. It may already be thinking too far ahead. If so, please offer your own version of a system primer:

"See Jane. See Dick. See Jane provision the country, using decimal notation for tracking all transaction chains, no matter how complex. See Dick try to run off with all the decimal notation, i.e., the 'fiat.' "

The simple issue is that most of this whole, embarrassing debate results from twisted semantics. A "deficit" formally means less of something than was previously present. Can one have a virtual deficit in a dimensionless, virtual concept - regardless of whether or not you write virtual symbols for those dimensionless concepts in double-entry accounting logs? Of course. It all depends on the semantics chosen for the context being discussed. What happens of people try to mix metaphors across non-overlapping contexts? Then you have sophism. Note that sophism isn't a problem unless a conversation occurs between any combination of the unscrupulous and/or slow witted.

Sophism 300BC: "Is that YOUR dog?" [Yes.] "Is THAT dog a mother?" [Yes.] "Therefore THAT dog is YOUR mother. Ha. Ha." [??]

Sophism 2013 AD: "Does our growing population and economy need more virtual units to track the increasing number of transactions uses this year, vs last  year?" [Yes.]  "So we have a deficit in calculating units to be used this year, vs last year?" [Yes.] "Those charged with making up that 'deficit' therefore have a 'debt'." [Well ... Ok.] "You're a citizen. Therefore, YOU have a debt to pay. Pay up!" [Huh? .. well ... ok. Here. ... Hey! Whaddya mean, I no longer have a job, or pension, or civil rights?]

Endless numbers of anthropologists & historians have explained this ... in countless ways. Even Wallace & Darwin. Here's the gist of the story.

In reality, all adaptive systems are always on a fiat currency system, i.e., no limit to self-bookkeeping. Just use the noise thrown off by the system components currently in operation. Our only internal system restraint is avoiding the confusion of either inflation or deflation. An electorate may pretend otherwise, but it was always just a pretension. Fiat = guaranteed denomination of any & all public initiative. It's just system bookkeeping. Can you imagine any cell-biology system that wasn't resource restrained, voluntarily running out of ATP? That's like a nation which isn't resource constrained running out of hammers - or a blonde running out of signals to breathe in and breathe out. No reason for it to occur ... other than internal disorganization.

Hence, a balanced fiat currency budget means balanced public fiat, which means balanced public initiative? So, what the heck does that mean? It means no NET public initiative this year that exceeds what's clawed back from last year's public initiative? What sense does that make? None whatsoever. Just sophism.

Stop coordinating so we can focus on infighting? The only avenue for local advancement which that policy leaves is class warfare!

Class warfare is just jostling within the ranks - which just brings us back to another definition of inflation vs deflation. Cultural inflation = too little internal adaptive pressure. Cultural deflation = too much internal adaptive pressure. Either can weaken the resiliency of a culture, and voluntarily limit it's adaptive rate.

Once infighting breaks out, guess which "class" of people always promotes balanced fiat? You guessed it. Whomever gets a leg up in any family/clan/class struggle naturally seeks to stick it to their former adversary - and keep 'em down - by under-funding and over-taxing everyone in their erstwhile competitor class. Minimal jostling for position keeps distributed adaptive rate at rates dictated by context. The knack is to know how to not go too far. A culture under-provisioning an entire class of it's own citizens is exactly like a person shooting their own foot, or brain. If you have an asset, it's better to maximally employ it rather than waste it. In any complex system, the highest return - by far - is the return-on-coordination. The alternatives are all different degrees of playing with failure.

USUALLY, these internal-competition cycles are broken only when some worse crisis forces the infighters to instead team up, coordinate, and optimally provision the entire country. Any lack of outside adaptive pressure, however, allows the knuckledraggers to again lobby for Ludditism and "balanced fiat." If that gets out of hand, the whole system usually falls behind some other culture maintaining a higher adaptive rate.

ps: "Balanced Fiat" has become a CFC euphemism for class warfare. Where CFC means "control-fraud correct" .. i.e., endless semantic Sophism

Chris Dillow — On Within-Class Envy

Of course, there are countless real world analogies to this behaviour. Old money sneering at new money, the richcomplaining about the super-rich, "white trash" being racist and "strivers" attacking "shirkers" are all examples of within-class conflict. What's striking about this experiment is that such behaviour emerges so easily, without the aid of ideology or media manipulation.This suggests that the lack of development of class solidarity has some deeper-rooted causes than ideology alone.

For a Marxist, this is depressing stuff. But it should also concern any liberal or democrat.It suggests that people might support policies that hurt other poor people - for example, welfare cuts or immigration controls - even if they themselves are harmed by such policies. In this sense, people's preferences aren't necessarily the same as their narrow material interests.

Stumbling and Mumbling
On Within-Class Envy
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)

The basis of interest politics and wedge issues?

Paul Krugman: The 1 Percent’s Solution

Has Paul Krugman been reading Rodger Malcolm Mitchell and getting that the problem is class warfare perpetrated by the 1%? Sounds like it.

Economist's View
Paul Krugman: The 1 Percent’s Solution
posted by Mark Thoma | Professor of Economics, University of Oregon