Stop the $6 Trillion Coronavirus Corporate Coup! — Matt Stoller

The American Economic Liberties Project (my org) put out a statement against the bill, AFL-CIO official Damon Silvers, who oversaw the 2008 bailout, put out an article against the bill, as did dozens of economics and finance professors. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned of the risks of a bill tilted to big business, as did libertarian member Justin Amash. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker how to do a bailout without corruption. And Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin pointed out that the bill is “robbing taxpayers to bail out the rich.”

But then these two Senators, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, cut a deal last night. And from what I can tell, it’s really really bad, and much of the bad stuff is not being included in the sleazy marketing materials from Schumer and McConnell, or in the reporting about the bill. There’s a reason for that. Sunlight would kill this thing.

That means there is a narrow way to stop it....

BIG by Matt Stoller
Stop the $6 Trillion Coronavirus Corporate Coup!

Matt Stoller

Benjamin I Page, Jason Seawright, Matthew J Lacombe — What billionaires want: the secret influence of America’s 100 richest

A new study reveals how the wealthy engage in ‘stealth politics’: quietly advancing unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative policies...

How can this be so? If it is true, why aren’t voters aware and angry about it?

The answer is simple: billionaires who favor unpopular, ultraconservative economic policies, and work actively to advance them (that is, most politically active billionaires) stay almost entirely silent about those issues in public. This is a deliberate choice. Billionaires have plenty of media access, but most of them choose not to say anything at all about the policy issues of the day. They deliberately pursue a strategy of what we call “stealth politics”.

We have come to this conclusion based on an exhaustive, web-based study of everything that the 100 wealthiest US billionaires have said or done, over a 10-year period, concerning several major issues of public policy.... 

Our findings help illuminate how the political network assembled by the Koch brothers could have become so powerful. The Kochs have had a fertile field of less-well-known conservative billionaires to cultivate for hundreds of millions of dollars in in secret, unreported contributions. The Kochs’ entrepreneurship and organizational skills, together with stealthy contributions by these little-known billionaires, have produced a political juggernaut.

Both as individuals and as contributors to Koch-type consortia, most US billionaires have given large amounts money – and many have engaged in intense activity – to advance unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative economic policies. But they have done so very quietly, saying little or nothing in public about what they are doing or why. They have avoided political accountability. We believe that this sort of stealth politics is harmful to democracy....

The Guardian
What billionaires want: the secret influence of America’s 100 richest

Benjamin I. Page, Fulcher professor of decision making; Jason Seawright, professor of political science, and Matthew J Lacombe, PhD candidate in political science, all at Northwestern University and co-authors of Billionaires and Stealth Politics (forthcoming 2018, University of Chicago Press)

See also

Le Monde — Le Blog de Thomas Piketty
Le Monde » and the billionaires

Thomas Piketty

Joseph E. Stiglitz — Déjà Voodoo

A Trump administration staffed by plutocrats – most of whom gained their wealth from rent-seeking activities, rather than from productive entrepreneurship – could be expected to reward themselves. But the Republicans’ proposed tax reform is a bigger gift to corporations and the ultra-rich than most had anticipated.

Best line: "Trump assumed office promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. Instead, the swamp has grown wider and deeper. With the Republicans’ proposed tax reform, it threatens to engulf the US economy."

Project Syndicate
Déjà Voodoo

Joseph E. Stiglitz, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979, University Professor at Columbia University, Co-Chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute

Ralph Nader — How Big Corporations Game Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy

Tracing the growth of corporatocracy.

Counterpunch
How Big Corporations Game Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy

Ralph Nader

teleSUR — The Pope Hails Communism for Focus on 'Poor' and 'Marginalized'

Asked if his pursuit and for a more egalitarian society meant he envisioned a “Marxist type of society,” the pontiff quipped "it is the communists who think like Christians.”…

teleSUR
The Pope Hails Communism for Focus on 'Poor' and 'Marginalized'

Alex Christoforou — Alex Soros comes out of the shadows. Son of George Soros is busy putting politicians in his pocket

Thought that the world would soon be rid of then influence of octogenarian George Soros? Think again.

Just like a chip off the old block.

Alex really gets around these days.

The prospects for liberal interventionism appears to remain alive and well for the foreseeable future.

The Duran
Alex Soros comes out of the shadows. Son of George Soros is busy putting politicians in his pocket

Alex Christoforou

John Keane — Capitalism and Democracy [part 3]

Part two of this series on capitalism and democracy introduced the unusual idea of ‘democracy failure’. Instead of seeing democracy as the hapless victim of capitalist markets, as Marxists and others have typically done in the past, it examined the way market failures happen when the power-humbling mechanisms of monitory democracy are not applied to capitalist markets. This third part extends the point. It probes Jane Mayer’s recent fine book Dark Money to understand how democracies such as the United States are not only ruined when the wealthy try to buy their way into political power, but also why plutocracy is preparing the way for further market failures.…

The Conversation
Capitalism and Democracy [part 3]
John Keane | Professor of Politics, University of Sydney

Sputnik — Assange Says 80% of US National Security Agency Budget Privatized

Addressing International Media Forum "New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream", Julian Assange said that about 80 percent of the US National Security Agency budget is privatized. He also said that Google is engaged with the US White House and Hillary Clinton's elections campaign. Google has power to control information flow, he added.

As much as 80 percent of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) budget is privatized, demonstrating the merger between Washington and corporate organizations, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday.

This is rather ominous, when considered along with the military-industrial complex. The entire military and intelligence establishments are largely privately owned, although the line between military and intelligence is blurred since US intelligence is largely operational rather than informational.

Should this be called "corporate statism" or "statist corporatism?" Whatever, it is scary for democracy, if that even exists in the US other than as a facade, with politicians for sale.

Sputnik
Assange Says 80% of US National Security Agency Budget Privatized

Yves Smith — New IMF Paper Challenges Neoliberal Orthodoxy

While the IMF’s research team has for many years chipped away at mainstream economic thinking, a short, accessible paper makes an even more frontal challenge. It’s caused such a stir that the Financial Times featured it on its front page. We’ve embedded it at the end of this post and encourage you to read it and circulate it.

The article cheekily flags the infamous case of the Chicago Boys, Milton Friedman’s followers in Pinochet’s Chile, as having been falsely touted as a success. If anything, the authors are too polite in describing what a train wreck resulted. A plutocratic land grab and speculation-fueled bubble led quickly to a depression, forcing Pinochet to implement Keynesian policies, as well as rolling back labor “reforms,” to get the economy back on its feet.

The papers describes three ways in which neoliberal reforms do more harm than good.…

Now that the wheels are coming off, the knives are coming out.

Naked Capitalism
New IMF Paper Challenges Neoliberal Orthodoxy
Yves Smith

Brad DeLong — The Melting Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy

Assessment 

When I try to evaluate the state of the debate over Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century two years after its first (French) publication, I find myself driven to three conclusions. The factors that Piketty identifies as leading to the melting-away of the social-democratic North Atlantic economy are operating, but so far their effects on income and wealth inequality have been smaller than other largely-unrelated factors that have been operating in the past generation and generating the rise of housing as a source of wealth and the rise of the super-incomes. Piketty's factors have been supercharged by other forces over the past generation, but that does not mean that they are not at work—and, in fact, reinforces the chances that Piketty's inequality-driving factors will be of decisive importance over the next seventy years. The question of whether our road leads to Piketty (2014)—a new Belle Époque plutocracy—or Keynes (1936)—a euthanization of the rentier in which the wealth of the rich is outlandish but their incomes are not due to low rates of profit—hinges on our politics. And our politics is something we can control.

We as a civilization could decide that we are not willing to let money talk so loudly in politics. We could keep our politics from being one of establishing monopoly after monopoly and rent-extraction chokepoint after rent-extraction chokepoint. If we manage that, then the forecasts of Keynes (1936) and Rognlie (2015) will come true, and a rise in wealth accumulation will carry with it a fall in the rate of profit, and a highly-productive not-too-unequal society.

But right now money talks very loudly indeed. And I leave the Piketty debate more depressed about our ability to keep it from talking so loudly. What makes me more depressed? The Piketty debate itself does: The eagerness of so-many economists to aggressively make so many shoddy arguments that Piketty does not know what he is talking about.

Talking Points Memo
The Melting Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy

J. Bradford DeLong

Electing the President of An Empire — Abby Martin interviews Noam Chomsky

NC: About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% on the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised. Their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. As you move up the scale you get a bit more influence. When you get to the top, policy is made.

Now the top can mean a fraction of 1%, so it’s kind of a plutocracy with democratic forms. And the elections, I mean by now it’s almost become a joke but it’s always been true that campaign financing plays a very substantial role in not only who’s elected but what the policies are. That goes back 100 years. Great campaign manager 100 years ago, Mark Hanna, was asked once: “What are the important things that you have to have to run a campaign. He said: “There are three things. First one’s money. The second one is money. And I forget what the third one is.”

Aside — Abby Martin is looking to be her generation's Amy Goodman. Her recent interview of Larry Wilkerson was excellent, and this interview with Chomsky continues in that vein. Interesting to see Larry Wilkerson, a self-identified Republican, although now a disaffected one, agreeing with arch-leftist Noam Chomsky. I hope Abby will interview Mike Lofgren, too.

AlterNet
Noam Chomsky: Electing the President of An Empire
Abby Martin

Paul Street — Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship

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
Verging on Plutocracy? Getting Real About the Unelected Dictatorship

Paul Street

Meteor Blades — Sanders invokes FDR, LBJ, and Martin Luther King Jr. to define his version of 'democratic socialism'

Going on the offensive after being tarred as a self-identified "socialist." Bernie should have called himself a social democrat (opposed to neoliberalism) from the get-go. Now he is stuck with bad branding. Amateurish politically.

So let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me. [Come on Bernie, "social democracy."] It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans. And it builds on what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968 when he stated that; “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.” It builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.

Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.

Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt. [...]

In my view, it’s time we had democratic socialism for working families, not just for Wall Street, billionaires and large corporations. It means that we should not be providing welfare for corporations, it means we should not be providing huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country, or trade policies which boost corporate profits as workers lose their jobs. It means that we create a government that works for works for all of us, not just powerful special interests. It means that economic rights must be an essential part of what America stands for.

It means that health care should be a right of all people, not a privilege.

He seems to be stuck on the individualism versus socialism thing.

Daily Kos
Sanders invokes FDR, LBJ, and Martin Luther King Jr. to define his version of 'democratic socialism'

Meteor Blades

Peter Radford — Plutocracy?

The 2012 Page, Bartels, and Seawright paper makes interesting reading. I came across it via the Krugman blog and recommend it to you all.

The key is that this is a first small attempt to quantify the difference in perspective between the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘general public’. The paper is thus an important step along the way towards understanding why it is that so much of our political discourse seems totally blind to the reality as experienced by the vast majority of our citizens.
If, like me, you have come to believe that our policy makers have a narrow focus and that their focus overlaps more with that of the wealthy and/or big business than it does with ordinary folk, then this paper is a start to getting empirical support for that feeling.
The paper’s concluding paragraph is worth quoting in full:

“Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their political preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy.”

This is the point: the ability of wealth to affect policy, substantially increased by recent trends and legal decisions, is subverting the very foundation of America’s self-image and self-justification. It is no longer a democracy, or is nearly so, and is rapidly declining into plutocracy.….

The Radford Free Press
Plutocracy?Peter Radford

Also Market Truths Or Obscured Views?

Mike Krieger — Peter Thiel Blasts: The American Political System Is "Not A Democracy Or Constitutional Republic"

Libertarians coming to the conclusion that it may not be just government that's the problem but government capture by large firms and oligarchs — a conclusion that left libertarians came to some time ago.

Zero Hedge
Peter Thiel Blasts: The American Political System Is "Not A Democracy Or Constitutional Republic"

Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog

Steve Fraser — Plutocracy the First Time Around: Revisiting the Great Upheaval and the First Gilded Age

Is history rhyming?

TomDispatch
Plutocracy the First Time Around: Revisiting the Great Upheaval and the First Gilded Age
Steve Fraser

Keane Bhatt — Progressive Policies Are Popular - So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?

A HuffPost/YouGov poll (6/20/13) found that 74 percent of the US public supports requiring companies to offer paid sick leave to their employees; paid maternity leave garnered 61 percent approval. In a number of recent polls, the idea of free community college received majority support (The Hill, 1/20/15)–one poll found that more Republicans favored the measure than opposed it, rather remarkable given that the idea was only recently popularized by President Obama himself.

So it's not voters' preferences that, in Blitzer's words, "could hurt Democrats" facing elections. A likelier reason is election funding. Political scientists Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson observed that politicians largely depended on financing from economic elites (AlterNet, 12/18/14) in what were probably the most expensive midterms in history (Washington Post, 10/22/14)

This is entirely consistent with first Chief Justice John Jay's view that the people who own the country should govern the country, making a lie of Abraham Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people and for the people." So much for the left in the United States. There is in effect one party, the party of the ruling elite, which fields two candidates for each office to create a façade of democracy.

Citi called this result "plutonomy." It is aptly characterized as "oligarchic democracy," as Aristotle foresaw in Politics. Wealth and power skew the selection process. Aristotle thought that true democracy could be best achieved by random selection using choice by lot, thereby eliminating class bias.

Truth out

Progressive Policies Are Popular - So Why Should Democrats Be Afraid of Them?

Keane Bhatt, FAIR | Op-Ed    

Janet Allon — Krugman Dismantles the Right's Hysterical Fear of Actual Democracy

Krugman concludes: "The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy. And it’s by no means clear which side will win."

AlterNet
Krugman Dismantles the Right's Hysterical Fear of Actual Democracy
Janet Allon

Also, Luke Brinker, Paul Krugman’s fear: “It’s by no means clear” whether democracy or plutocracy will prevail in America, at Salon.

Sean Mcelwee — Conspiracy of the plutocrats: Secrets of the wealth-inequality explosion revealed

Piketty protégé Gabriel Zucman explains how the world's wealthiest are scamming governments for trillions

"Meritocracy" at work.

Salon
Conspiracy of the plutocrats: Secrets of the wealth-inequality explosion revealed

Sean Mcelwee

Eric W. Dolan — ‘Oligarchic tendencies’: Study finds only the wealthy get represented in the Senate (via Raw Story )

‘Oligarchic tendencies’: Study finds only the wealthy get represented in the Senate (via Raw Story )

Members of the U.S. Senate do not respond equally to the views of all their constituents, according to research to be published in Political Research Quarterly next month. Senators overall represent their wealthiest constituents, while those on bottom…

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