Wow. 16 million hits, and counting. Leave it to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) to show how to turn a campaign finance primer into a viral video. Certainly the first time a congressional hearing on strengthening ethics rules for the executive branch reached such a huge audience.
This is a must-watch clip. I hesitate to add much commentary, as anything I write will likely not add all that much, and might instead only distract from the original.Nonetheless, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes! I will hazard adding some commentary.
I only ask that you watch the clip first. It’ll only take five minutes of your time. Just something to ponder on what I hope for many readers is a lazy, relaxing Sunday. Please watch it, as my commentary will assume you’ve done so.This is a big deal. I have often written previously that without overhauling campaign finance, lasting reform is not possible, if it is even possible to pass in the first place. Getting the money out of politics is a sine qua non of genuine change for the better. And that is just for starters.
We need a revolution to cast off monopolies and restore entrepreneurial freedom. First of two excerpts from “The Myth of Capitalism.”Bloomberg Opinion
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....
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.
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
The Trump White House research team have issued a very strange report. It’s called “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,”. It purports to prove that ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’ policies would be damaging to Americans because the ‘opportunity costs’ of socialism compared to capitalism are so much higher.
What is strange and rather amusing is that the White House advisers to Trump deem it necessary to explain to Americans the failures of ‘socialism’ in 2018. But when you delve into the report, it becomes clear that what is worrying the Trumpists is not ‘socialism’, but the policies of left Democrat Bernie Sanders for higher taxes on the rich 1% and the increased popularity of a ‘single-payer’ national health service for all. The popularity of these policies threatens the Republican majority in Congress and also the wealth and income of big pharma corporations and Trump’s billionaire supporters....Michael Roberts Blog
The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even more unequal.
Those in the small group at the top have long been able to put distance between themselves and everyone else preciselybecause they’ve been able to capture the surplus and then convert their share of the surplus into ownership of wealth. And the returns on their wealth allow them to capture even more of the surplus produced within global capitalism. This is accompanied by growing income inequality.
However, although people are aware of inequality, they are typically unaware of its real extent, and mainstream economics and the popular press contribute to this situation, which in turn leads to the reproduction of the system that produces ever-more-grotesque levels of inequality.
Both class and ideology underpin this worsening situation. The tiny group at the top, both nationally and globally, have both an interest and the means to maintain the economic and social rules and institutions that allow them to capture the surplus, and thus create more distance between themselves and everyone else. Meantime, mainstream economic and political discourses, inside and outside the academy, tend to ignore the class conditions and consequences of inequality – and to undermine the possibility of a real debate about the kinds of changes that are necessary to give the majority of people a say in how the surplus is utilized....
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."
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” —Justice Louis BrandeisThe rise of monopoly, monopsony, oligarchy, plutonomy, and government capture, spelling the death of a moribund republic in which corruption at the top has been legalized in the name of the "free market," which supposedly is a necessary condition for democracy.
This all implies Trump should become well versed in the national economy ideas of Friedrich List – whose tariff-protected Zollverein League was essentially the founding method of Prussia to build the German nation.
Disraeli’s Coningsby was never more appropriate; “So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
Many countries have powerful elites with outsize influence, but in India, dynastic elites control the top echelons in every sphere of public life: politics, business, the media, and even Bollywood.…
Every point of leverage – from government contracts and industrial licenses to national awards – is used to maintain this ecosystem of power.…
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
Whatever enthusiasm the Obama administration may have once had for the democratic upheavals of the Arab Spring has virtually disappeared. That point was underscored with Secretary of State John Kerry’s just-completed meetings with Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The administration’s decision to deliver a shipment of F-16 fighter planes to Cairo on the eve of Kerry’s trip further emphasized that Washington’s affections lie with Egypt’s military autocrats, not the supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the elected president Sisi and his fellow generals deposed and imprisoned.
The Obama administration’s Egypt policy is a microcosm of a troubling pattern in U.S. foreign policy. At least with respect to the Third World, throughout both the Cold War and the so-called war on terror, U.S. policy makers seem to prefer compliant autocrats to feisty, unpredictable democratic leaders.…
The enthusiasm for corrupt, thuggish autocrats has been a bipartisan phenomenon. A few years after Carter’s astonishing toast to the Shah, Vice President George H. W. Bush engaged in similar behavior toward Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos. Bush emphasized the U.S. government’s respect and admiration for Marcos: “We stand with you sir . . . . We love your adherence to democratic principle and to the democratic processes.” The reality was that the Philippines strongman had been a full-fledged dictator since his imposition of martial law in 1972, and he had displayed pronounced authoritarian tendencies and practices for several years before that official proclamation. His rule was also so astonishingly corrupt that it nearly destroyed the Philippines’ economy.…
Unfortunately, there are few signs that U.S. officials have learned that their preference for authoritarians is both sleazy and counterproductive.…That is because a society under capitalism is just a pretend democracy. It is really an oligarchy, specifically plutonomy.
So, the current situation does appear hopeless.
However, in challenging the terms of the bailout—first, in supporting the “no” vote in the 5 July referendum and, then, in Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s statements that his government would not implement reform measures beyond those agreed with lenders at a euro zone summit this month—the Greek government has come to represent all the “thinking and suffering people” of Europe and to expose the “passive and thoughtless existence” that characterizes the tiny elite that currently reigns on that continent.
That, perhaps, should fill us with hope.Sorry, I haven't got my hopes up. If the European elite is to be defeated in their attempt to impose neoliberalism on Europe, indications are that it will likely be by the nationalist Right rather than a resurgent Left. The Left has had its chance on several occasions in different countries and has consistently blown it.
Still, the negotiations are nice and all, but they’re not going anywhere, and they never will. The Troika side of the table is interested in one thing only: to humiliate Athens and force it into ultimate submission, along the lines of those photographs we’ve come to know of Abu Graibh.
Yanis Varoufakis labeled the Troika policies vis-a-vis Greece ‘fiscal waterboarding’ when he started out as finance minister, and here’s thinking he should have stuck with that image in a much more persistent and a much louder fashion....
It’s time for Tsipras to turn to his people, on national TV, and say look, whatever we can discuss with the Troika, and whatever compromise we may be able to reach, there is no option on or off the table that would allow for you, the people of Greece, to not be debt slaves for the rest of your lives.
The European Union is merely a crude modern version of a feudal society (but without the debt jubilee older versions had), that’s all the morals that Brussels and Berlin can muster. And, Tsipras should say, if that is what you want, if you want to be slaves instead of a free people, tell me so. I will draw my conclusions from that....
And no, none of us get a free pass on this one. Your voice is long overdue. Because no matter where you are or who you are, whether you’re American or European, it’s still your government, acting in your name, that supports and magnifies the craziness unloaded upon the cradle of democracy.
All the Greek people know until now is that Europe and the IMF are attempting to strangle them. Still, so many among us don’t agree with that at all. Thing is, it’s time to let that be known. To the people of Greece, and to our own ‘leaders’ who if we don’t get vocal will continue to do as they please. Just because the people you’ve elected don’t have any morals doesn’t mean you don’t have to either.The Automatic Earth
Why does it matter that we as a nation understand this causal linkage [between economic inequality and lack of social mobility]? The answer has to do with both policy and power. One way of summarizing the fundamental problem of narrowly distributed growth is that those whose incomes are asset-driven hold disproportionate political power relative to those whose incomes depend on paychecks.
Thus, anti-inequality measures that threaten the top 1%–that attempt to reduce their economic “rents”—like collective bargaining, higher minimum wages, trade policy that protects workers’ rights and wages, full employment, robust safety nets, progressive taxation, are attacked as counterproductive to growth and jobs.
That leaves us stuck in a cul-de-sac: we can’t increase opportunity because we can’t decrease inequality....Bingo!
Unfortunately, I fear there are more Baltimores in our future.Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
According to a leaked European Commission proposal in the ongoing EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, EU member state legislative initiatives will have to be vetted for potential impacts on private business interests.
The proposal forms part of a wider plan for so-called “regulatory cooperation”. Civil society groups have already denounced earlier iterations of this plan as being a tool to stop or roll back regulation intended to protect the public interest. The new elements in the leaked proposal expand the problem, according to civil society organisations.
Civil society groups have condemned the “regulatory exchange” plan as an affront to parliamentary democracy. “This is an insult to citizens, elected politicians and democracy itself”, says Max Bank of Lobby Control.
The “regulatory exchange” proposal will force laws drafted by democratically-elected politicians through an extensive screening process. This process will occur throughout the 78 States (50 U.S. states and 28 EU ones), not just in Brussels and Washington DC. Laws will be evaluated on whether or not they are compatible with the economic interests of major companies. Responsibility for this screening will lie with the Regulatory Cooperation Body, a permanent, undemocratic, and unaccountable conclave of European and American technocrats.
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners. — George Carlin, The American DreamAccording to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.
“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?....Making the world safe for neoliberal globalization aka neo-feudalism under a Western elite under the aegis of the world's sole superpower. What could go wrong?
How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?....Financiers.
The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments....I guess you can see where this is headed. Ellen wanders off track and out of paradigm with MMT.
