Softpanorama

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Home Switchboard Unix Administration Red Hat TCP/IP Networks Neoliberalism Toxic Managers
(slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and  bastardization of classic Unix

Key Myths of Neoliberalism

News Neoliberalism Neoliberalism Bookshelf Recommended Links Neoliberal rationality The neoliberal myth of human capital Neoclassical Pseudo Theories and Crooked and Bought Economists as Fifth Column of Financial Oligarchy Scapegoating and victimization of poor and unemployed
Ayn Rand and her Objectivism Cult Neoliberal "New Class" as "creative class" Small government smoke screen Invisible Hand Hypothesys: The Theory of Self-regulation of the Markets Shareholder value scam "Starving the beast" bait and switch Universal quantification  Deification of market
Neoliberalism's Myth on Benefits of Free Trade Neoliberal concept of freedom Financization of everything in sight Mathiness Rational expectations scam Numbers racket and "Potemkin numbers" Free Markets Newspeak The Great Transformation
Neoliberal "New Class" as variant of Soviet Nomenklatura Techno-fundamentalism Ayn Rand and her Objectivism Cult Greed Is King - What We Learned Managerialism Deception as an art form Machiavellism Mayberry Machiavellians
Neoliberalism as secular religion, "idolatry of money"  Pope Francis on danger of neoliberalism Over-consumption of Luxury Goods as Market Failure Globalization of Financial Flows Neoliberalism as Trotskyism for the rich Libertarian Philosophy Greenspan humor Etc

A critical look on the role of myths in the neoliberal society was undertaken by Robert Bonomo in his artcile We're All Zombies ( The Unz Review  Feb 23, 2015). He compare behaviour of financial oligarchy in  the neoliberal society with the behaviour of zombies:

The great psychologist and mystic Carl Jung was asked if a myth could be equated to a collective dream and he answered this way, “A myth…is the product of an unconscious process in a particular social group, at a particular time, at a particular place. This unconscious process can naturally be equated with a dream. Hence anyone who ‘mythologizes,’ that is, tells myths, is speaking out of this dream.”

Many of the themes in our popular culture are conscious story telling devices with the definite purpose of social engineering/control, but others seem to just emerge from the collective unconscious like the stuff of dreams.

For example  essential quality of the zombie myth is its unquenchable hunger. No amount of flesh and blood seems able to quench the longing to consume live human flesh. Modern man has a similar problem -- no amount of money, sex, gadgets, job titles, drugs, entertainment, pornography, art, religion or gurus seem able to quench our thirst. We live in constant hunger. If we equate the zombie ‘hunger’ for flesh to the human desire for money, the comparison becomes almost uncanny. Most adult humans spend most of their day either making money or spending it while being constantly bombarded with propaganda/advertising to keep them hungry.

From the most humble street vendor to the billionaires on CNBC, no one seems to ever have enough money. Zombies need to eat live human flesh and money is at its core, human labor. Our craving for money is really the craving for the work of others, for the sweat and blood of millions to furnish us with unlimited amounts of food and consumer goods.

The vast majority of Westerners have ceased to create anything tangible. Only one in five Americans actually produce anything. Eating what one produces on a farm or trading manufactured goods for food connects us to life. But when people spend ten hours hours a day in an office looking at a computer screen and two hours in traffic, somehow eating, and living, become abstract. What are we actually doing to create the food , heat, and the shelter we need?

Modern man is almost entirely without out any practical skills. He doesn’t know how to grow food, hunt animals or build a house. He uses all sorts of electronic tools whose core technologies he doesn’t really understand and which he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix.

This set of circumstances is a recent development in human history, beginning in the 18th century and growing exponentially in the last 30 years during the information revolution. We are helpless slaves to technologies we don’t understand and to media that programs us to believe all sorts of propaganda designed to keep us from actually thinking critically.

Neoliberals created amazingly elaborate set of myths. Which are enforced via universities and MSM very effectivly. Both in quality of myths and the quility of indoctibation they are successfully competing with Marxism and Trotskyism. Like Bolsheviks they creates its special "Neoliberal-Speak" a language for indoctrinated, much like "Marxism-speak" in the USSR. 

We will list only some of the most popular neoliberal myths. Among them


Our work will be guided by a shared belief that market  principles, open trade and investment regimes, and effectively regulated financial markets foster the dynamism, innovation, and entrepreneurship that are essential for economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction. […]

We recognize that these reforms will only be successful if grounded in a commitment to free market  principles, including the rule of law, respect for private  property, open trade and investment, competitive markets, and efficient, effectively regulated financial systems. These  principles are essential to economic growth and  prosperity and have lifted millions out of poverty, and have significantly raised the global standard of living. 

Recognizing the necessity to improve financial sector regulation, we must avoid over-regulation that would hamper economic growth and exacerbate the contraction of capital flows, including to developing countries. We underscore the critical importance of rejecting  protectionism and not turning inward in times of financial uncertainty.

-Declaration from the G-20 Washington Summit 2008

 

Amid the burgeoning financial crisis, the Group of Twenty (G-20) met in 2008 for the Washington Summit, attended by then President Rodríguez Zapatero of the ruling Socialist party (PSOE), where the world’s wealthiest nations called for concerted international cooperation to reform the financial sector, favorable to reviving global flows of capital.

The many points identified in the declaration (the need to strengthen transparency and accountability, enhance regulation, promote integrity in the financial markets, reform international financial institutions, and foster prudential oversight and risk management), may have been a legible indicator that the world’s leading economic  powers were coming to terms with the responsibility of unethical business practices and systemic flaws, among other factors, in the successive tumbling of international markets in a domino effect ( Declaration of the Summit ).

Yet, despite the different nuances of  policy positions in the European Union at large, political and financial powers have upheld structural reform  as the basis from which to pursue deeper austerity measures and labor reforms that favor precarity, thereby dismantling the welfare state and social rights in Spain under the aegis of neoliberal reform. In the neoliberal policies of the EU, reducing the deficit by cutting public expenditures on social measures (on public healthcare, education, pensions, social  programs, and so on) while leaving others untouched (investments in private enterprise, the military, national security programs, and so on) has been expressed, and indeed imposed, as part of the only  solution to the crisis in Spain, as elsewhere. According to this logic, as the G-20 declaration asserts, greater competition, private investments, and the surveillance and tempered regulation of the free market. In sum, free market activity with minimal state intervention, as deemed necessary equate directly to greater opportunity, entrepreneurship, and prosperity that deliver poverty reduction and a higher standard of living on a global scale. And yet, in extensive literature on the effects of neoliberal policies in general and of austerity in particular, nothing could be farther from the social reality experienced by world populations, as these reforms have correlated to greater inequality, unrest, disease, and mortality.

 In the forging of its myth, neoliberal policies are asserted by the G-20 as providing a better quality of life for all. On what bases is the claim made that a higher standard of living follows naturally from austerity and the "flexibilization" of labor, among other neoliberal reforms? Myth, writes Roland Barthes, bears an ideological mechanics that  ‘naturalizes’ its constructed character in order to assert and legitimize itself as truth. Exemplified in

Barthes’ reading of a magazine photograph in which a soldier of African descent salutes the French flag, myth produces a sleight of hand here, forged from an image of colonial subservience to the French Empire that collapses the signified into a signifier

These reforms have proved historically “damaging [to] the welfare of the common people in those countries, causing enormous suffering,” writes Vicenç Navarro. “[T]hese policies had consequences for the welfare and quality of life of ordinary people, creating death, disease, and social unrest” (“The IMF’s Mea Culpa?”).

Also see  Basu and Stuckler; Blyth; Harvey,  A Brief History of Neoliberalism ; and Lustig and her contributors, to name a few.  by reducing its connotative meaning into a self-evident truth: “that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro [ sic] in serving his so-called oppressors” ( Mythologies  116). By attributing the constructed character of presumptions to nature, myth may  become an accomplice to legitimize power relations by forging an alibi. Here, to the ‘natural order’  of the cultural (and ethnic) ‘ superiority ’ of the metropolis  and its right to (military) rule over the colonial subject, demonstrated in the subordinate’s allegiance to the empire. In this sense, as in Barthes’ s reading, myth may adopt or invert the arguments of its opposition, despite the lack of veracity in its production of meanings or claims. “Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a  perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it always to have an ‘elsewhere’ at its disposal”—  an elsewhere  which Barthes locates in the empire’s  benevolent intentions as its alibi to implicit racial subordination and colonial oppression (123). Thereby myth becomes indisputable material if its alibi is taken literally, at once  passing itself off as a natural order that has always been and that bears a malleable disposition to be appropriated in further myth-making, say, in Barthes’ s reading, at the service of imperial power and its legitimacy of rule. Let us return then to the assertion that neoliberal governmentality delivers greater good on a global scale.

The myth that neoliberalism produces poverty reduction and social wellbeing for all has become an alibi for the dismantling of the welfare state in Spain and with it, an accomplice to the dismantling of social rights, on the one hand, and to the channeling of state coffers into private interests to the benefit of banks, financial institutions, and private business, on the other. Such a polemic has been flagged by economist Vicenç Navarro, who argues that Spain’s ‘ oft’ multi-billion euro  bailout from the European Central Bank (ECB) does not alleviate the crisis of credit-lending in Spain, as this capital is destined for Spanish banks to pay off interest on loans from European financial institutions abroad, while the Spanish state incurs this burden of debt, on the one hand, and must also adopt austerity policies to dismantle social welfare programs, on the other (“The Euro Is Not in Trouble”). Public funds, in other words, are redirected to private interests in neoliberal practice at the expense of labor

“If I focus on a full signifier, in which I clearly distinguish the meaning and the form, and consequently  the distortion which the one imposes on the other, I undo the signification of the myth, and I receive the latter as an imposture” (128). See Roland Barthes,

 Mythologies

As Navarro notes, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have placed conditions on Spain’s eligibility to receive financial assistance by urging the government to pursue measures that would increase the flexibility of labor, reduce public expenditures on pensions, and  privatize the welfare state — in sum, to deepen neoliberal reforms (“The Euro Is Not in Trouble”).

One form of what David Harvey calls the “accumulation by dispossession” of capital, these measures entail the “reversion to the private domain of common property rights won through past class struggles (the right to a state pension, to welfare, or to national health care),” which often, if not exclusively, benefit the greatest fortunes at the expense of social  programs (“The ‘New’ Imperialism” 75).

That is, where the private accumulation of capital reaches its limits of projected growth, the sustainability of a given enterprise must be secured through dispossession, through takeovers, expropriation, the payment of private debts from public funds, and so on. However, one should not presume that these reforms are adopted coercively alone, as government officials in Spain’s predominant left and right parties (PSOE and PP, respectively) have welcomed likeminded policies, historically, in order to meet the accords for Spain’s adhesion to the European Union after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

Amid neoliberal governance, contemporary times have witnessed the rise of new transnational actors and financial players. The state, in other words, experiences a crisis of sovereignty for its accentuated lack of autonomous decision-making on fiscal and labor matters, in which government officials and policy-makers often succumb to corporate, banking, and financial interests beyond the state, and sometimes do so voluntarily. This circumstance is not new, however, nor is it unique to Spain. In the 1970s, foreign credit lending from financial institutions in the United States would wield powerful leverage to reshape strategically the economic policies of indebted countries.

 As David Harvey notes, after Mexico was pushed into default on its debt to New York financial institutions in 1982-84, this circumstance provided the test case for the IMF and United States government to work in concert to demand neoliberal reforms of Mexico towards greater labor flexibility  (the deregulation of labor protections for workers), free market laws, and privatization (, 28-31). Echoing the test case of Mexico, today the European Commission (EC), the IMF, and the ECB, known popularly as the Troika, have urged the European member states of intervened economies to pursue further neoliberal “structural adjustments”

Top Visited
 Switchboard
Latest
Past week
Past month

NEWS CONTENTS

Old News ;-)

[May 30, 2021] Mean Girl Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan

Highly recommended!
See also her book: The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy by Lisa Duggan
Notable quotes:
"... From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world. The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated-the reign of brutal capitalism-intensified. Though Ayn Rand's popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation took a dive during the 1960s and '70s. Then after her death in 1982, during the neoliberal administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, her star rose once more. (See chapter 4 for a full discussion of the rise of neoliberalism.) ..."
"... During the global economic crisis of 2008 it seemed that the neoliberal order might collapse. It lived on, however, in zombie form as discredited political policies and financial practices were restored. ..."
"... We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social, and cultural transition - but we don't yet know which way we're headed. The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelical Christians pull strings. The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand. ..."
"... The current Trump administration is stuffed to the gills with Rand acolytes. Trump himself identifies with Fountainhead character Howard Roark; former secretary of state Rex Tillerson listed Adas Shrugged as his favorite book in a Scouting magazine feature; his replacement Mike Pompeo has been inspired by Rand since his youth. Ayn Rand's influence is ascendant across broad swaths of our dominant political culture - including among public figures who see her as a key to the Zeitgeist, without having read a worth of her writing.'' ..."
"... Rand biographer Jennifer Burns asserts simply that Ayn Rand's fiction is "the gateway drug" to right-wing politics in the United States - although her influence extends well beyond the right wing ..."
"... The resulting Randian sense of life might be called "optimistic cruelty." Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed. ..."
"... The Fountainhead and especially Atlas Shrugged fabricate history and romanticize violence and domination in ways that reflect, reshape, and reproduce narratives of European superiority' and American virtue. ..."
"... It is not an accident that the novels' fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes." ..."
"... Does the pervasive cruelty of today's ruling classes shock you? Or, at least give you pause from time to time? Are you surprised by the fact that our elected leaders seem to despise people who struggle, people whose lives are not cushioned and shaped by inherited wealth, people who must work hard at many jobs in order to scrape by? If these or any of a number of other questions about the social proclivities of our contemporary ruling class detain you for just two seconds, this is the book for you. ..."
"... As Duggan makes clear, Rand's influence is not just that she offered a programmatic for unregulated capitalism, but that she offered an emotional template for "optimistic cruelty" that has extended far beyond its libertarian confines. Mean Girl is a fun, worthwhile read! ..."
"... Her work circulated endlessly in those circles of the Goldwater-ite right. I have changed over many years, and my own life experiences have led me to reject the casual cruelty and vicious supremacist bent of Rand's beliefs. ..."
"... In fact, though her views are deeply-seated, Rand is, at heart, a confidence artist, appealing only to narrow self-interest at the expense of the well-being of whole societies. ..."
Jun 14, 2019 | www.amazon.com

From the Introduction

... ... ...

Mean Girls, which was based on interviews with high school girls conducted by Rosalind Wiseman for her 2002 book Queen Bees and War/tubes, reflects the emotional atmosphere of the age of the Plastics (as the most popular girls at Actional North Shore High are called), as well as the era of Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, whose motto is "Greed is Good."1 The culture of greed is the hallmark of the neoliberal era, the period beginning in the 1970s when the protections of the U.S. and European welfare states, and the autonomy of postcolonial states around the world, came under attack. Advocates of neoliberalism worked to reshape global capitalism by freeing transnational corporations from restrictive forms of state regulation, stripping away government efforts to redistribute wealth and provide public services, and emphasizing individual responsibility over social concern.

From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world. The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated-the reign of brutal capitalism-intensified. Though Ayn Rand's popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation took a dive during the 1960s and '70s. Then after her death in 1982, during the neoliberal administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, her star rose once more. (See chapter 4 for a full discussion of the rise of neoliberalism.)

During the global economic crisis of 2008 it seemed that the neoliberal order might collapse. It lived on, however, in zombie form as discredited political policies and financial practices were restored. But neoliberal capitalism has always been contested, and competing and conflicting political ideas and organizations proliferated and intensified after 2008 as well.

Protest politics blossomed on the left with Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and opposition to the Dakota Access oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the United States, and with the Arab Spring, and other mobilizations around the world. Anti-neoliberal electoral efforts, like the Bernie Sanders campaign for the U.S. presidency, generated excitement as well.

But protest and organizing also expanded on the political right, with reactionary populist, racial nationalist, and protofascist gains in such countries as India, the Philippines, Russia, Hungary, and the United States rapidly proliferating. Between these far-right formations on the one side and persistent zombie neoliberalism on the other, operating sometimes at odds and sometimes in cahoots, the Season of Mean is truly upon us.

We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social, and cultural transition - but we don't yet know which way we're headed. The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelical Christians pull strings. The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand.

Rand's ideas are not the key to her influence. Her writing does support the corrosive capitalism at the heart of neoliberalism, though few movers and shakers actually read any of her nonfiction. Her two blockbuster novels, 'The Fountainpen and Atlas Shrugged, are at the heart of her incalculable impact. Many politicians and government officials going back decades have cited Rand as a formative influence-particularly finance guru and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a member of Rand's inner circle, and Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president most identified with the national embrace of neoliberal policies.

Major figures in business and finance are or have been Rand fans: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Steve Jobs (Apple), John Mackey (Whole Foods), Mark Cuban (NBA), John Allison (BB&T Banking Corporation), Travis Kalanik (Uber), Jelf Bezos (Amazon), ad infinitum.

There are also large clusters of enthusiasts for Rand's novels in the entertainment industry, from the 1940s to the present-from Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Raquel Welch to Jerry Lewis, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, Sandra Bullock, Sharon Stone, Ashley Judd, Eva Mendes, and many more.

The current Trump administration is stuffed to the gills with Rand acolytes. Trump himself identifies with Fountainhead character Howard Roark; former secretary of state Rex Tillerson listed Adas Shrugged as his favorite book in a Scouting magazine feature; his replacement Mike Pompeo has been inspired by Rand since his youth. Ayn Rand's influence is ascendant across broad swaths of our dominant political culture - including among public figures who see her as a key to the Zeitgeist, without having read a worth of her writing.''

But beyond the famous or powerful fans, the novels have had a wide popular impact as bestsellers since publication. Along with Rand's nonfiction, they form the core texts for a political/ philosophical movement: Objectivism. There are several U.S.- based Objectivist organizations and innumerable clubs, reading groups, and social circles. A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that only the Bible had influenced readers more than Atlas Shrugged, while a 1998 Modern Library poll listed The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as the two most revered novels in English.

Atlas Shrugged in particular skyrocketed in popularity in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. The U.S. Tea Party movement, founded in 2009, featured numerous Ayn Rand-based signs and slogans, especially the opening line of Atlas Shrugged: "Who is John Galt?" Republican pundit David Frum claimed that the Tea Party was reinventing the GOP as "the party of Ayn Rand." During 2009 as well, sales of Atlas Shrugged tripled, and GQ_magazine called Rand the year's most influential author. A 2010 Zogby poll found that 29 percent of respondents had read Atlas Shrugged, and half of those readers said it had affected their political and ethical thinking.

In 2018, a business school teacher writing in Forbes magazine recommended repeat readings: "Recent events - the bizarro circus that is the 2016 election, the disintegration of Venezuela, and so on make me wonder if a lot of this could have been avoided bad we taken Atlas Shrugged's message to heart. It is a book that is worth re-reading every few years."3

Rand biographer Jennifer Burns asserts simply that Ayn Rand's fiction is "the gateway drug" to right-wing politics in the United States - although her influence extends well beyond the right wing.4

But how can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement. This sexiness extends beyond romance to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called her "sense of life." Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a "structure of feeling," Rand's sense of life combines the libido-infused desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight.5

Lauren Berlant has called the structure of feeling, or emotional situation, of those who struggle for a good life under neoliberal conditions "cruel optimism"-the complex of feelings necessary to keep plugging away hopefully despite setbacks and losses.'' Rand's contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration and glee that enliven Rand's novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life might be called "optimistic cruelty." Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed.

Ayn Rand's optimistic cruelty appeals broadly and deeply through its circulation of familiar narratives: the story of "civilizational" progress, die belief in American exceptionalism, and a commitment to capitalist freedom.

Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as violent conquest. America is imagined as a clean slate for pure capitalist freedom, with no indigenous people, no slaves, no exploited immigrants or workers in sight. The Fountainhead and especially Atlas Shrugged fabricate history and romanticize violence and domination in ways that reflect, reshape, and reproduce narratives of European superiority' and American virtue.

Their logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on radicalized beauty and physical capacity - perceived ugliness or disability' are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.

Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Ntation through the lens of industrial capitalism (see chapter 2). They solicit positive identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels' fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes."

aslan , June 1, 2019

devastating account of the ethos that shapes contemporary America

Ayn Rand is a singular influence on American political thought, and this book brilliantly unfolds how Rand gave voice to the ethos that shapes contemporary conservatism. Duggan -- whose equally insightful earlier book Twilight of Equality offered an analysis of neoliberalism and showed how it is both a distortion and continuation of classical liberalism -- here extends the analysis of American market mania by showing how an anti-welfare state ethos took root as a "structure of feeling" in American culture, elevating the individual over the collective and promoting a culture of inequality as itself a moral virtue.

Although reviled by the right-wing press (she should wear this as a badge of honor), Duggan is the most astute guide one could hope for through this devastating history of our recent past, and the book helps explain how we ended up where we are, where far-right, racist nationalism colludes (paradoxically) with libertarianism, an ideology of extreme individualism and (unlikely bed fellows, one might have thought) Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

This short, accessible book is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the contemporary United States.

Wreck2 , June 1, 2019
contemporary cruelty

Does the pervasive cruelty of today's ruling classes shock you? Or, at least give you pause from time to time? Are you surprised by the fact that our elected leaders seem to despise people who struggle, people whose lives are not cushioned and shaped by inherited wealth, people who must work hard at many jobs in order to scrape by? If these or any of a number of other questions about the social proclivities of our contemporary ruling class detain you for just two seconds, this is the book for you.

Writing with wit, rigor, and vigor, Lisa Duggan explains how Ayn Rand, the "mean girl," has captured the minds and snatched the bodies of so very many, and has rendered them immune to feelings of shared humanity with those whose fortunes are not as rosy as their own. An indispensable work, a short read that leaves a long memory.

kerwynk , June 2, 2019
Valuable and insightful commentary on Rand and Rand's influence on today's world

Mean Girl offers not only a biographical account of Rand (including the fact that she modeled one of her key heroes on a serial killer), but describes Rand's influence on neoliberal thinking more generally.

As Duggan makes clear, Rand's influence is not just that she offered a programmatic for unregulated capitalism, but that she offered an emotional template for "optimistic cruelty" that has extended far beyond its libertarian confines. Mean Girl is a fun, worthwhile read!

Sister, June 3, 2019

Superb poitical and cultural exploration of Rand's influence

Lisa Duggan's concise but substantive look at the political and cultural influence of Ayn Rand is stunning. I feel like I've been waiting most of a lifetime for a book that is as wonderfully readable as it is insightful. Many who write about Rand reduce her to a caricature hero or demon without taking her, and the history and choices that produced her seriously as a subject of cultural inquiry. I am one of those people who first encountered Rand's books - novels, but also some nonfiction and her play, "The Night of January 16th," in which audience members were selected as jurors – as a teenager.

Under the thrall of some right-wing locals, I was so drawn to Rand's larger-than-life themes, the crude polarization of "individualism" and "conformity," the admonition to selfishness as a moral virtue, her reductive dismissal of the public good as "collectivism."

Her work circulated endlessly in those circles of the Goldwater-ite right. I have changed over many years, and my own life experiences have led me to reject the casual cruelty and vicious supremacist bent of Rand's beliefs.

But over those many years, the coterie of Rand true believers has kept the faith and expanded. One of the things I value about Duggan's compelling account is her willingness to take seriously the far reach of Rand's indifference to human suffering even as she strips away the veneer that suggests Rand's beliefs were deep.

In fact, though her views are deeply-seated, Rand is, at heart, a confidence artist, appealing only to narrow self-interest at the expense of the well-being of whole societies.

I learned that the hard way, but I learned it. Now I am recommending Duggan's wise book to others who seek to understand today's cultural and political moment in the United States and the rise of an ethic of indifference to anybody but the already affluent. Duggan is comfortable with complexity; most Randian champions or detractors are not.

[May 03, 2021] Free markets are only free for parasites and usurers to run their schemes.

May 03, 2021 | www.unz.com

Mefobills , says: May 2, 2021 at 8:14 pm GMT • 5.9 hours ago

@HallParvey st absolutely destroy them.

I said: Okay, I get it, if you lend them the money, then they can pay. This is like a Ponzi scheme: you lend the investors enough to pay the interest and keep current. That was my introduction to how the balance of payments worked between the United States and the third world and how political the whole credit problem was.

Free markets are only free for parasites and usurers to run their schemes. Lolbertarianism is an ideology of our (((friends))), and I think its adherents are dupes. I no longer think they are well meaning dupes either, they have a personality defect, where they lack empathy.

[Feb 24, 2021] The tendency of liberalism to deny the consequences of society stems from its myth of the 'individual '

Feb 24, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

Patroklos , Feb 21 2021 22:13 utc | 63

[email protected] (and vk passim)

The tendency of liberalism to deny the consequences of society stems from its myth of the 'individual'. Liberalism imagines a world of rational subjects each making decisions in a sovereign way (Thatcher's 'there is no such thing as society'). This allows capitalism to erect a moral framework that represents the consequences of an economy as the consequences of personal decisions. In this way, success (wealth) is 'reward' and failure (poverty) is punishment. It's what Max Weber called 'secular Protestantism'. The working classes participate in this evaluative ideology (Gramsci); it is the source of their self-loathing and the reason they always vote against their own best interests. They all believe their lack of means is a consequence of their lack of intelligence, work ethic, failure of entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. Here is Marx's own critique of the way liberalism washes its hands of the effects of capitalism:

"The... theory... which is also expressed as a law of nature, that population grows faster than the means of subsistence, is the more welcome to the bourgeois as it silences his conscience, makes hard-heartedness into a moral duty and the consequences of society into the consequences of nature, and finally gives him the opportunity to watch the destruction of the proletariat by starvation as calmly as any other natural event without bestirring himself, and, on the other hand, to regard the misery of the proletariat as its own fault and to punish it. To be sure, the proletarian can restrain his natural instinct by reason, and so, by moral supervision, halt the law of nature in its injurious course of development." - Karl Marx, Wages, December 1847

While it may be superficially true that our poor Texan could have cunningly evaded copping the wholesale price the fact remains that he is -- as all Texans are -- a victim of a system structurally designed to extract exorbitant rents from his need for power. A socialist system would not see him as a battery hen to be skimmed or as an atomized individual who should 'sink or swim' (in the words of that local mayor) but would seek to prevent power, food, water, air, housing, education, health, etc etc from being hijacked and sequestered by vested interests accessible only by outrageous fees. Socialism would outlaw rent-seeking, which is the theft of meaningful life by carpetbaggers and their corrupt partners in government.

[Feb 21, 2021] 'Freedom' under neo-liberal capitalism is all of the negative type.

Feb 21, 2021 | www.unz.com

Mulga Mumblebrain , says: February 16, 2021 at 1:13 am GMT • 4.2 days ago

@Flying Dutchman

'Freedom' under neo-liberal capitalism is all of the negative type. You are free to be as greedy and arrogant as you like, as rich, ie as big a thief, as you like, and as poor as you like. You are to ignore the liberal injunction that your freedom must not interfere with that of others, and screw as many patsies as you desire. You are 'free' to vote for two or so near identical parties, then have no 'freedom' but that which your money buys you. 'Freedom' is the biggest lie of all Big Lies.

[Feb 03, 2021] Those who have the most to say about the burdens of government regulation tend to be silent about the enormous infrastructure supporting a very specific conception of corporate personhood, limited liability, and intellectual property.

Feb 03, 2021 | crookedtimber.org

kinnikinick 01.29.21 at 4:47 pm

Those who have the most to say about the burdens of government regulation tend to be silent about the enormous infrastructure supporting a very specific conception of corporate personhood, limited liability, and intellectual property.
It's like an industrialist looking out upon a vast landscape of canals, dams, and levees, and complaining at the "unnatural" construction of a bridge putting a ferryman out of a job.

[Feb 03, 2021] Amid -Shortage-, Ecuador Police Bust Clinic Giving 1000s Of Fake COVID Vaccines - ZeroHedge

Feb 03, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

rock-ribbed 17 hours ago remove link

It's still not clear exactly what the clinic's customers were being injected with...

My guess is that it's something less hazardous to your health than the real vaccine, but still not what the greatest scientist of all time, Dr. Fauci, and our greatest president of all time, His Excellency Joe Biden, have mandated that you take.

[Feb 03, 2021] Freedom from the Market

Feb 03, 2021 | crookedtimber.org

Freedom from the Market

by HENRY on JANUARY 26, 2021

Mike Konczal has a new book, Freedom from the Market ( Bookshop.org locator , Amazon ). I've been wanting to write about this book for a while, but first had to wait for it to come out, and then had my working life banjaxed by the madness of the last few weeks. But it is a great book that looks to remake the American debate about freedom and largely succeeds. Full disclosure: Mike is a friend of the 'see very occasionally but like very strongly' variety; I also read an early version of the mss and commented on it.

When I say that this book is about the American debate, I mean it. Non-Americans will learn from the book, but they aren't the target audience. The examples that Konczal draws on to inform modern Americans are drawn from their own, largely forgotten history. This could be seen as a reflection of the American parochialism that Konczal mentions in passing, but it is, I think, a deliberate political move. It also is in some ways refreshing – rather than weaving fairytales about the wonders of Fantasy Sweden or Fantasy Germany, it tells stories where the ambiguities are necessarily more visible to its readers.

Still, it provides measured hope. By drawing on what has happened in American history, Konczal makes it easier for Americans to understand that things they might not believe are possible in America must be, because they have been. He rescues moments such as the WWII government run daycare centers that allowed women to work, or the use of the power of the federal state to force through the integration of Southern hospitals, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Notably, although he doesn't dwell on this point, many of these changes began at moments that seem shittier and more despairing than our own.

Konczal neither provides a standard linear history, nor a policy textbook. Instead, he is claiming an alternative American tradition, which has not looked to the market as its apotheosis, but instead has sought to free Americans from its random vagaries. His history explains how America has responded collectively to the real and expressed needs of publics, who have organized to fight for them. And it does so in the plain language that he mentions in passing was necessary to allow ordinary people to organize and understand who was trying to stop them.

Konczal's fundamental claim is that people who attribute freedom to markets miss out on much of the story. Equally important is a notion of freedom from markets, "rooted in public programs that genuinely serve people and checking market dependency." This notion goes back much further in time than the New Deal. The nineteenth century is sometimes depicted as a reign of laissez-faire, both by those who admired it and deplored it. Konczal argues instead that there was an emerging sense of public needs – and imperfect ways in which the government provided for them. This helps us understand, for example, the provision of public land through the Homestead Act and the land grant universities.

The nineteenth century notion of the public was clearly horribly flawed and contradictory – it did not include slaves or Native Americans. Some, like Horace Greeley ended up fleeing these contradictions into the welcoming arms of free market absolutism. But within these contradictions lay possibilities that opened up in the twentieth century. Konczal builds, for example on Eric Schickler's work to argue that as the New Deal began to provide concrete benefits to African Americans, it created a new relationship between them and the Democratic Party, breaking up the old coalition that had held Jim Crow together.

The organizing ideas in this book are Polanyian – the stresses of the market lead to social rupture, which may in turn create the conditions for political mobilization. But Konczal doesn't depict this as necessary or inevitable – people's choices have consequences. He is also more precise than Polanyi in his understanding of how change happens – through social movements and the state:

While the Supreme Court can be effective at holding back change and enforcing already existing power structures, it is actually very weak at creating new reform itself. It controls no funding and is dependent on elite power structures to carry out its decisions. What really creates change is popular mobilization and legislative changes.

Finally, Konczal not only employs Polanyi's ideas, but the ideas of Polanyi's friendly critics like Quinn Slobodian, to describe how modern Hayekians have sought to "encase" the market order in institutions and practices that are hard to overturn. Property rights aren't the foundation of liberty, as both nineteenth century jurists and twentieth century economists would have it. They are a product of the choices of the state, and as such intensely political.

This allows Konczal to turn pragmatism against the Hayekians. Hayek's notion of spontaneous order is supposed to be evolutionary, to provide a more supple response to what people (thought of as individuals want). But if there is a need to provide collective goods for people that cannot be fulfilled through voluntarism, the Hayekian logic becomes a brutal constraint on adaptation.

The efforts of Hayekians to enforce binding legal constraints, to cripple the gathering of the collective knowledge that can guide collective action, to wink at legal doctrines intended to subvert social protections against the market; all these prevent the kinds of evolutionary change that are necessary to respond to changing circumstances. Konczal makes it clear that Oliver Wendell Holmes was no left-winger – but his pragmatist criticisms of the rigid and doctrinaire laissez-faire precepts of his colleagues rings true. Their "willingness to use a very specific understanding of economics to override law writes a preferential understanding of economics into the constitution itself." Although Konczal wrote this book before the current crisis, he describes Holmes as mentioning compulsory vaccination laws as one of the ways in which government interference in private decisions can have general social benefits. The wretched contortions of libertarians and market conservatives over anti-pandemic measures during the last several months, and the consequences of their intellectual rigidity for human welfare in states such as North Dakota illustrate the point, quite brutally.

What Konczal presses for is a very different notion of freedom. This doesn't deny the benefits of markets, but it qualifies them. In Konczal's words, "markets are great at distributing things based on people's willingness to pay. But there are some goods that should be distributed by need." Accepting this point entails the necessity of keeping some important areas of life outside the determining scope of markets. Furthermore, people's needs change over time, as societies and markets change. Konczal's framework suggests the need for collective choice to figure out the best responses to these changes, and a vibrant democratic politics, in which the state responds to the expressed needs of mobilized publics as the best way to carry out these choices.

All this makes the book sound more like an exercise in political theory than it is. That's because of my own professional deformities, and because I want you to read the book itself, if you really to get the good stuff – the stories, the examples, and the overall narrative that Konczal weaves together. Freedom from the Market has the potential to be a very important book, focusing attention on the contested, messy but crucially important intersection between social movements and the state. It provides a set of ideas that people on both sides of that divide can learn from, and a lively alternative foundation to the deracinated technocratic notions of politics, in which good policy would somehow, magically, be politically self supporting, that has prevailed up until quite recently. Strongly recommended.

Share this:

{ 37 comments read them below or add one }

Brett 01.26.21 at 3:47 pm ( 1 )

I'll second this recommendation – it was a great read. I would especially recommend reading it for the section on Medicare integration, since that's a story that rarely gets told but is genuinely quite fascinating. It gives me greater respect for LBJ, given that he was giving them full-support despite a difficult, treacherous political battle to integrate hospitals in the South despite immense resistance.

He also made a very interesting point after the Homestead section when he got to the section on work-hour labor movements, about how they needed to specifically make it so that certain rights couldn't be contracted away, because otherwise even laws establishing such-and-such rules would get end-runned by businesses requiring their employees to give them up in contracts.

Kurt Schuler 01.27.21 at 4:10 am (
3 )

Henry, you write, "if there is a need to provide collective goods for people that cannot be fulfilled through voluntarism, the Hayekian logic becomes a brutal constraint on adaptation." That seems like a big "if." Other than the classic examples of national defense and perhaps police and courts, what goods cannot be provided through voluntarism?

Chris Bertram 01.27.21 at 8:29 am (no link)

There's a nice line in Slobodian's book about Americans not knowing much about the rest of the world but imagining that the US is a scale-model of it. Isn't the worry about the general claim here that it is more plausible to see property rights as merely the creature of the state when you have a vast internal market with many needs catered for by domestic production than it is when you have small states with relatively specialized domestic production that need to trade across borders to satisfy their needs. In such a case, where the real economy transcends borders and where trade barriers at those borders just make everyone poorer, you need transnational guarantees (or at least a very strong degree of confidence) for property rights and investment against the potential interference of local governments. So even if Konczal is right for the US, the question of how to do social democracy transnationally remains for the rest of us. The EU is one possible answer to that, but the continuation of national political narratives, blaming other nations within the structure for their own problems (Germany > Greece, Italy) etc remains a big obstacle to anti-market pushback at that level.

reason 01.27.21 at 11:20 am (no link)

Just a short aside, this sentence struck me:

" Property rights aren't the foundation of liberty, as both nineteenth century jurists and twentieth century economists would have it."

Property rights are inherently a restriction of liberty. They restrict the rights of everybody but the designated owner. It may be that in some circumstances they are net a positive, that this is clearly not something one can expect from the nature of the thing. That this point isn't made more often and more strongly puzzles me.

Jake Gibson 01.27.21 at 1:22 pm (no link)

I think it can be illuminating to think of "property rights" in the context that at some point all property was taken (stolen) from The Commons.
And that property laws are enshrinement of common law on possession (nine tenths).

MPAVictoria 01.27.21 at 1:22 pm ( 8 )

"what goods cannot be provided through voluntarism?"

Apparently insulin .
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/another-person-has-died-from-rationing-insulin.html

Henry 01.27.21 at 2:16 pm (no link)

The "twentieth century economists" like the "nineteenth century jurists" refer just to those discussed in the book (basically Friedman, Chicago School, market for corporate control people etc etc). So they're not claims about the general class of economists in the twentieth century, where there is tons of disagreement on lots of stuff obviously, but a particular strain of economic thought that Konczal writes about.

Rapier 01.27.21 at 3:27 pm ( 10 )

There is no "the" market. All markets are not the same.
The Hayekians first insistence is that in fact all markets are the same. They then have designed the 'markets' they want, and if you design a market you win.

Mike Huben 01.27.21 at 4:11 pm (no link)

Kurt Schuler @ 3 asks: "what goods cannot be provided through voluntarism?"

The glib answer is "none" because you can always find an exceptional case of private production.

But the problem is "provided" is underspecified: it could mean provision to only one person, or (better) provision of ENOUGH. And even enough is underspecified.

Look at something like water. Public provision of vast volumes of clean, safe, cheap drinking water is an alternative to voluntarism's answer: expensive bottled water which must be used frugally by the poor, consumes much energy in transportation and waste in plastic: which is enough? Which is proper provision? Should there be only one type of provision?

And of course that question implies another; what goods should not be provided through voluntarism? Maybe pollution, addiction, crime, and a host of others.

"Voluntarism" is an example of framing, trying to focus the world through an ideological lens. If you accidentally accept this narrow peephole on the world, your thinking is greatly constrained because of the things is has misdirected you from. The same kind of framing as "markets are freedom", which Konczal is apparently decrying. (I have not yet read the book.)

steven t johnson 01.27.21 at 4:59 pm ( 12 )

Given the tenor of most responses, it doesn't seem likely Konczal's book is going to change the narrative in any significant way.

[email protected] seems a good example of the pro-market reasoning. For one thing, "economics" says that if a person with a scarce talent can earn more money than is necessary to induce them to exercise that talent, the income can be taxed away without affecting the market outcome. Considering the real life examples of professional athletes, movie stars and artists, the sage advice to tax the athletes, stars and artists, precisely because it won't endanger the market outcomes of professional athletics, Hollywood and the art world presupposes the market outcomes of pro sports, Hollywood and the museum/art gallery circuit are just and wise.

[email protected] wrote "Economics is wisely silent on people's preferences and needs. The point surely is not that there is something inherent in certain goods that means they should be distributed by need–who decides what those "good" goods are that everyone (ought to?) need?; the point is that income should be redistributed so that everyone can buy whatever they see fit to buy based on their own understanding of their needs."

Yes, I recall reading a short article by von Hayek explaining there was no scientific way to distinguish between wants and needs, thus there was no way ever, even in principle, to deny there was such a thing as scarcity. Like von Hayek, the assumption that, given the impossibility of pronouncing a difference between needs and wants (nor apparently even a way of merely satisficing any such distinction,) the only valid way of deciding what must be produced is by consumer sovereignty. The "votes" by rational consumers are the only possible means of justice. Like distinguishing between productive and unproductive labor, anything less than the market is tyranny.

I have no idea why Bob says Konczal's book as presented doesn't pose a problem, given two market refutations of it are endorsed in the comment. It may be something like compatibilism, the philosophical position that people have free will in the religious sense despite the myriad of facts and millennia of experience showing that the religious notion of moral responsibility is, to say the least, flawed. In words, compatibilists will say they accept things like mental illness leave old notions of moral responsibility -- which is to say, old notions about retribution and punishment -- then in practice, they will do things like try adolescents as adult or arbitrarily limit the definition of mental illness or simply ignore such fiddling objections to honor time-honored customs. Similarly, market proponents will give lip service to the notion of market failure, then inexplicably (?) fail to see it.

Chris [email protected] writes " the continuation of national political narratives, blaming other nations within the structure for their own problems (Germany > Greece, Italy) etc remains a big obstacle " to social democracy. Is the illustrative example meant to condemn Germany blaming Greece and Italy for creating their own problems and leeching (or trying to) off of Germany? Or, is it Greece and Italy blaming of Germany for not curing their own failures for them? Is it somehow both? Also, the definition of the EU as a consortium of states premised on fiscal integrity may be more of an obstacle to social democracy than political narratives, however construed?

Francis Spufford 01.27.21 at 7:50 pm ( 13 )

Kurt Schuler @ 3 --

Well, insulin clearly (see above). But also: schools that make everybody literate and promote basic social solidarity. Colleges that are cheap enough to educate all of the talents. Hospitals that treat illnesses irrespective of ability to pay. Universal vaccinations. Flood defences. Disaster relief. Food inspectors. Drug safety testers. Buildings inspectors. Fire inspectors. Transport safety inspectors. Highways. Mending potholes in highways. Keeping bridges safe. Last-mile rural electrification. Universal mail coverage at a single price. Legal advice to even access to justice by rich and poor. Excellent daycare at prices poor people can afford. Basic research in particle physics and astronomy. R & D in far-from-market areas society needs. Drug discovery for diseases poor people get. Training of specialists in non-profitable yet essential professions. Landscape conservation. Pollution control. Tech regulation. Setting a carbon price/tax. Railways that move people fast enough and cheaply enough to take custom away from ecocidal airlines. Mass transit in cities. Space programmes. A welfare safety net permitting risky careers in the arts. A welfare safety net to equalise the chances of children. A welfare safety net allowing every member of a society to go to sleep every night in a state of delicious moral luxury, knowing that no-one is hungry. Lighthouses. Earthquake detection. Censuses. Diplomacy. Peacemaking. Peacekeeping. Public broadcasters with editorial independence. Et cetera et cetera et cetera, in every flavour from civilisational basic to utopian flight of fancy. Collective action! Getting the job done everywhere on the planet where libertarians aren't.

John Quiggin 01.28.21 at 6:52 am ( 14 )

" In such a case, where the real economy transcends borders and where trade barriers at those borders just make everyone poorer, you need transnational guarantees (or at least a very strong degree of confidence) for property rights and investment against the potential interference of local governments."

Much of the world did social democracy pretty well last century, without transnational guarantees. Conversely, the creation of investor guarantees like ISDS has been a gift to predatory corporations like Philip Morris.

[Feb 03, 2021] US insulin prices as market failure

Feb 03, 2021 | crookedtimber.org

mw 01.28.21 at 6:04 pm (
19 )

"Apparently insulin ."

Insulin (and Epi pens) become unaffordable in the U.S. because the government massively screwed up the regulations. These are off-patent drugs, so in theory anybody can make them. BUT, getting production facilities FDA-approved is a long, expensive process. So when there's an effective monopoly on a drug, no other company will enter the market to compete -- even after huge price hikes. Why not? Because after the new company had invested the time and money to get its production line built and approved, the original monopolist would drop its prices back down, and the new entrant would make no money. And everybody knows this, so potential new entrants don't bother. An obvious solution is reciprocity to allow importation of drugs already approved in the EU. But there's no way the FDA is going to allow that to happen and lose its regulatory monopoly.

The bottom line is that these are not failures of unregulated markets, they are cases of government failure in the most heavily regulated market in the U.S. (and where, in fact, the strict regulation is the key enabler of the bad outcome and where the obvious fix is blocked by the regulatory agency defending its turf).

MPAVictoria 01.29.21 at 1:39 am (no link)

"Insulin (and Epi pens) become unaffordable in the U.S. because the government massively screwed up the regulations."

Just need to point out that this is completely false. Insulin prices are high in the US because of a lack of price controls. Canada has very similar patent rules and our insulin is made by the same companies but guess what? We set a maximum price for pharmaceuticals. The US should do the same.

mw 01.29.21 at 1:23 pm (no link)

MPAVictoria @ 23 Just need to point out that this is completely false. Insulin prices are high in the US because of a lack of price controls. Canada has very similar patent rules and our insulin is made by the same companies but guess what? We set a maximum price for pharmaceuticals. The US should do the same.

Yes, you could layer on additional price-control regulations to fix the problems caused by the existing regulations. Of course it's one thing for Canada to adopt such rules where the U.S. has not (and remains a source of profits and R&D incentives) and another when the U.S. is also controlling prices. Incidentally, if price controls were to be adopted in the U.S., my suggested approach is that the U.S. should require all pharma companies within, say, two years to sell drugs here for the lowest price they have negotiated in any industrialized country with a comparable per-Capita GDP. Then we can all be in it together.

But that's all a discussion for another thread -- the point remains that insulin and epi pens are not examples of a free, unregulated market failing, they're an example of a very heavily (but badly) regulated market failing. Yes bad U.S. regulations are responsible -- they create barriers to entry (specifically high costs of setting up a production facility combined with an FDA regulatory monopoly and a ban on imports) that enable monopoly pricing.

notGoodenough 01.29.21 at 8:01 am (no link)

mw @ 19, MPAVictoria @ 23

Not to side-track the thread, but I think there was an attempt to explore this on a previous thread (particularly with respect to Daraprim, though I believe many of the points are applicable in a general sense) [1]. While I´ll freely admit I am not an economist, I didn´t find the responses to my queries and concerns from those advocating "regulations are the issue" sufficiently satisfactory [2, 3] to warrant changing my position – in short, I see little evidence to support the notion that it is US regulations responsible for the high price of pharmaceuticals (particularly as it appears that R&D spending is frequently less than that of marketing and administration). I hope the discussion at the links provided is of interest.

Apologies to everyone for the interjection, but Pharma is a topic of keen interest and concern to me.

[1] https://crookedtimber.org/2019/10/09/the-third-lesson/
[2] https://crookedtimber.org/2019/10/09/the-third-lesson/#comment-766046
[3] https://crookedtimber.org/2019/10/09/the-third-lesson/#comment-766434

CHETAN R MURTHY 01.29.21 at 8:32 pm (no link)

mw @ 30: I forgot to respond to your by-the-by argument that the pharmas' US profits fund their R&D. This is, as with the rest of your arguments, untrue.

(1) the US taxpayer funds most pharma research
(2) Last I checked, pharmas spend more on advertising and lobbying than they do on R&D.

'nuff said.

MPAVictoria 01.30.21 at 1:29 am (no link)

@ NotGoodenough – Interesting links thank you! And I completely agree that I am unconvinced that over regulation in it the reason the US has uniquely high drug prices.

@ me – Drug approval and manufacturing requirements in the US are not that different from any other developed country. Neither is it's Drug IP regime. So the argument that these features are what cause these outrageous pharmaceutical prices doesn't make much sense. In fact the US had a bit of a reputation of being too ready to approve drugs with limited effectiveness. The reason that Americans pay more than anyone else in the world is simple – no price controls.

[Feb 03, 2021] FTC says Amazon took away $62 million in tips from drivers

Feb 03, 2021 | abcnews.go.com

"The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that for more than two years, Amazon didn't pass on tips to drivers, even though it promised shoppers and drivers it would do so.

The FTC said Amazon didn't stop taking the money until 2019, when the company found out about the FTC's investigation . The drivers were part of Amazon's Flex business, which started in 2015 and allows people to pick up and deliver Amazon packages with their own cars. The drivers are independent workers, and are not Amazon employees.

The FTC said Amazon at first promised workers that they would be paid $18 to $25 per hour, and also said they would receive 100% of tips left to them by customers on the app .

But in 2016, the FTC said Amazon started paying drivers a lower hourly rate and used the tips to make up the difference. Amazon didn't disclose the change to drivers, the FTC said, and the tips it took from drivers amounted to $61.7 billion."

And a "team" at Amazon reprogrammed the app to steal tips. Managers, programmers, testers, documentation specialists, accountants, database wizards, etc. Nobody said a word. All corrupt to the bone. "Learn to code!"

[Jan 28, 2021] Poor Lives Matter, But Less

Jan 26, 2021 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. Sundaram discusses how the obsession with metrics, a long standing favorite topic of ours (see Management's Great Addiction ) produces policies that give short shrift to the poor and poor countries. One of the big fallacies is treating money as the measure of the value and quality of life. For instance, reducing the instance of cancer is worth more in rich countries because their lives are valued more highly in these models. Similarly, they often fall back on unitary measures like lifespan, and so don't capture outcomes like diets heavy in low nutrient foods (think simple sugars) producing higher rates of non-communicable diseases and hence less healthy citizens

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published at his website

Current development fads fetishize data, ostensibly for 'evidence-based policy-making': if not measured, it will not matter. So, forget about getting financial resources for your work, programmes and projects, no matter how beneficial, significant or desperately needed.

Measure for Measure

Agencies, funds, programmes and others lobby and fight for attention by showcasing their own policy agendas, ostensible achievements and potential. Many believe that the more indicators they get endorsed by the 'international community', the more financial support they can expect to secure.

Collecting enough national data to properly monitor progress on the Sustainable Development Goals is expensive. Data collection costs, typically borne by the countries themselves, have been estimated at minimally over three times total official development assistance (ODA).

Remember aid declined after the US-Soviet Cold War, and again following the 2008-9 global financial crisis. More recently, much more ODA is earmarked to 'support' private investments from donor countries.

With data demands growing, more pressure to measure has led to either over- or under-stating both problems and progress, sometimes with no dishonest intent. 'Errors' can easily be explained away as statistics from poor countries are notoriously unreliable.

Political, bureaucratic and funding considerations limit the willingness to admit that reported data are suspect for fear this may reflect poorly on those responsible. And once baseline statistics have been established, similar considerations compel subsequent 'consistency' or 'conformity' in reporting.

And when problems have to be acknowledged, 'double-speak' may be the result. Organisations may then start reporting some statistics to the public, with other data used, typically confidentially, for 'in-house' operational purposes.

Money, Money, Money

Economists generally prefer and even demand the use of money-metric measures. The rationale often is that no other meaningful measure is available. Many believe that showing ostensible costs and benefits is more likely to raise needed funding. Using either exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) has been much debated. Some advocate even more convenient measures such as the prices of a standard McDonald's hamburger in different countries.

Money-metrics imply that estimated economic losses due to, say, smoking or non-communicable diseases ( NCD s), including obesity, tend to be far greater in richer countries, owing to the much higher incomes lost or foregone as well as costs incurred.

Development Discourse Changes

The four UN Development Decades after 1960 sought to accelerate economic progress and improve social wellbeing. Unsurprisingly, for decades, there have been various debates in the development discourse on measuring progress.

The rise of neoliberal economic thinking, claiming to free markets, has instead mainly strengthened and extended private property rights. Rejecting Keynesian and development economics, both associated with state intervention, neoliberalism's influence peaked around the turn of the century.

The so-called 'Washington Consensus ' of US federal institutions from the 1980s also involved the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, both headquartered in the American capital.

In 2000, the UN Secretariat drafted the Millennium Declaration. This, in turn, became the basis for the Millennium Development Goals which gave primacy to halving the number of poor. After all, who would object to reducing poverty. The poor were defined with reference to a poverty line, somewhat arbitrarily defined by the Bank.

Poverty Fetish

Presuming money income to be a universal yardstick of wellbeing, this poverty measure has been challenged on various grounds. Most in poorer developing countries sense that much nuance and variation are lost in such measures, not only for poverty, but also for, say, hunger .

Anyone familiar with the varying significance, over time, of cash incomes and prices in most countries will be uncomfortable with such singular measures. But they are nonetheless much publicised and have implied continued progress until the Covid-19 pandemic.

Rejection of such singular poverty measures has led to multi-dimensional poverty indicators, typically to meet 'basic needs'. While such 'dashboard' statistics offer more nuance, the continued desire for a single metric has led to the development, promotion and popularisation of composite indicators.

Worse, this has been typically accompanied by problematic ranking exercises using such composite indicators. Many have become obsessed with such ranking, instead of the underlying socio-economic processes and actual progress.

Blind Neglect

Improving such metrics has thus become an end in itself, with little debate over such one-dimensional means of measuring progress. The consequent 'tunnel vision' has meant ignoring other measures and indicators of wellbeing.

In recent decades, instead of subsistence agriculture, cash crops have been promoted. Yet, all too many children of cash-poor subsistence farmers are nutritionally better fed and healthier than the offspring of monetarily better off cash crop or 'commercial' farmers.

Meanwhile, as cash incomes rise, those with diet-related NCDs have been growing. While life expectancy has risen in much of the world, healthy life expectancy has progressed less as ill health increasingly haunts the sunset years of longer lives.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Meanwhile, as poor countries get limited help in their efforts to adjust to global warming, rich countries' focus on supporting mitigation efforts has included, inter alia, promoting 'no-till agriculture'. Thus attributing greenhouse gas emissions implies corresponding mitigation efforts via greater herbicide use .

Maximising carbon sequestration in unploughed farm topsoil requires more reliance on typically toxic, if not carcinogenic pesticides, especially herbicides. But addressing global warming should not be at the expense of sustainable agriculture.

Similarly, imposing global carbon taxation will raise the price of, and reduce access to electricity for the 'energy-poor', who comprise a fifth of the world's population. Rich countries subsidising affordable renewable energy for poor countries and people would resolve this dilemma.

Following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the UN proposed a Global Green New Deal (GGND) which included such cross-subsidisation by rich countries of sustainable development progress elsewhere.

The 2009 London G20 summit succeeded in raising more than the trillion dollars targeted. But the resources mainly went to strengthening the IMF, rather than for the GGND proposal. Thus, the finance fetish blocked a chance to revive world economic growth, with sustainable development gains for all.

Sound of the Suburbs , January 27, 2021 at 4:00 am

The globalists found just the economics they were looking for.
The USP of neoclassical economics – It concentrates wealth.
Let's use it for globalisation.

Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s.
"a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped"

This is what it's supposed to be like.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.

[Dec 20, 2020] The American ruling class has failed on pretty much every issue of significance for the past several decades

Neoliberals as an occupying force for the country
Notable quotes:
"... The bottom line is the true enemies of the American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people are the people who control America. ..."
"... This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing. But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free trade." ..."
Dec 20, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
Bemildred , Dec 19 2020 2:00 utc | 124

This is awesome, he nails the dilemma which our owners are confronted with;

I'll put it this way: It is not as though the American ruling class is intelligent, competent, and patriotic on most important matters and happens to have a glaring blind spot when it comes to appreciating the threat of China. If this were the case, it would make sense to emphasize the threat of China above all else.

But this is not the case. The American ruling class has failed on pretty much every issue of significance for the past several decades. If China were to disappear, they would simply be selling out the country to India, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, or some other country (in fact they are doing this just to a lesser extent).

Our ruling class has failed us on China because they have failed us on everything. For this reason I believe that there will be no serious, sound policy on China that benefits Americans until there is a legitimate ruling class in the United States. For this reason pointing fingers at the wickedness and danger of China is less useful than emphasizing the failure of the American ruling class. The bottom line is the true enemies of the American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people are the people who control America.

This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing. But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free trade."

The Zürich Interviews - Darren J. Beattie: If Only You Knew How Bad Things Really Are

Grieved , Dec 19 2020 3:12 utc | 129

@102 karlof1 - "By deliberately setting policy to inflate asset prices, the Fed has priced US labor out of a job, while as you report employers sought labor costs that allowed them to remain competitive."

I never heard it said so succinctly and truly as this before. That is what happened isn't it? The worker can't afford life anymore, in this country.

And if the worker can't afford the cost of living - who bears the cause of this, how follows the remedy of this, and what then comes next?

I really appreciate your point of view, which is the only point of view, which is that the designers of the economy, the governors of the economy, have placed the workers of the economy in a position that is simply just not tenable.

No wonder they strive to divide in order to rule - because they have over-reached through greed and killed the worker, who holds up the society.

How long can the worker flounder around blaming others before the spotlight must turn on the employer?

uncle tungsten , Dec 19 2020 3:12 utc | 130

Bemildred #115

You have to remember these people really do think they are better. They do think in class terms even if they avoid that rhetoric in public. The problem is they thought they could control China like they did Japan. That was dumb then and it looks even dumber now. You can see similar dumbness in their lack of grip on any realisitic view of Russia. Provincials really. Rich peasants.

Thank you, they certainly DO think in class terms ALWAYS. + Rich peasants is perfect :))

Thankfully they are blinded by hubris at the same time. The USA destroyed the Allende government in Chile in 1973. After the Nixon Kissinger visit to China in 1979 they assumed they could just pull a color revolution stunt when they deemed it to be the right time. Perhaps in their hubris they thought every Chinese worker would be infatuated with capitalism and growth.

They tested that out in the People Power colour (yellow) revolt in the Filipines in 1986 following a rigged election by Marcos. In 1989 only 16 years after China had been buoyed up with growth and development following the opening to USA capitalism, they tried out the same trick in Tienanmen square in China but those students were up against the ruling party of the entire nation - not the ruling class. BIG MISTAKE. The ruling party of China was solidly backed by the peasant and working class that was finally enjoying some meager prosperity and reward a mere 40 years after the Chinese Communist Party and their parents and grandparents had liberated China from 100 years of occupation, plunder, human and cultural rapine and colonial insult. Then in 2020 it was tried on again in Hong Kong. FAIL.

The hubris of the ruling class and its running dogs is pathetic.

We see the same with Pelosi and the ruling class in the Dimoratss today. They push Biden Harris to the fore, piss on the left and refuse to even hold a vote on Medicare for All in the middle of a pandemic. Meanwhile the USAi ruling class has its running dogs and hangers on bleating that "its wrong tactic, its premature, its whatever craven excuse to avoid exposing the ruling class for what they are - thieves, bereft of compassion, absent any sense of social justice, fakes lurking behind their class supposition.

They come here to the bar with their arrogant hubris, brimming with pointless information some even with emoji glitter stuck on their noses. Not a marxist or even a leftie among them. Still its class that matters and its the ruling class that we must break.

chu teh , Dec 19 2020 4:00 utc | 131

@102 karlof1 and Grieved | Dec 19 2020 3:12 utc | 129

I did not understand inflate-assets/suppress-workers and forgot to return to it to clear it up. Grieved sent me back to Karlof1. I just got it.

That viewpoint indeed explains method of operation to accomplish the results I observed. When Nixon was forced to default on Bretton Woods use of Gold Exchange Standard* [the USD is as good as gold], then printing fiat solved the problem [threat to US inventory of gold]....but printing fiat [no longer redeemable as a promise convert to gold] became the new problem [no way to extinguish the promises to redeem/pay].

So how to proceed? Aha! Steal from the workers; squeeze 'em, entertain and dazzle 'em!.. Such an elegant solution...slow, certain and hardly noticeable...like slow-boiling frogs...an on-going project as we blog.

Now I'll read Karlof1's link.

[Nov 28, 2020] Deplorables, or Expendables

Notable quotes:
"... The Expendables: How the Middle Class got Screwed by Globalization ..."
"... The Innovation Illusion ..."
"... The Expendables ..."
"... Napoleon Linarthatos is a writer based in New York. ..."
Nov 28, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Home / Articles / Economy / Deplorables, Or Expendables? ECONOMY Deplorables, Or Expendables?

Rubin offers some valuable, albeit well-known, critiques of globalized trade, but doesn't go far beyond that. (By momente/Shutterstock)

NOVEMBER 26, 2020

|

12:01 AM

NAPOLEON LINARTHATOS

Back in 2013 a group of Apple employees decided to sue the global behemoth. Every day, after they were clocking out, they were required to go through a corporate screening where their personal belongings were examined. It was a process required and administered by Apple. But Apple did not want to pay its employees for the time it had required them to spend. It could be anywhere from 40 to 80 hours a year that an employee spent going through that process. What made Apple so confident in brazenly nickel-and-diming its geniuses?

Jeff Rubin, author of The Expendables: How the Middle Class got Screwed by Globalization , has an answer to the above question that is easily deduced from the subtitle of his book. The socio-economic arrangements produced by globalization have made labor the most flexible and plentiful resource in the economic process. The pressure on the middle class, and all that falls below it, has been so persistent and powerful, that now " only 37 percent of Americans believe their children will be better off financially than they themselves are. Only 24 percent in Canada or Australia feel the same. And in France, that figure dips to only 9 percent." And "[i]n the mid-1980s it would have taken a typical middle-income family with two children less than seven years of income to save up to buy a home; it now takes more than ten years. At the same time, housing expenditures that accounted for a quarter of most middle-class household incomes in the 1990s now account for a third ."

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13045197114175078?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13045197114175078-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamericanconservative.com&rid=www.nakedcapitalism.com&width=838

The story of globalization is engraved in the " shuttered factories across North America, the boarded-up main streets, the empty union halls." Rubin does admit that there are benefits accrued from globalization, billions have been lifted up out of poverty in what was previously known as the third world, wealth has been created, certain efficiencies have been achieved. The question for someone in the western world is how much more of a price he's willing to pay to keep the whole thing going on, especially as we have entered a phase of diminishing returns for almost all involved.

As Joel Kotkin has written, "[e]ven in Asia, there are signs of social collapse. According to a recent survey by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, half of all Korean households have experienced some form of family crisis, many involving debt, job loss, or issues relating to child or elder care." And "[i]n "classless" China, a massive class of migrant workers -- over 280 million -- inhabit a netherworld of substandard housing, unsteady work, and miserable environmental conditions, all after leaving their offspring behind in villages. These new serfs vastly outnumber the Westernized, highly educated Chinese whom most Westerners encounter. " "Rather than replicating the middle-class growth of post–World War II America and Europe, notes researcher Nan Chen, 'China appears to have skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but disproportionately distributed wealth like the contemporary United States.'"

Although Rubin concedes to the globalist side higher GDP growth, even that does not seem to be so true for the western world in the last couple decades. Per Nicholas Eberstadt, in "Our Miserable 21st Century," "[b]etween late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5 percent per annum." "With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years 2000–2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20 percent higher than it is today."

Stagnation seems to be a more apt characterization of the situation we are in. Fredrik Erixon in his superb The Innovation Illusion , argues that "[p]roductivity growth is going south, and has been doing so for several decades." "Between 1995 and 2009, Europe's labor productivity grew by just 1 percent annually." Noting that "[t]he four factors that have made Western capitalism dull and hidebound are gray capital, corporate managerialism, globalization, and complex regulation."

me title=

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.426.0_en.html#goog_1789765618 Ad ends in 15s

Contrary to popular belief, globalization has functioned as a substitute for innovation and growth. With globalization on the march, the western ruling class could continue to indulge in its most preferred activities, regulation and taxation, in an environment where both of these political addictions appeared sustainable. Non-western elites could perpetuate their authoritarian regimes, garnering growth and legitimacy, from the access to the western markets. Their copy-and-paste method of "innovation" from western firms would fit well with an indigenous business class composed of mostly insiders and ex-regime apparatchiks.

There are plenty of criticisms that can be laid at the feet of globalization. The issue with Rubin's book is that is does not advance very much beyond some timeworn condemnations of it. One gets the sense that the value of this book is merely in its audacity to question the conventional wisdom on the issue at hand. Rubin, who is somewhat sympathetic to Donald Trump, seems to be much closer to someone like Bernie Sanders, especially an earlier version of Sanders that dared to talk about the debilitating effects of immigration on the working class.

Like Sanders, Rubin starts to get blurry as he goes from the condemnation phase to the programmatic offers available. What exactly would be his tariffs policy, how far he would go? What would be the tradeoffs of this policy? Where we could demarcate a reasonable fair environment for the worker and industry and where we would start to create another type of a stagnation trap for the whole economy? All these would be important questions for Rubin to grapple with and would give to his criticisms more gravitas.

It would have also been of value if he had dealt more deeply with the policies of the Trump administration. On the one hand, the Trump administration cracked down on illegal and legal immigration. It also started to use tariffs and other trade measures as a way to boost industry and employment. On the other hand, it reduced personal and corporate taxes and it deregulated to the utmost degree possible. It was a kind of 'walled' laisser-faire that seemed to work until Covid-19 hit. Real household income in the U.S. increased $4,379 in 2019 over 2018. It was "more income growth in one year than in the 8 years of Obama-Biden." And during Trump's time, the lowest paid workers started not to just be making gains, but making gains faster than the wealthy. "Low-wage workers are getting bigger raises than bosses" ran a CBS News headline .

Rubin seems to view tax cuts and deregulation as another giveaway to large corporations. But these large corporations are just fine with high taxation, since they have a choice as to when and where they get taxed. Regulation is also more of a tool than a burden for them. It's a very expedient means for eliminating competitors and competition, a useful barrier to entry for any upstart innovator that would upend the industry they are in. Besides, if high taxation and regulation were a kind of antidote to globalization, then France would be in a much better shape than it appears to be. But France seems to be doing worse than anybody else. In the aforementioned poll about if their "children will be better off financially than they themselves are" France was at the bottom in the group of countries that Rubin cited. The recent events with the yellow-vests movement indicate a very deep dissatisfaction and pessimism of its middle and working class.

Moreover, there does not seem to be much hostility or even much contention between government bureaucracies and the upper echelons of the corporate world. Something that Rubin's politics and economics would necessitate. And cultural and political like-mindedness between government bureaucracies and the managerial class of large corporations is not just limited to the mutual embrace of woke politics. It seems that there is a cross pollination of a much broader set of ideas and habits between bureaucrats and the managerial class. For instance, Erixon notes that "[c]orporate managers shy away from uncertainty but turn companies into bureaucratic entities free from entrepreneurial habits. They strive to make capitalism predictable." Striving for predictability is a very bureaucratic state of mind.

In Rubin's book, missed trends like that make his perspective to feel a bit dated. There is still valuable information in The Expendables . Rubin does know a lot about international trade deals. For instance, a point that is often ignored in the press about international trade agreements is that "[i]f you're designated a "developing" country, you get to protect your own industries with tariffs that are a multiple of those that developed economies are allowed to use to protect their workers." A rule that China exploits to the utmost.

Meanwhile, Apple, after its apparent lawsuit loss on the case with its employees in California, now seems committed to another fight with the expendables of another locale. The Washington Post reported that "Apple lobbyists are trying to weaken a bill aimed at preventing forced labor in China, according to two congressional staffers familiar with the matter, highlighting the clash between its business imperatives and its official stance on human rights." "The bill aims to end the use of forced Uighur labor in the Xinjiang region of China ." The war against the expendables never ends.

Napoleon Linarthatos is a writer based in New York.

[Nov 17, 2020] A short note of class struggle

Nov 17, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

hunkerdown , November 16, 2020 at 10:29 am

Consider the structure of the term "common sense", which is just shared opinion. If there is no common sense, there will be no common action.

The problem with coming together is that the ruling class divides and rules us as a normal procedure of creating a class system. Nobody in the ruling class has a problem with this. Their purpose in life is to reproduce the system of mass slavery and adapt it to present conditions and they, being among the elect, are fine with this.

Pat , November 16, 2020 at 9:48 am

Cognitive dissonance is a daily occurrence for anyone paying attention. And our struggling "leaders" are largely struggling over territory while ignoring the state of the nation.

True national emergencies are ignored as they are inconvenient, or more honestly buried under the rug, because they might mean our sociopaths at the top of the food chain would have to pony up some of their Ill gotten gains to the social good AND lose some of their leverage over modern serfs. And unlike "war" and "military intervention" which have been monetized to the nth degree, pandemic response has been bungled not only because the social systems have been shredded but because factions are fighting over response in order to find a way to strip as much public money from it as possible.

We make black jokes here about brunch, but the election of Biden is NOT about him, it is a probably a vain attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. The sad thing is that instead of pretending to be the adults in the room, the usual suspects kept up their four year long tantrum, instead of letting the process play out and talking about how our system works, it was all "he isn't giving up, he is being mean." All because it slightly delayed them reestablishing their rice bowls. And so ends the "bring us together" meme with nary a whimper.

I wish there was a chance our national leaders would get their heads out of the pockets of their donors long enough to notice that the foundation THEY depend on for their corrupt lifestyles had been destroyed. I wish our foundations had not been so corrupted that even one part remains strong.

I am not entirely pessimistic. The kids are largely alright. I just hope we can hold it together long enough to give them a chance.

David , November 16, 2020 at 11:30 am

Two slightly different things here, perhaps.
I think it's generally accepted that all societies need a common frame of reference against which you can have discussions and arguments, make and critique policy and try to interpret the world. This doesn't mean that everybody agrees, or still less that everybody is obliged to, but rather that everybody agrees about what the issues are and about the ground over which they may disagree. Back in the days of the Cold War, for example, there were furious debates about politics, not to mention wars, atrocities and dictatorships, but pretty much everybody agreed what the issues were, even if they were on different sides of them. Historically, this was very much the norm: the religious wars of Europe, or the wars of the French Revolution were between people with very different views, but who agreed on the underlying context. What we have now, is what the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre called "incommensurability": a jaw-breaking term which means, essentially, that people don't even begin from the same assumptions, and so are condemned to talk past each other. This accounts for a lot of the cognitive dissonance. In the case of Brexit, for example, much of the bitterness and confusion arose from the fact that Leavers and Remainers were simply talking about different things, and starting from different assumptions, but didn't realise it. The same applies, obviously to the whole TDS story. As a result, Joe Public is now faced with the need to choose between competing and mutually exclusive interpretations of events, or even whether events have actually occurred. It's hardly surprising there's so much confusion and stress.

It's made worse by the kind of thing Thuto mentions. One of the least helpful ideas to emerge from the 1960s was that children should be "left to find their own way", rather than being taught things. But children mature by testing their ideas against the norms and structures of society, and indeed their parents, and coming to some sort of personal vision of the world. A lot of modern politics (and practically all of IdiotPol) is the result of middle-class educated people who were never contradicted as children, and are still looking to shock and provoke twenty or thirty years later. Once you understand that much of the political and media system is made of people who are basically adolescents ("why does it have to make sense? Tell me why it has to make sense!) the chaos and stress become easier to understand.

Sound of the Suburbs , November 16, 2020 at 1:00 pm

This is what we should expect.
Western liberalism's descent into chaos.
1920s/2000s – neoclassical economics, high inequality, high banker pay, low regulation, low taxes for the wealthy, robber barons (CEOs), reckless bankers, globalisation phase
1929/2008 – Wall Street crash
1930s/2010s – Global recession, currency wars, trade wars, austerity, rising nationalism and extremism
1940s – World war.

Right wing populist leaders are what we should expect at this stage in the descent into chaos.

Why is Western liberalism always such a disaster?
They did try and learn from past mistakes to create a new liberalism (neoliberalism), but the Mont Pelerin Society went round in a circle and got back to pretty much where they started.

It equates making money with creating wealth and people try and make money in the easiest way possible, which doesn't actually create any wealth.
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned" income.
The American have lost sight of what real wealth creation is, and are just focussed on making money.
You might as well do that in the easiest way possible.
It looks like a parasitic rentier capitalism because that is what it is.

Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial crisis.
What they are doing is really an illusion; they are just pulling future spending power into today.
The 1920s roared at the expense of an impoverished 1930s.
Japan roared on the money creation of real estate lending in the 1980s, they spent the next 30 years repaying the debt they had built up in the 1980s and the economy flat-lined.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YTyJzmiHGk

Bankers use bank credit to pump up asset prices, which doesn't actually create any wealth.
The money creation of bank credit flows into the economy making it boom, but you are heading towards a financial crisis and claims on future prosperity are building up in the financial system.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
Early success comes at the expense of an impoverished future.

Things haven't been the same since 2008.
Early success came at the expense of an impoverished future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6
At 18 mins.
The money creation of bank credit flowed into the economy before 2008 making it boom, but they were heading towards a financial crisis and claims on future prosperity were building up in the financial system.
It's repayment time.

Sound of the Suburbs , November 16, 2020 at 1:01 pm

Let's get the basics sorted.
When no one knows what real wealth creation is, you are in trouble.

We want economic success
Step one – Identify where wealth creation occurs in the economy.
Houston, we have a problem.

Economists do identify where real wealth creation in the economy occurs, but this is a most inconvenient truth as it reveals many at the top don't actually create any wealth.
This is the problem.
Much of their money comes from wealth extraction rather than wealth creation, and they need to get everyone thoroughly confused so we don't realise what they are really up to.

The Classical Economists had a quick look around and noticed the aristocracy were maintained in luxury and leisure by the hard work of everyone else.
They haven't done anything economically productive for centuries, they couldn't miss it.
The Classical economist, Adam Smith:
"The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money."
There was no benefits system in those days, and if those at the bottom didn't work they died.
They had to earn money to live.

Ricardo was an expert on the small state, unregulated capitalism he observed in the world around him. He was part of the new capitalist class, and the old landowning class were a huge problem with their rents that had to be paid both directly and through wages.
"The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community" Ricardo 1815 / Classical Economist.
They soon identified the constructive "earned" income and the parasitic "unearned" income.
This disappeared in neoclassical economics.

GDP was invented after they used neoclassical economics last time.
In the 1920s, the economy roared, the stock market soared and nearly everyone had been making lots of money.
In the 1930s, they were wondering what the hell had just happened as everything had appeared to be going so well in the 1920s and then it all just fell apart.
They needed a better measure to see what was really going on in the economy and came up with GDP.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised inflating asset prices doesn't create real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth and therefore does not add to GDP. The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by GDP.
Real wealth creation involves real work producing new goods and services in the economy.

So all that transferring existing financial assets around doesn't create wealth?
No it doesn't, and now you are ready to start thinking about what is really going on there.

GlassHammer , November 16, 2020 at 2:08 pm

"Much of their money comes from wealth extraction rather than wealth creation, and they need to get everyone thoroughly confused so we don't realise what they are really up to."

And this is why the quintessential business model in the U.S (at least since the 1970s) has been the multi-level marketing scheme.

[Nov 16, 2020] Four More Years Of by Andrew Joyce

Highly recommended!
There are two different things here. Trump betrayal of his voters is one thing, but election fraud is another and is unacceptable no matter what is your opinion about Trump. We should not mix those two topics.
Notable quotes:
"... Anarchy and Christianity ..."
"... Le meutre d'un enfant ..."
"... homo economicus ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
Nov 16, 2020 | www.unz.com
ANDREW JOYCE NOVEMBER 14, 2020 3,100 WORDS 77 COMMENTS REPLY Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More RSS

All our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary system and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian and omnipresent.
Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity (1991)

Look at them! Look at them, will you? Behold our politicians' horrible languid maws!; the courtier-like faces of department managers. They are indeed salesmen, for the very power of nations is measure in relation to their own mercantile activity.
Jean Cau, Le meutre d'un enfant (1965)

"What's going to happen now?" I was asked earlier today. "Nothing and everything," I replied. Immigration, largely unchallenged and unscathed (excepting the incidental impact of COVID-19 on population movement) from four years of Trumpism, will now continue to accelerate unabated . Zionism will continue to enjoy the expansion of American institutional and military support, this time with the blood interest of Jared Kushner replaced with the Jewish spouses of all three of Biden's children. And the momentary Obama-era delusion of a post-racial America will continue to dissolve in the reality of the increasing awareness and importance of race throughout the West, not solely as a result of mass migration but also of the increasing ubiquity of the ideologies of racial grievance and revenge. There will, of course, be a dramatic change for the worse in tone and spirit, and some smaller legislative victories like the banning of federal anti-racism training will likely soon be reversed. The defeat of Donald Trump is also hugely demoralizing to many decent American people, and emboldening to their bitterest enemies. This is to be sorely regretted. But it is in the shared qualities of Trump and Biden, rather than the election and sham ballots, that the real nature of our political systems and their future can be perceived. And it is in these shared qualities that our true problems lie.

Parliamentary electoral democracy is merely a representation of the general system in which it operates. Slavoj Zizek comments:

At the empirical level, of course, multi-party liberal democracy "represents" -- mirrors, registers, measures -- the quantitative dispersal of different opinions of the people, what they think about the proposed programs of the parties and about their candidates, etc. However, prior to this empirical level and in a much more radical sense, the very form of multi-party liberal democracy "represents" -- instantiates -- a certain vision of society, politics, and the role of the individuals in it: politics is organized in parties that compete through elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus, etc. One should always be aware that this frame is never neutral, insofar as it privileges certain values and practices.

The truth of the system, in terms of its non-negotiable aspects, is thus revealed in the "values and practices" privileged and ring-fenced under both Trump and Biden. What are these non-negotiables? Zionism, GloboHomo ideological capitalism and its "woke" leftist correlates, and the neoliberal promotion of GDP as the benchmark of human success and happiness.

Zionism

Jews have little to fear from a Biden presidency, which is presumably why Haaretz is claiming that the "American Jewish vote clinched Biden's victory and Trump's ouster. American Jews decided the outcome of the U.S. elections." Donald Trump might have been hailed as the "most pro-Israel President in U.S. history," but Jews are notoriously unreliable in their partnerships with non-Jewish elites. Fate, it must be said, has not been kind to those gentile elites that have exhausted their usefulness to Jews. And Trump is surely exhausted, having spent a busy four years fighting for Jews in Israel and in the United States. He reversed long-standing US policies on several critical security, diplomatic and political issues to Israel's favour, including the Iran nuclear accord, the treatment of Israel at the UN, and the status of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. In December 2019, he announced his Executive Order on Combatting Anti-Semitism , promising to fight "the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and around the world." One wonders what else he could possibly have done for these people -- apart from a war with Iran -- a question that appears to have been answered by Jews with a resounding "Nothing." One can only imagine Trump's facial expression on seeing Benjamin Netanyahu's emphatic congratulations to Joe Biden, punctuated with the loving refrain: "I have a personal, long and warm connection with Joe Biden for nearly 40 years, and I know him to be a great friend of the State of Israel."

Biden and Harris, replete with their immediate familial ties to Jews, are viewed in Zionist circles as being at least as reliable as Trump, although not as exuberant and bullish. Biden has been known as a staunch supporter of Israel throughout his 36 years in the Senate, often cites his 1973 encounter with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir as "one of the most consequential meetings" of his life, and has on more than one occasion regaled audiences with a tale about his father telling him that "You don't need to be a Jew to be a Zionist." While some modifications are likely in the American approach to Iran, few reversals are expected on Trump's four years of pro-Israel activism. Biden, for example, has weakly criticized moving the embassy to Jerusalem but said he would not pull it back to Tel Aviv. Michael Herzog at Haaretz describes both Biden and Harris as "traditional Democrats, with a fundamental commitment to Israel whose roots are in part emotional in nature (in contrast to Obama)."

The change in relationship between America and Israel will be, in meaningful terms, restricted to the personal. Netanyahu, for all his fawning, is likely to undergo a personal demotion of sorts, with David Halbfinger of the New York Times pointing out that we can expect a Biden presidency to diminish Netanyahu's "stature on the global stage and undercut his argument to restive Israeli voters that he remains their indispensable leader." Palestinian leaders, probably the best-positioned to offer a perspective on the potential for an improvement in their condition under the new presidency, have been sombre to say the least. Hanan Ashrawi, a senior PLO official, responded to the question if she expected United States policy to continue tilting heavily in Israel's favor: "I don't think we're so naïve as to see Biden as our savior." Contrast this with the cheerfulness and confidence of Israel settlers who have grown accustomed to the perennial nature of American support for Zionism. David Elhayani, head of the Yesha Council, an umbrella for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, said the party of the U.S. president ultimately doesn't matter so long as the baseline commitment to support Israel persists: "Under Obama, we built more [settlement] houses than we have under Trump I think Biden is a friend of Israel."

The fact that the grassroots of the Democratic Party are drifting away from Zionism is no more consequential than the fact the grassroots of the Republican Party wanted major action on immigration reform. The former, like the latter, have been equally ignored by the real power brokers and influencers. Regardless of the radical appearance of Democrat-affiliated movements like Black Lives Matter, the fact remains that all of the leftist aggression and rhetoric of the summer of 2020 has resulted in the putative election of an establishment Zionist and political pragmatist who is sure to execute a more or less formulaic neoliberal scheme for government. In one sense, the bland, forgetful, and familiar Biden, who lacks any hint of genuine or novel ideology and was elected purely as a symbol of "not Trump," is the fitting response to Trump, who was equally devoid of ideological sincerity or complexity beyond the symbolism of "not Establishment." And so, while the media proclaims, as Heraclitus, that "all is in flux," from a different perspective we could argue, like Parmenides, the opposite -- "there is no motion at all."

GloboHomo

If I retain one abiding, surreal, memory of the Trump presidency in the years ahead it will be the Don dancing to the Village People in the wake of his numerous drives to legalize homosexuality in various African backwaters. That the Red State Christians comprising so much of his base could maintain their self-adopted blind spot on this issue is a remarkable testament to the power of personality, because no world leader in history has done more in recent history than Donald Trump to export what E. Michael Jones has so aptly termed "the Gay Disco" -- the double-barrelled shotgun of unbridled finance capitalism and the superficial freedom of sexual "liberty." As the pastors and preachers of South Carolina and Texas urged their huddled congregations to pray for the President, Trump was busy dispatching new missionaries, like U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, to the corners of the earth in search of converts to the Church of GloboHomo.

In February 2019, the U.S. embassy indulged in some nostalgia for Weimar when it flew LGBT activists from across Europe to Berlin for a strategy dinner to plan to push for decriminalization in places that still outlaw homosexuality -- mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. For my part, I can think of many social problems in these parts of the world, but it really takes a special kind of mind to arrive at the opinion that one of the most pressing is that they need to become more gay. Grenell, however, horrified that Iran has the audacity to execute its own convicted homosexual pederasts, was not to be deterred, and was instrumental in the blackmail of lesser nations, promising they would be denied access to terrorism intelligence if they don't legalise homosexuality. All of which has left the far corners of the American cultural-military empire questioning whether they could better live with suicide bombers or sodomy.

Against such manoeuvres, Biden's apparent claim to be one half of the "most pro-equality ticket in history" seems a little overstated. That being said, there's no question that Biden is going to step up the domestic nature of GloboHomo significantly as soon as he assumes office. Biden has pledged to sign the Equality Act, thus far opposed by the Trump administration, within his first 100 days in office, a piece of legislation that will amend "the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, public education, federal funding, credit, and the jury system." Biden has pledged to appoint significant numbers of homosexuals and transsexuals to positions of influence, and has promised to allow transsexuals to join the military. Experienced in advancing global LGBT+ dogma as part of the Obama-Biden administration, Biden will also once again take up the global mantle, expressing his "hopes to reverse Trump's efforts and expand queer rights internationally by making equality a centrepiece of US diplomacy," and condemning Poland's "LGBT-free zones." Stunning and brave indeed.

There is a certain sense in the cases of both Trump and Biden that, for all the flamboyance of their efforts in this area, there is a performative aspect to this politics. I don't get the impression that either has been especially personally committed to these ideas or actions, but that, as pragmatic-symbolic politicians, they have been made aware that this is the direction the broader System is moving in and they should comply and support it. The longevity and gradual acceleration of these trends, beginning in earnest with the presidency of Bill Clinton, would suggest a systemic movement underlying, and entirely untethered to, specific political parties or figures. Throughout the West, and much as with Zionism, GloboHomo, or hedonistic credit-based capitalism and its sexual correlates more generally, is to be accepted and promoted as an essential part of the role of neoliberal government. In the context of declining basic freedoms at home, for example the obvious decline in free speech and the creeping criminalisation of meaningful dissent against the status quo, the international promotion of homosexuality and transsexual identities offers a cost-free and PR-friendly method for increasingly authoritarian neoliberal regimes to posture as crusaders for freedom. The trucker in Ohio is, logical flaws notwithstanding, and whether he wants it or not, thus assured of his place in the Land of the Free via his government's emancipation of the gays and transvestites of Uganda. Engaged politically only at the most superficial level, the masses play along with this ruse, often in blunt denial, possessing only fragmentary realisations of the fact their countries are changing around them while the petty "rewards" of Americanism are meagre and peculiar, if not insulting.

GDP!

Along with frequent reassurances that he was "giving serious consideration" to doing something, Trump's presidency was marked by regular updates on the performance of American GDP. Unfortunately the GDP, like the Jewish vote, appears to have stabbed him in the back, with around 70% of American GDP represented in counties that (putatively!) voted Democrat. Trump's tragicomic belief in GDP performance as a form of politics in its own right is perhaps the quintessential example of the mentality of homo economicus and the tendency of neoliberals to view countries as mere zones, or economic areas, where everything is based on rationalism and materialism, and national success is purely a calculation of economic self-interest. Writing pessimistically of Trump's expected nomination in 2015 , I issued a stark warning about the influence of Jared Kushner, but also added:

For all his bluster, Trump is a creation and product of the bourgeois revolution and its materialistic liberal ideologies. We are teased and tantalized by the fantasy that Trump is a potential "man of the people." But I cannot escape the impression that he is a utilitarian and primarily economic character, who seeks a social contract based on personal convenience and material interest. In his business and political history I see only the "distilled Jewish spirit."

I don't think I've seen anything over the last four years that has made me question or revise that assessment. Trump's dedicated tweeting on GDP in fact had the opposite effect.

The disturbing reality, of course, is that GDP is only one side of a national economy. Another crucial aspect is government borrowing, and current projections suggest that the United States is " condemned to eternal debt ." According to The Budget Office of the United States Congress (CBO), "the US economy would enter the first half of this century with a public debt equivalent to 195 percent of its GDP. In the next 30 years the debt of the most powerful economy on the planet would more than double." The first significant jump occurred in the wake of the subprime crisis, in which Jewish mortgage lenders were especially prominent. The subprime crisis forced public debt to 37 percent of GDP, which then rose steadily to 79 percent between 2008 and the outbreak of COVID-19. It now stands at 98 percent, and is accelerating. Although the United States has reached comparable levels of debt in the past, there has almost always been an accompanying war, or wars, which acted as a financial pressure valve -- a fact that does not bode well for isolationists but may be encouraging news for Zionist hawks.

Joe Biden has claimed recently that "a Biden-Harris Administration will not be measured just by the stock market or GDP growth, but by the extent to which growth is raising the pay, dignity, and economic security of our working families" -- while at the same time welcoming millions of new immigrants and legalizing the ~20M+ illegals into the workforce .The American economy is in fact extremely unlikely to change direction, with Biden reassuring his billionaire donors gathered at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan in June 2019 that "no one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change." I believe him. Biden was part of an administration that looked on as 10 million working Americans lost their homes. Matt Stoller at the Washington Post has described Obama-era Democrat economic policies as "in effect, a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power." Biden was part of a team that outright rejected prosecuting major bankers for fraud and money laundering, and that represented one of the most monopoly-friendly administrations in history:

2015 saw a record wave of mergers and acquisitions, and 2016 was another busy year. In nearly every sector of the economy, from pharmaceuticals to telecom to Internet platforms to airlines, power was concentrated. And this administration, like George W. Bush's before it, did not prosecute a single significant monopoly under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Instead [under Obama] the Federal Trade Commission has gone after such villains as music teachers and ice skating instructors for ostensible anti-competitive behavior. This is very much a parallel of the financial crisis, as elites operate without legal constraints while the rest of us toil under an excess of bureaucracy.

Biden is the product of funding from forty-four billionaires , including six hedge fund speculators, seven real estate barons, and five in the tech sector. Of the top 22 donors, at least 18 are Jews (Jim Simons, Len Blavatnik, Stewart Resnick, Eli Broad, Neil Bluhm, David Bonderman, Herb Simon, Daniel Och, Liz Lefkovsky, Steve Mandel, Bruce Karsh, Howard Marks, S. Daniel Abraham, Marc Lasry, Jonathan Tisch, Daniel Lubetsky, Laurie Tisch, and Robert Toll). The Jewish consortium behind Biden is almost identical in its financial composition to that behind Trump which, as I've explained previously , was notable for its embodiment of "usury and vulture capitalism, bloated consumerism, and the sordid commercial exploitation of vice." Biden's transition team , meanwhile, is comprised of "executives from Lyft, Airbnb, Amazon, Capital One, Booz Allen, Uber, Visa, and JPMorgan." In short, expectations that Biden is going to break up Big Tech, or any monopoly for that matter, are the fantasies of the deluded, the ignorant, and the duped.

Conclusion

While the drama and recrimination surrounding the election are unquestionably fascinating, I hope you'll forgive for being less agitated than most. My reasons for lethargy are simple: I knew that regardless of outcome we'd get four more years -- four more years of Zionism, GloboHomo, and the standardized, rationalized machinery of economic escalation that now provides the apologetic engine for mass migration. Behind the abortion debates, Supreme Court picks, culture wars, and media theater, these are the non-negotiables of the System. You don't hear about them, and you can't talk about them, because you can't vote on them. And this is the biggest electoral fraud of all.

Jack McArthur , says: November 14, 2020 at 7:37 pm GMT • 1.9 days ago

I feel particular sorrow for ordinary decent Americans, in what today should be the land of plenty for all, who are having to witness this horrible implosion of their country and values. Other than divine intervention there is no hope. The media, money markets and political classes are either directly run by the same children of a devil or by loathsome gentiles who have taken the Judas coin or who are cowards in fear of their miserable life's.

What is life if it means cowering down in the face of evil? An ancient voice trying to tell this strange world that you are controlled by an evil power and that your eternal fate is determined by how you respond to it i.e. join the freak show or stand up like a true man or woman and tell them no.

The writer of this essay is a man of culture, with wide interests. There are not many left. Compare him to the moronic voices of today with their narrow perverted interests and weep for what faces you.

Craig Nelsen , says: November 14, 2020 at 9:30 pm GMT • 1.8 days ago

I feel particular sorrow for ordinary decent Americans, in what today should be the land of plenty for all, who are having to witness this horrible implosion of their country and values. Other than divine intervention there is no hope. The media, money markets and political classes are either directly run by the same children of a devil or by loathsome gentiles who have taken the Judas coin or who are cowards in fear of their miserable life's.

Particular particular sorrow for the young. As for divine intervention, we used to have a saying about God helping those who help themselves. Surely there must be some action we can take.

https://jailsoros.com/

Realist , says: November 15, 2020 at 3:30 pm GMT • 1.1 days ago

While the drama and recrimination surrounding the election are unquestionably fascinating, I hope you'll forgive for being less agitated than most. My reasons for lethargy are simple: I knew that regardless of outcome we'd get four more years -- four more years of Zionism, GloboHomo, and the standardized, rationalized machinery of economic escalation that now provides the apologetic engine for mass migration. Behind the abortion debates, Supreme Court picks, culture wars, and media theater, these are the non-negotiables of the System. You don't hear about them, and you can't talk about them, because you can't vote on them. And this is the biggest electoral fraud of all.

Exactly correct. As early as mid April 2017 I could see that Trump had no intention of keeping his promises to middle Americans I wrote a comment to this blog saying as much.

Trump is a minion of the Deep State.

The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the two parties as long as their important issues are advanced (wealth and power). As a matter of fact it strengthens the false perception that there is a choice when voting.

Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch America's Got Talent, Dancing With The Stars or The Masked Singer than be informed about important issues.

AReply , says: November 16, 2020 at 6:05 am GMT • 11.1 hours ago

The only discernible values espoused in this rambling crypfic article is dog-whistling to bigots of yore.

There is no study of history, no analysis, no insight and no meaning beyond blathers about jews and homos.

The tone is hatred and despair with the judgement that others are to blame and there is nothing to work towards.

The Zizek quote offered a word-salad refrain that everybody comes to power under some bias, to themselves, if nothing else. But Zizek's actual point has be de-contextualized. Here is what Zizek was saying:

Biden is Just Trump With a Human Face
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rt.com/op-ed/504705-slavoj-zizek-biden-trump/amp/

//Let's remember that [Hannah] Arendt said this in her polemic against Mao, who himself believed that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun" – Arendt qualifies this like an "entirely non-Marxist" conviction and claims that, for Marx, violent outbursts are like "the labor pangs that precede, but of course do not cause, the event of organic birth." Basically, I agree with her, but I would add that there never will be a fully peaceful "democratic" transfer of power without the "birth pangs" of violence: there will always be moments of tension when the rules of democratic dialogue and changes are suspended.

Today, however, the agent of this tension is the Right, which is why, paradoxically, the task of the Left is now, as the US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pointed out, to save our "bourgeois" democracy when the liberal center is too weak and indecisive to do it. Is this in contradiction with the fact that the Left today should move beyond parliamentary democracy?

No: as Trump demonstrates, the contradiction is in this democratic form itself, so that the only way to save what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to move beyond it – and vice versa, when rightist violence is on the rise, the only way to move beyond liberal democracy is to be more faithful to it than the liberal democrats themselves. This is what the successful democratic return to power of the Morales's party in Bolivia, one of the few bright spots in our devastated landscape, clearly signals.//

In other words we must be conservatives who are willing to progress!

And hey, crypto-fascists: Zizek is not on board with you just because RT runs him on their version of Fox News.

A New Kind of Communism

https://www.youtube.com/embed/QARALafdWUI?feature=oembed

The world is never going back to the old-timey dayz of white settlement of an eden America. So move forward or croak of old age or both.

As to the idea that "decent Americans" are in any way demoralized by Trump's loss:
BULLSHIT!

If you are demoralized by Trump's loss, you have been ejected from decency. But Luckily for you, it so happens USA is a happy-enough home for all stripes of perverts.

Meimou , says: November 16, 2020 at 6:10 am GMT • 11.0 hours ago
@Verymuchalive the Occidental Observer writers in prison, you have zero reason to think Trump won't crack down on free speech in 2020.

Another 4 years of Trumpstien means a very large % of the right will continue to sleep, something Biden could not get us to do. Biden could never get the right to support vaccines or martial law.

No Trump apologist besides Alex Jonestien gives an excuse why Trump is backing a unsafe, hastily made vaccine for a disease with a 99% survival rate. No Trump cultist will provide a credible one. (Wally will not be the first)

Consider.

GreatSocialist , says: November 16, 2020 at 6:22 am GMT • 10.8 hours ago
@Realist rs.

And what happened? She was raped and kicked in the butt by him. He always does that to everybody. He did it to his dad, he did it to his brothers and sister, he did it to his family ..and now he has raped America.

Trump's only ability is to find out what others fear or desire, then overpromise on everything and deliver nothing or even the opposite after u have given him your support or money. That's how he operates in business, and that's how he has conducted his fake presidency.

I am surprised that so many seemingly intelligent people have been taken in by this well-known conman.

Clay Alexander , says: November 16, 2020 at 6:44 am GMT • 10.4 hours ago

Great article. What I find strange is a businessman from New York second only to Israel in population of Jews could be so easily duped by them. Loyal only to themselves. In the words of Harry Truman "Jesus couldn't do anything with them, what am I suppose to do with them?".

geokat62 , says: November 16, 2020 at 8:26 am GMT • 8.7 hours ago

I think it needs to be emphasised that the "homo" in globohomo stands for "homogeneity" and not "homosexuality":

Globohomo

(adj) A word used to describe a globalized and homogenized culture pushed for by large companies, politicians, and Neocon/Leftist pawns. This culture includes metropolitan ideals such as diversity, homosexuality, sexual degeneracy, colorblindness in regard to race, egalitarianism, money worship, and the erasure of different individual cultures, among other things.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Globohomo

Miro23 , says: November 16, 2020 at 10:28 am GMT • 6.7 hours ago

My reasons for lethargy are simple: I knew that regardless of outcome we'd get four more years -- four more years of Zionism, GloboHomo, and the standardized, rationalized machinery of economic escalation that now provides the apologetic engine for mass migration. Behind the abortion debates, Supreme Court picks, culture wars, and media theater, these are the non-negotiables of the System. You don't hear about them, and you can't talk about them, because you can't vote on them.

This may be great for The US' Jewish plutocracy, but the United States is still in economic competition with countries that don't give 2 cents for ZioGlob world (for example China – which has just signed the RCEP – Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, covering 15 Asian countries, after 8 years of negotiation and covering 2.2 billion people).

So the rest of the world looks on with interest, same as it did in 1923, when the German Weimar Republic collapsed in an orgy of sleaze, corruption, debt and worthless money.

sethg , says: November 16, 2020 at 10:38 am GMT • 6.5 hours ago

990. Jews are the scapegoats for all the deficiencies of low-IQ whites just as whites are the scapegoats for all the deficiencies of low-IQ non-whites. Let me explain how that works.

Why do we observe Jews at the forefront of many cutting-edge industries? (for example the media/arts and financial industries are indeed rife with them). The low-IQ answer is, of course, a simplistic conspiracy theory: Jews form an evil cabal that created all these industries from scratch to "destroy culture" (or at least what low-IQ people think is culture, i.e. some previous, obsolete state of culture, i.e. older, lower culture, i.e. non-culture). And, to be sure, there is a lot of decadence in these industries. But, in an advanced civilization, there is a lot of decadence everywhere anyway! It's an essential prerequisite even! So it makes perfect sense that the most capable people in such a civilization will also be the most decadent! The stereotype of the degenerate cocaine-sniffing whoremonging or homosexual Hollywood or Wall Street operative belongs here. Well, buddy, if YOU were subjected to the stresses and temptations of the Hollywood or Wall Street lifestyles, maybe you'd be a "degenerate" too! But you lack the IQ for that, so of course you'll reduce the whole enterprise to a simplistic resentful fairy tale that seems laughable even to children: a bunch of old bearded Jews gathered round a large table planning the destruction of civilization! Well I say enough with this childish nonsense! The Jews are simply some of the smartest and most industrious people around, ergo it makes sense that they'll be encountered at or near all the peaks of the dominant culture, being overrepresented everywhere in it, including therefore in its failings and excesses! This is what it means to be the best! It doesn't mean that you are faultless little angels who can do no wrong, you brainless corn-fed nitwits! There's a moving passage somewhere in Nietzsche where he relates that Europe owes the Jews for the highest sage (Spinoza), and the highest saint (Jesus), and he'd never even heard of Freud or Einstein! In view of all the immeasurable gifts the Jewish spirit has lavished on humanity, anti-semitism in the coming world order will be a capital offense, if I have anything to say on the matter. The slightest word against the Jews, and you're a marked man: I would have not only you, but your entire extended family wiped out, just to be sure. You think you know what the Devil is, but he's just the lackey taking my orders. Entire cities razed to the ground (including the entire Middle East), simply because one person there said something bad about "the Jews", that's how I would have the future! Enough with this stupid meme! To hell with all of you brainless subhumans! You've wasted enough of our nervous energy on this stupid shit! And the same goes to low-IQ non-whites who blame all their troubles on whites! And it's all true: Jews and whites upped the stakes for everybody by bringing into the world a whole torrent of new possibilities which your IQ is too low to handle! So whatcha gonna do about it? Are you all bark, or are you prepared to bite? Come on, let's see what you can do! Any of you fucking pricks bark, and we'll execute every motherfucking last one of you!

From http://orgyofthewill.net

Zarathustra , says: November 16, 2020 at 10:44 am GMT • 6.4 hours ago

Blah, blah, blah. Cat circling the hot plate. Trump was galacticly stupid. He should have told the Jews that I will give you Jerusalem and Golan heights in my second term. He would have a second term.
The only point is here is this:
Jews see Iran as a mortal threat. Jews want Iran to be destroyed. For Biden the first point on the agenda is destruction of Iran. Biden did promise Jews that he will destroy Iran.
That is why Biden did win.
Trump hesitated with his promise to destroy Iran that is why he lost.
So here is the conclusion question:
Was Biden serious when he promised to Jews destroy Iran, or he was only making fools from them Jews.
That is the only outstanding question

The Spirit of Enoch Powell , says: November 16, 2020 at 4:11 pm GMT • 58 minutes ago
@Trinity

From my understanding, the term "Globohomo" was originally meant as a shorthand for "globalised homogenisation", wherein all national cultures would be eliminated in favour of a universal culture, promotion of homosexuality is just one of the components of GloboHomo, with things like rampant consumerism, substance use and liberalism being some of the other things.

If you go to the newly built sections of Europeans cities, you will notice how they are all the same (homogenous) with the same American fast food outlets and the same architectural style.

[Nov 07, 2020] .It's a class-war people, recognize it for such.

Nov 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

donten , Nov 5 2020 23:33 utc | 178

The amount of cerebral activity wasted here is, well, wasted...It's a class-war people, recognize it for such. The U.S. needs to fall down among the weeds, and fertilize what's coming...The libertarian impulse must be squashed until it is unrecognizable!!

Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty in that order, my friends. All else is sickness in the mind.

[Nov 07, 2020] Moral is is them, money is for us

Nov 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

malchik ralph , Nov 6 2020 19:23 utc | 118

Americans preach family values and are publicly prudish while privately consuming porn en masse

Americans preach capitalism and free market values while privately approving monopolization of vital sectors

[Nov 06, 2020] the Professional, Managerial class.

Nov 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

c1ue , Nov 5 2020 20:24 utc | 144

@vig #85
Sorry: PMC refers to the Professional, Managerial class.
It could be considered the Petit Bourgeoisie in the Marxist sense except these aren't shopkeepers. They're the middle managers, doctors, lawyers, MBAs, tenured professors, finance types and what not who are divorced from the actual hands-on labor.
They mostly work for large corporations and government/non-government institutions like state governments (at the higher levels), think tanks and nonprofits.

c1ue , Nov 5 2020 20:37 utc | 148

@vig #85
And to clarify further: there is a professor at Stanford University named Victor Davis Hanson. He is both a tenured professor in early Western history (Greek) and also a farmer - 4th or 5th generation in the San Joaquin valley in California.
What Hanson has talked about at length was that the urban elite - the people in the cities and along the East and West Coasts of America - have been enjoying a different reality than the rest of the country.
In particular, the opening up of the American economy to China, India and the rest of the world has created new markets for companies like Boeing, Facebook, GE and the like - which benefits these areas and demographics.
However, this same action has also exposed American farmers, manufacturers, non-MBA/PhD/Master's/etc to low priced labor and mercantilist economic policies in these other countries.
The example Hanson uses is his own farm. In the 1980s, the price for raisins was $1200/ton and the market was largely in Europe.
With the advent of the EU, Greek farmers got subsidies from the EU such that they took over the EU market for raisins. The price for raisins fell to $400/ton.
Hanson doesn't say that this could/should be prevented; what he says is that it is a travesty that there were no voices in the US at least pushing back against these obviously anti-competitive economic policies. The lack of such voices meant that the forces of globalism could run rampant and destroy entire sectors of the American economy at amazing speed. In particular, the US leadership = oligarchs plus PMC class chose to sell out the rest of the country in order to enrich itself.
This is 100% obvious to anyone who looks at the details of what has happened in the last 30+ years: China went from 6% of the US GDP in 1984 to near parity (or beyond) in purchasing power terms today.

[Oct 25, 2020] Whose Great Reset- The Fight For Our Future Technocracy Vs. The Republic -

Oct 25, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Whose Great Reset? The Fight For Our Future – Technocracy Vs. The Republic by Tyler Durden Fri, 10/23/2020 - 23:40 Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print

Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

People living in the western world are in the greatest fight for the future of pluralist and republican forms of governance since the rise and fall of fascism 75 years ago. As then, society had to be built up from a war. Today's war has been an economic war of the oligarchs against the republic, and it increasingly appears that the coronavirus pandemic is being used, on the political end, as a massive coup against pluralist society. We are being confronted with this 'great reset', alluding to post-war construction. But for a whole generation people have already been living under an ever-increasing austerity regimen. This is a regimen that can only be explained as some toxic combination of the systemic inevitabilities of a consumer-driven society on the foundation of planned obsolescence, and the never-ending greed and lust for power which defines whole sections of the sociopathic oligarchy.

Recently we saw UK PM Boris Johnson stand in front of a 'Build Back Better' sign, speaking to the need for a 'great reset'. 'Build Back Better' happens to be Joe Biden's campaign slogan, which raises many other questions for another time. But, to what extent are the handlers who manage 'Joe Biden', and those managing 'Boris Johnson' working the same script?

The more pertinent question is to ask: in whose interest is this 'great reset' being carried out ?

Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers upon the theory and practice of austerity. Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers as puppets of a morally decaying oligarchy.

What Johnson calls the 'Great Reset', Biden calls the 'Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice'. Certainly the coming economy cannot be left to Boris Johnson or Joe Biden.

How is it that now Boris Johnson speaks publicly of a 'great reset', whereas just months ago when those outside the ruling media paradigm used this phrase, it was censured by corporate Atlanticist media as being conspiratorial in nature? This is an excellent question posed by Neil Clark.

And so we have by now all read numerous articles in the official press talking about how economic life after coronavirus will never be the same as it was before. Atlanticist press has even run numerous opinion articles talking about how this may cut against globalization – a fair point, and one which many thinking people by and large agree with.

Yet they have set aside any substantive discussion about what exists in lieu of globalization, and what the economy looks like in various parts of the world if it is not globalized. We have consistently spoken of multipolarity, a term that in decades past was utilized frequently in western vectors, in the sphere of geopolitics and international relations. Now there is some strange ban on the term, and so we are now bereft of a language with which to have an honest discussion about the post-globalization paradigm.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890 Technocracy or Pluralism? A Fight Against the Newspeak

Until now, we have only been given a steady diet of distancing, of lockdown provisions, quarantining, track and trace, and we have forgotten entirely about the fact that all of this was only supposed to be a two or three-week long exercise to flatten the curve. And now the truth is emerging that what is being planned is a new proposal being disguised as a 'great reset'.

One of the large problems in discussing the 'great reset' is that a false dichotomy has arisen around it. Either one wants things to be how they were before and without changes to the status quo, or they promote this 'great reset'. Unfortunately, Clark in his RT article falls into this false dichotomy, and perhaps only for expedience sake in discussing some other point, he does not challenge the inherent problems in 'how things were before'. In truth, we would be surprised if Clark did not appreciate what we are going to propose.

What we propose is that we must oppose their ' new normal ' 'great reset', while also understanding the inherent problems of what had been normalized up until Covid.

The way things were before was also a tremendous problem, and yet now it only seems better in comparison to the police state-like provisions we've encountered throughout the course of politicizing the spectre of this 'pandemic'.

Oddly this politicization is based in positive cases (and not hospitalizations) ostensibly linked to the novel coronavirus. Strangely, we are told to 'listen to the consensus science' even as these very institutions consist of politically arrived at appointments. Certainly science is not about consensus, but about challenging assumptions, repeatability and a lively debate between disagreeing scientists with relatively equal qualifications. As Kuhn explains in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , science is always evolving, and by definition potentially overturns consensus paradigms. This is a debate we have not seen, and this fact by itself represents an illiberal cancer growing on an already defective pluralist society – ironically, all flying under the banner of liberalism.

Decisions that a society decides to take should be driven by reason, prudence, and justice. What is or isn't scientific plays a role, but cannot be the deciding factor. Science clearly says that we may eliminate cross-walk injuries by banning street-crossing or by banning driving, but what policy makers must do is account for the need to have both cars and crossing the street, in deciding how – if it's even possible – to reduce or eliminate such injuries. Science is only one part of this equation.

But isn't economics also a science? Is sociology not a science? What about psychology and psychiatry – as in the known effects of social isolation and, say, suicide prevention? What about housing and urban planning? The great sociologist Emile Durkheim explains how these are sciences – they adopt and apply the scientific method in their work. Universities have been awarding doctoral degrees in these sciences for a century or more, do these expert opinions not count when managing a public catastrophe?

It is, and always has been, a political and politicized position to listen to some scientists, and not others.

And so what of our term 'reset'? Indeed, it is itself misleading, and we would propose it is intentionally so if we understand Orwell's critique of the use of language – newspeak – in technocratic oligarchies.

A 'reset' textually refers to going back to something once known, erasing defects or contradictions which arose along the way, which carries with it the familiar, and something we had previously all agreed to. A 'reset' by definition means going back to how things were before – not just recently, but before at some point farther back. Its definition is literally contrary to how Boris Johnson means it in his shocking public statement at the start of October.

The term 'reset' was therefore arrived with extraordinary planning and thoughtfulness, with the intent to persuade [manipulate] the public. It simultaneously straddles two unique concepts, and bundles them together at once into a single term in a manner that reduces nuance and complexity and therefore also reduces thinking. It does so while appealing to the implicit notion of the term that it relates to a past consensus agreement.

If understood as we are told to understand it, we must hold two mutually contradictory notions at the same time – we are incongruously told that this reset must effectively restore society to how it was at some point before because things can never be how they were at any time before. Only within the paradigm of this vicious newspeak could anything ever have the public thinking that such a textual construction makes any bit of sense.

What are Our Real Options? Whose Reset?

Those who understand that this 'reset' is not a reset but rather a whole new proposal on the entire organization of society, but being done through oligarchical methods and without the sort of mandate required in a society governed by laws and not men, are – as we have said – reluctant to admit that a great change is indeed necessary.

Rather, we must understand that the underlying catastrophic economic mechanisms which are forcing this great change exist independently of the coronavirus, and exist independently of the particular changes which the oligarchs promoting their version of a 'reset' (read: new proposals ) would like to see.

You see, the people and the oligarchs are locked into a single system together. In the long-term, it seems as if the oligarchs are looking for solutions to change that fact, and effect a final solution that grants them an entirely break-away civilization. But at this moment, that is not the case. Yet this system cannot carry forward as it has been, and the Coronavirus presents a reason at once both mysterious in its timing and also profound in its implications, to push forward a new proposal.

We believe that technology is quickly arriving at a point where the vast majority of human beings will be considered redundant. If the technocracy wants to create a walled civilization, and leave the rest of humanity to manage their own lives along some agrarian, mediaeval mode of production, there may indeed be benefits to those who live along agrarian lines. But based in what we know about psychopathy, and the tendency of that among those who govern, such an amicable solution is likely not in the cards.

That is why the anti-lockdown protests are so critically important to endorse. This is precisely because the lockdown measures are used to ban mass public demonstrations, a critical part of pushing public policy in the direction of the interests of the general public. A whole part of the left has been compromised, and rolled out to fight imaginary fascists, by which they mean anyone with conventional social views which predate May of 1968. All the while the actual plutocrats unleash a new system of oligarchical control which, for most, has not been hitherto contemplated except by relatively obscure political scientists, futurists, and science fiction authors.

Certainly the consumerist economic system (sometimes called 'capitalism' by the left), which is based in both globalized supply chains but also planned obsolescence, is no longer feasible. In truth, this relied upon a third-world to be a source of both raw materials and cheaper labor. The plus here is that this 'developing world' has largely now developed. But that means they will be needing their own raw materials, and their own middle-classes have driven up their own cost of labor. Globalization was based in some world before development, where the real dynamic is best explained as imperialism , and so it makes sense that this system is a relic of the past, and indeed ought to be.

It increasingly appears that the 'Coronavirus pandemic', was secondary to the foregone economic crisis which we were told accompanied it. Rather, it seems that the former came into being to explain-away the latter.

Another world is possible, but it is one which citizens fight for. In the U.S., England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, there have already been rather large anti-lockdown demonstrations. These, as we have explained, are not just against lockdown but are positively pushing to assert the right to public and political association, to public and political speech, and the redressing of grievances. This is a fundamental right for citizens in any republic where there is any sort of check on the oligarchy.

We have written on the kind of world that is possible, in our piece from April 2020 titled: " Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity ". That lays out what is possible, and what the problems of pre-corona system were, in economic terms more than political. Here we discuss the problems of globalization-based supply chain security in a multipolar world, and the larger problem of planned obsolescence, especially in light of 3D printing, automation, and the internet of things.

We posed the philosophical question as to whether it is justified to have a goods-production system based upon both the guaranteed re-sale of the same type of goods due to planned obsolescence and the 'work guarantees' that came with it. In short, do we live to work or to we work to live? And with the 4th industrial revolution looming, we posed the question of what will happen after human workers are no longer required.

Pluralist society is the compromise outcome of a ceasefire in the class war between the oligarchy and the various other classes that compromise the people, at large. Largely idealized and romantic ideas that form the basis of the liberal-democratic ideology (as well as classical fascism) are used to explain how it is the oligarchy that is so very committed to that arrangement of pluralism, and that this very arrangement is the product of their benevolence, and not the truth: that it was the fight put up by common people to fight for a more just future. No doubt there have been benevolent oligarchs who really believed in the liberal ideology, of which fascism is one of its more radical products. But the view that the class struggle can be acculturated or legislated into non-existence is similar to believing that the law of gravity can be ruled unlawful in a court.

Perhaps we have forgotten what it takes, and perhaps things just have not gotten bad enough. Decreases in testosterone levels in the population may be leading to a dangerous moment where vigorous defiance to injustice is much less possible. Critical now is to avoid any artificial means to opiate ourselves into thinking things are better than they are, whether by way of anti-depressants or other self-medication. Only with a clear assessment of the real situation on the ground can we forge the necessary strategy.

The great political crisis now is that a pandemic is being used to justify an end-run around constitutional rights, an end-run around pluralist society, and so the vehicle – the mechanism – that the general public might use to fight for their version of a 'reset' is on the verge of disappearing.

In many ways this means that now is the final moment. We ask – whose great reset, ours or theirs?

[Sep 28, 2020] The apparent problems with the the US "management elite": the hired managerial class is both very stupid and very self-serving

Sep 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

Beckow says: September 26, 2020 at 6:58 pm GMT 200 Words ↑ @PetrOldSack

If it is about ' surplus populations ' – and I agree that is a strong motivation for the elites – why are they super-charging import of the additional surplus population from the Third World?

The corona panic is not helping, unless this is only Phase 1. Tanking the economy will most likely result in a much weaker control of the population – the draconian new rules won't make much difference because they can never be draconian enough. Tens of millions without work is a prescription for chaos – it has always been.

One explanation that I find possible is ' inertia ' – the rulers are stuck, the hired managerial class is both very stupid and very self-serving. What we see is helpless inertia and a slow slide, but no plan or even coherent thought.

The members of the ruling class seem lost and helpless (' tear it down so we can rebuilt it better ' is a weird refrain used by Macron, Trudeau and now Biden). The real story could be that there is nobody behind the curtain, no ideas, and inertia rules.

PetrOldSack , says: September 26, 2020 at 7:14 pm GMT

@The Alarmist hat we need to get the global population back below one billion, because every action they have taken lately seems designed to lead to means to achieve that end.

To keep with the Saker, "the elites have gone mad", at government level, the public puppets mostly do not know what they are doing. A level deeper, the few bet on chaos, improvise, but at the least have some sort of quality goal: induce chaos to mask the causes of the necessary culling of the surplus populations. At the level of the middle class, and populus, the former are suicidal, the latter as always in the history of mankind, do not even grasp the situation they are in.

, JasonT , says: September 26, 2020 at 9:44 pm GMT
@Beckow much difference because they can never be draconian enough."

Corona panic leads to mandatory vaccinations.
Mandatory vaccinations leads to implantation of biochip.
Biochip sends and receives signals to/from 5G network.
Signals between biochips and AI through 5G network track everyone who has the chip, does not allow troublemakers to buy/sell thereby starving them, and in extreme cases, signals from 5G network to biochips kills/disables troublemakers.

The rules do not need to be draconian. In fact, no overt 'rules' are needed at all because people will learn through pain what they are allowed to do.

[Sep 23, 2020] How Globalization Destroyed the Western Middle Class

Notable quotes:
"... "Another chasm opened between middle-class Westerners and their wealthy compatriots. Here, too, the middle class lost ground. It seemed that the wealthiest people in rich countries and almost everybody in Asia benefited from globalization, while only the middle class of the rich world lost out in relative terms. These facts supported the notion that the rise of "populist" political parties and leaders in the West stemmed from middle-class disenchantment. ..."
Sep 23, 2020 | www.blacklistednews.com

HOW GLOBALIZATION DESTROYED THE WESTERN MIDDLE CLASS Published: September 15, 2020
Share | Print This

undefined Twitter Facebook Email Pinterest Reddit
SOURCE: INSIGHT HISTORY

The world is becoming more equal but largely at the expense of middle-class Westerners, according to a recent paper by Branko Milanovic , a Stone Center Senior Scholar and a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Milanovic's paper was published in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and was titled: The World Is Becoming More Equal, Even as Globalization Hurts Middle-Class Westerners . Broadly speaking, globalization is the process of increased " worldwide integration of the economic, cultural, political, religious, and social systems" of the globe, producing an increased flow of goods, capital, labour, and information, across national borders. It was a process that gained steam particularly in the mid-1980s, with globalization having the greatest transformative impact on life since the Industrial Revolution .

Milanovic's paper starts by arguing that the world became more equal between the end of the Cold War and 2007/08 financial crisis, a period of high globalization. During this period however, globalization weakened the middle class in the West. As Milanovic writes :

"The results highlighted two important cleavages [or divisions]: one between middle-class Asians and middle-class Westerners and one between middle-class Westerners and their richer compatriots. In both comparisons, the Western middle class was on the losing end. Middle-class Westerners saw less income growth than (comparatively poorer) Asians, providing further evidence of one of the defining dynamics of globalization: in the last 40 years, many jobs in Europe and North America were either outsourced to Asia or eliminated as a result of competition with Chinese industries. This was the first tension of globalization: Asian growth seems to take place on the backs of the Western middle class."

Milanovic continues :

"Another chasm opened between middle-class Westerners and their wealthy compatriots. Here, too, the middle class lost ground. It seemed that the wealthiest people in rich countries and almost everybody in Asia benefited from globalization, while only the middle class of the rich world lost out in relative terms. These facts supported the notion that the rise of "populist" political parties and leaders in the West stemmed from middle-class disenchantment. "

Milanovic goes on to note that in an updated paper that looks at incomes in 130 countries from 2008 to 2013-14, the first tension of globalization holds true: in that, the incomes of the non-Western middle class grew more than the incomes of the middle class in the West. The impact of globalization on the Western middle class is imperative to understand. Globalization is a process that has produced winners and losers , and the Western middle class has been the greatest loser.

In my opinion, any system that weakens the middle class in any country should be seen as counterproductive. Having a strong middle class is one of the most important tenets in building a strong, prosperous, and stable society. The middle class serves as the bedrock of any country: those who comprise the middle-class work hard, pay taxes, and buy goods. A true solution to poverty in underdeveloped countries would create more prosperity for everyone, not take prosperity from one region and redirect it into another. This so-called solution creates at least as many problems as it supposedly solves.

Globalization has produced, and will seemingly continue to produce, a global standardization of wealth in many ways. For those special interests who are in the process of creating a global system, an economic uniformity across the globe is advantageous for the creation of this one-world system.

Sources

Globalization Definition, Oxford Reference - https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095855259

MÜNCHAU , W. (24 April, 2016) The revenge of globalisation's losers, Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/a4bfb89a-0885-11e6-a623-b84d06a39ec2

Milanovic, B. (28 Aug. 2020) The World Is Becoming More Equal, Even as Globalization Hurts Middle-Class Westerners. Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-08-28/world-economic-inequality

Milanovic, B. (13 May, 2016) Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization, Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2016/05/why-the-global-1-and-the-asian-middle-class-have-gained-the-most-from-globalization

Vanham, P. (17 Jan. 2019) A brief history of globalization, World Economic Forum https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/how-globalization-4-0-fits-into-the-history-of-globalization/

[Jul 09, 2020] Who belongs to working class and who to manageria class

I think the difference is owning of stock. If a person owns anough money to maintin the current standard of living without employment this person belong to upper middle class.
In this sense Steven Johnson comment are bunk.
Jul 09, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Chetan Murthy 07.06.20 at 6:45 am (
48 )

likbez @ 39:

Without working class votes they can't win. And those votes are lost

It's helpful that you told us who you were, in so few words. The Dems didn't lose working-class votes in 2016: the median income of a Hillary voter was less than that of a Trump voter [or maybe it was average? In any case, not much difference.] What the Dems lost, was "white non-college-educated" voters. They retained working class voters of color.

But hey, they don't count as working-class voters to you. Thanks for playing.

MisterMr 07.06.20 at 8:21 am ( 49 )

Two points:

1) White collar are, by definition, working class, because they don't own the means of production. What I see is an opposition between blue collars and white collars, that are two wings of the working class, not that democrats are going against the working class.
For some reason, the main divide in politics today is a sort of culture war, and republicans and other right wing parties managed to present the traditionalist side of the culture war as the "working class" one, and therefore the other side as the evil cosmopolitan prosecco sipping faux leftish but in reality very snobbish one, so that they pretend that they are the working class party because of their traditionalist stance.
But they aren't: already the fact that they blame "cosmopolitans" shows that they think in terms of nationalism (like Trump and his China virus), which is a way to deflect the attention from class conflict.
So comparatively the Dems are still the working class party, and the fact that some working class guys vote for trump sows that they suffer from false consciousness, not that the Dems are too right wing (the dems ARE too right wing, but this isn't the reason some working class guys are voting Trump).

2) Neoliberalism and free markets are not the same thing, and furthermore neoliberalism and capitalism are not the same thing; at most neoliberalism is a form of unadultered capitalism. However since neoliberalism basically means "anti new deal", and new deal economies were still free market and still capitalist (we can call them social democratic, but in this sense social democracy is a form of controlled capitalism), it follows that the most economically succesful form of capitalism and free markets to date is not neoliberalism.

Orange Watch 07.06.20 at 5:40 pm (
59 )

Chetan [email protected]:

It's helpful that you told us who you were, in so few words. 43% of the US are non-voters. The median household income of non-voters is less than half of the median income of a Clinton voter (which was higher than the overall US median, albeit by less than the Trump median was). Clinton didn't lose in 2016 because of who voted as much as who didn't ; every serious analysis (and countless centrist screeds) since Trump's installation has told us that. Losing the working class doesn't require that the Republicans gain them; if the working class drops out, that shifts the electoral playing field further into the favor of politics who cater to the remaining voting blocks. Democrats playing Republican-lite while mouthing pieties about how they're totally not the party of the rich will always fare worse in that field than Republicans playing Republicans while mouthing pieties about how they ARE the party of the rich, but also of giving everyone a chance to make themselves rich. I know it's been de rigour for both Dems and the GOP to ignore the first half of Clinton's deplorable quote, but it truly was just as important as the half both sides freely remember. The Democrats have become a party of C-suite diversity, and they have abandoned the working class. And when their best pick for President's plenty bold plan for solving police violence is to encourage LEOs to shoot people in the leg instead of the chest (something that could only be said by a grifter or someone with more knowledge of Hollywood than ballistics or anatomy), the prospect of keeping the non-white portions of the working class from continuing to drop out is looking bleak.

[email protected]:

The traditional threading of that needle is to expand class-based analysis to more accurately reflect real-world political and economic behavior. In the past (and in some countries who updated the applicable definitions, still), the most relevant additional class was the petty bourgeoisie; in the modern US, however, the concept of the professional-managerial class is the most useful frame of reference.

MisterMr 07.07.20 at 12:06 pm (
76 )

Orange Watch 59

"The traditional threading of that needle is to expand class-based analysis to more accurately reflect real-world political and economic behavior. In the past (and in some countries who updated the applicable definitions, still), the most relevant additional class was the petty bourgeoisie; in the modern US, however, the concept of the professional-managerial class is the most useful frame of reference."

Sure, but one has to adopt a logicwhen building "class" groups. One relrvant dimension is educational attainment, which is IMHO where the "professional-managerial" class comes from.
But, not everyone with a degree is a manager, and "professional" normally implies a level of income that is higher that that of an average rank and file white collar.

So the question is whether this "new class" is really managers, or just white collar workers who work in services instead than in industrial production.
Furthermore, as technology increases, it is natural that a larger share of people will work in services and a smaller share in industry, for the same reason that increased agricultural productivity means less agricultural jobs.

Orange Watch 07.08.20 at 11:01 pm (
105 )

steven t [email protected]:

There are a great many unstated assumptions baked into this comment, but I'll take a shot at a foundational one. You suggest PMC is a distinction without difference vis a vis middle class appears to suggest that you've bought into a commonly accepted "truth" that can't withstand close scrutiny, and your claim that economic status is not a useful distinguisher only further drives it home. What is the cutoff between middle class and rich? I've seen far too many well-educated idiots with professional degrees make ridiculous claims like $150k household income representing a solidly middle-class income. That's in the upper 15% of national incomes, but it's being called middle class. 240% of the national median household income, but it's "middle class". And to pre-empt cost-of-living arguments, it's 175% of the median household income in Manhattan. So when you say PMC is not a useful concept, and that income is not a useful class distinction, I need to ask you where you draw your lines, or if you're asserting that class has no economic aspect at all. If you're arguing that households in the upper quintile and bottom quintile don't have different concerns, outlooks, values, and lifestyles – that someone in either could be working class or middle class (but I assume not upper class? Arguments like what yours appears to be typically don't start the upper class anywhere below the 1% ) is hard to treat as serious. If that is an assertion you'd stand by, what that tells me is that you're using private definitions of working and middle class, and they're essentially unintelligible.

Gorgonzola Petrovna 07.09.20 at 10:13 am (
113 )

@MisterMr
White collar are, by definition, working class, because they don't own the means of production

That's not the definition. For example: despite not owning any means of production, lumpenproletariat is not part of the working class.

What I see is an opposition between blue collars and white collars, that are two wings of the working class

If this is the way you feel, that's fine. It is, however, a controversial view. An alternative (and quite convincing, imo) view is that "white collars" belong to the 'professional-managerial class', with entirely different interests.

Anyhow, a bourgeois democracy (aka 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie') does not and can not represent interests of the working class; this is indeed "by definition". Any benefits encountered by the working class are coincidental.

And in the current circumstance, the struggle between the remains of domestic bourgeoisie and global finance capitalism, the former faction is definitely – obviously – better aligned with interests of the domestic working class.

Orange Watch 07.08.20 at 11:01 pm (no link)

steven t [email protected]:

There are a great many unstated assumptions baked into this comment, but I'll take a shot at a foundational one. You suggest PMC is a distinction without difference vis a vis middle class appears to suggest that you've bought into a commonly accepted "truth" that can't withstand close scrutiny, and your claim that economic status is not a useful distinguisher only further drives it home. What is the cutoff between middle class and rich? I've seen far too many well-educated idiots with professional degrees make ridiculous claims like $150k household income representing a solidly middle-class income. That's in the upper 15% of national incomes, but it's being called middle class. 240% of the national median household income, but it's "middle class". And to pre-empt cost-of-living arguments, it's 175% of the median household income in Manhattan. So when you say PMC is not a useful concept, and that income is not a useful class distinction, I need to ask you where you draw your lines, or if you're asserting that class has no economic aspect at all. If you're arguing that households in the upper quintile and bottom quintile don't have different concerns, outlooks, values, and lifestyles – that someone in either could be working class or middle class (but I assume not upper class? Arguments like what yours appears to be typically don't start the upper class anywhere below the 1% ) is hard to treat as serious. If that is an assertion you'd stand by, what that tells me is that you're using private definitions of working and middle class, and they're essentially unintelligible.

[Jul 08, 2020] A note on the "professional-managerial class,

Notable quotes:
"... The notion that socioeconomic status is the difference between working and middle classes strikes me as more convenient to obscurantists than useful to serious analysis. Even worse, true SES is better defined by the acceptability of marriage partners. (This brings up religion, by the way, meaning Sunday segregation is an overlooked phenomenon in discussions of systemic racism.) In particular, in dealing with so-called working class people, the issue of property, particularly home ownership, seems to be sharply pertinent. This is true in the form of privilege, such as interest mortgage deduction and property tax rates. (Yes, I know this is not an acceptable use of the term "privilege" but this actually means something, so there.) ..."
"... Most of all, many people live in de facto one party systems, where elections don't make much difference. Much of this country would be more usefully understood I think as more like Mexico or the Philippines, where caciques and landed families tend to run things. The factional struggles play out in the struggles for nominations of the ruling party, while the Outs play catchup in the Out Party, whatever it may be called. The larger part of the people have no political vehicle at all, therefore are largely disengaged. ..."
"... Lastly, on the OP, I'm not at all convinced the near collapse of the stock market and the international credit system last winter, which prompted the reversal of all efforts by the Fed to "normalize" the financial system, wasn't the beginning of the economic consequences we face. And that the pandemic is simply the gust of wind that toppled the house of cards. ..."
Jul 08, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Originally from: The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic -- Crooked Timber

steven t johnson 07.08.20 at 2:12 pm ( 98 )

A note on the "professional-managerial class," if you don't mind?

Generally a professional is a small businessman. A clergyman may not be able to sell his practice but a doctor or a lawyer can. But clergy have even greater powers over who gets to compete than the AMA or the Bar do.

As for managers, those with an individually negotiated contract, especially those that include things like stock options, golden parachutes, etc. seem to me to be in an entirely different, well, class, than most others.

Academics who have an agent have a different situation than those who don't. Even so-called police unions have enough influence over policies and budgets (as near as I can tell) that the Fraternal Order of Police, or the Police Benevolent Association are more like the Bar than a trade union. I suggest "professional-managerial class" is not enough a genuine thing to be useful at all.

The notion that socioeconomic status is the difference between working and middle classes strikes me as more convenient to obscurantists than useful to serious analysis. Even worse, true SES is better defined by the acceptability of marriage partners. (This brings up religion, by the way, meaning Sunday segregation is an overlooked phenomenon in discussions of systemic racism.) In particular, in dealing with so-called working class people, the issue of property, particularly home ownership, seems to be sharply pertinent. This is true in the form of privilege, such as interest mortgage deduction and property tax rates. (Yes, I know this is not an acceptable use of the term "privilege" but this actually means something, so there.)

And other issues such as decline in property values, tax rates, school districts, are pertinent to individuals deciding what their "wallets" are doing. The question for many is, what's going to happen for their families in the long run, not just this quarter's profits. The fact that most people don't make profits is even more relevant in my opinion. (Yes, Obamacare was something of a redistribution the biggest since Shrub added prescription benefits. This kind of reasoning tells us Nixon was a liberal president!)

Most of all, many people live in de facto one party systems, where elections don't make much difference. Much of this country would be more usefully understood I think as more like Mexico or the Philippines, where caciques and landed families tend to run things. The factional struggles play out in the struggles for nominations of the ruling party, while the Outs play catchup in the Out Party, whatever it may be called. The larger part of the people have no political vehicle at all, therefore are largely disengaged.

On the subject of change, change from time is remorseless, invincible but usually invisible. It is always today, which is pretty much like yesterday, and tomorrow is pretty much like today, but the changes still come, despite the plans of a changer. This is true despite the seeming invulnerability to time of all manner of habits, from the imperial measures to the QWERTY keyboard. The idea that all sorts of things may be so simply because they were and there hasn't been enough of a conscious decision by the majority to re-arrange such things may deflate exaggerated ideas of agency. But it's so.

Lastly, on the OP, I'm not at all convinced the near collapse of the stock market and the international credit system last winter, which prompted the reversal of all efforts by the Fed to "normalize" the financial system, wasn't the beginning of the economic consequences we face. And that the pandemic is simply the gust of wind that toppled the house of cards.

[Jun 23, 2020] It is shocking to see such a disgusting piece of human garbage like Joe Biden get so many working class voters to vote for him. Biden has never missed a chance to stab the working class in the back in service to his wealthy patrons.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... From wiping out the ability of regular folks to declare bankruptcy (something supported by our founding fathers who were NOT socialists), to shipping our industrial base to communist China (which in less enlightened days would have been termed treason), to spending tens of trillions of dollars bailing out and subsiding the big banks (that's not a misprint), to supporting "surprise medical billing," to opening the borders to massive third-world immigration so that wages can be driven down and reset and profits up (As 2015 Bernie Sanders pointed out), Backstabbing Joe Biden is neoliberal scum pure and simple. ..."
"... It's astonishing that so many people will just blindly accept what they are told, that Biden is. "moderate." Biden is so far to the right, he makes Nixon look like Trotsky. ..."
"... Joe Biden is a crook and a con man. He has been lying his whole life. Claimed in his 1988 Campaign to have got 3 degrees at college and finished in top half of his class. Actually only got 1 degree & finished 76th out of 85 in his class. ..."
Mar 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

TG , Mar 3 2020 22:02 utc | 56

Yet another circus. The proles get to scream and holler, and when all is done, the oligarchy gets the policies it wants, the public be damned. Our sham 'democracy' is a con to privatize power and socialize responsibility.

Although it is shocking to see such a disgusting piece of human garbage like Joe Biden get substantial numbers of people to vote for him. Biden has never missed a chance to stab the working class in the back in service to his wealthy patrons.

The issue is not (for me) his creepiness (I wouldn't much mind if he was on my side), nor even his Alzheimer's, but his established track record of betrayal and corruption.

From wiping out the ability of regular folks to declare bankruptcy (something supported by our founding fathers who were NOT socialists), to shipping our industrial base to communist China (which in less enlightened days would have been termed treason), to spending tens of trillions of dollars bailing out and subsiding the big banks (that's not a misprint), to supporting "surprise medical billing," to opening the borders to massive third-world immigration so that wages can be driven down and reset and profits up (As 2015 Bernie Sanders pointed out), Backstabbing Joe Biden is neoliberal scum pure and simple.

It's astonishing that so many people will just blindly accept what they are told, that Biden is. "moderate." Biden is so far to the right, he makes Nixon look like Trotsky. Heck, he makes Calvin Coolidge look like Trotsky.

Mao , Mar 3 2020 22:01 utc | 55

Ian56:

Joe Biden is a crook and a con man. He has been lying his whole life. Claimed in his 1988 Campaign to have got 3 degrees at college and finished in top half of his class. Actually only got 1 degree & finished 76th out of 85 in his class.

[VIDEO]

https://twitter.com/Ian56789/status/1234914227963518977

[Jun 21, 2020] How Workers Can Win the Class War Being Waged Against Them by Richard D. Wolff

Notable quotes:
"... Mass unemployment will bring the United States closer to less-developed economies. Very large regions of the poor will surround small enclaves of the rich. Narrow bands of "middle-income professionals," etc., will separate rich from poor. Ever-more rigid social divisions enforced by strong police and military apparatuses are becoming the norm. Their outlines are already visible across the United States. ..."
"... In this context, U.S. capitalism strode confidently toward the 21st century. The Soviet threat had imploded. A divided Europe threatened no U.S. interests. Its individual nations competed for U.S. favor (especially the UK). China's poverty blocked its becoming an economic competitor. U.S. military and technological supremacy seemed insurmountable. ..."
"... Amid success, internal contradictions surfaced. U.S. capitalism crashed three times. The first happened early in 2000 (triggered by dot-com share-price inflation); next came the big crash of 2008 (triggered by defaulting subprime mortgages); and the hugest crash hit in 2020 (triggered by COVID-19). ..."
"... Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies. They silenced, deflected, co-opted, and/or demonized criticisms of capitalism. ..."
"... Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element. We cannot again leave capitalists in the exclusive positions to receive enterprise profits and make major enterprise decisions. ..."
Jun 19, 2020 | www.counterpunch.org

Organized labor led no mass opposition to Trump's presidency or the December 2017 tax cut or the failed U.S. preparation for and management of COVID-19. Nor do we yet see a labor-led national protest against the worst mass firing since the 1930s Great Depression. All of these events, but especially the unemployment, mark an employers' class war against employees. The U.S. government directs it, but the employers as a class inspire and benefit the most from it.

Before the 2020 crash, class war had been redistributing wealth for decades from middle-income people and the poor to the top 1 percent. That upward redistribution was U.S. employers' response to the legacy of the New Deal. During the Great Depression and afterward, wealth had been redistributed downward. By the 1970s, that was reversed. The 2020 crash will accelerate upward wealth redistribution sharply.

With tens of millions now a "reserve army" of the unemployed, nearly every U.S. employer can cut wages, benefits, etc. Employees dissatisfied with these cuts are easily replaced. Vast numbers of unemployed, stressed by uncertain job prospects and unemployment benefits, disappearing savings, and rising household tensions, will take jobs despite reduced wages, benefits, and working conditions. As the unemployed return to work, most employees' standards of consumption and living will drop.

Germany, France, and other European nations could not fire workers as the United States did. Strong labor movements and socialist parties with deep social influences preclude governments risking comparable mass unemployment; it would risk deposing them from office. Thus their antiviral lockdowns keep most at work with governments paying 70 percent or more of pre-virus wages and salaries.

Mass unemployment will bring the United States closer to less-developed economies. Very large regions of the poor will surround small enclaves of the rich. Narrow bands of "middle-income professionals," etc., will separate rich from poor. Ever-more rigid social divisions enforced by strong police and military apparatuses are becoming the norm. Their outlines are already visible across the United States.

Only if workers understand and mobilize to fight this class war can the trends sketched above be stopped or reversed. U.S. workers did exactly that in the 1930s. They fought -- in highly organized ways -- the class war waged against them then. Millions joined labor unions, and many tens of thousands joined two socialist parties and one communist party. All four organizations worked together, in coalition, to mobilize and activate the U.S. working class.

Weekly, and sometimes daily, workers marched across the United States. They criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies and capitalism itself by intermingling reformist and revolutionary demands. The coalition's size and political reach forced politicians, including FDR, to listen and respond, often positively. An initially "centrist" FDR adapted to become a champion of Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a huge federal jobs program. The coalition achieved those moderate socialist reforms -- the New Deal -- and paid for them by setting aside revolutionary change.

It proved to be a good deal, but only in the short run. Its benefits to workers included a downward redistribution of income and wealth (especially via homeownership), and thereby the emergence of a new "middle class." Relatively well-paid employees were sufficient in number to sustain widespread notions of American exceptionalism, beliefs in ever-rising standards of working-class living across generations, and celebrations of capitalism as guaranteeing these social benefits. The reality was quite different. Not capitalists but rather their critics and victims had forced the New Deal against capitalists' resistance. And those middle-class benefits bypassed most African Americans.

The good deal did not last because U.S. capitalists largely resented the New Deal and sought to undo it. With World War II's end and FDR's death in 1945, the undoing accelerated. An anti-Soviet Cold War plus anti-communist/socialist crusades at home gave patriotic cover for destroying the New Deal coalition. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act targeted organized labor. Senate and House committees spearheaded a unified effort (government, mass media, and academia) to demonize, silence, and socially exclude communists, socialists, leftists, etc. For decades after 1945 -- and still now in parts of the United States -- a sustained hysteria defined all left-wing thought, policy, or movement as always and necessarily the worst imaginable social evil.

Over time, the New Deal coalition was destroyed and left-wing thinking was labeled "disloyal." Even barely left-of-center labor and political organizations repeatedly denounced and distanced themselves from any sort of anti-capitalist impulse, any connection to socialism. Many New Deal reforms were evaded, amended, or repealed. Some simply vanished from politicians' knowledge and vocabulary and then journalists' too. Having witnessed the purges of leftist colleagues from 1945 through the 1950s, a largely docile academic community celebrated capitalism in general and U.S. capitalism in particular. The good in U.S. society was capitalism's gift. The rest resulted from government or foreign or ideological interferences in capitalism's wonderful invisible hand. Any person or group excluded from this American Dream had only themselves to blame for inadequate ability, insufficient effort, or ideological deviancy.

In this context, U.S. capitalism strode confidently toward the 21st century. The Soviet threat had imploded. A divided Europe threatened no U.S. interests. Its individual nations competed for U.S. favor (especially the UK). China's poverty blocked its becoming an economic competitor. U.S. military and technological supremacy seemed insurmountable.

Amid success, internal contradictions surfaced. U.S. capitalism crashed three times. The first happened early in 2000 (triggered by dot-com share-price inflation); next came the big crash of 2008 (triggered by defaulting subprime mortgages); and the hugest crash hit in 2020 (triggered by COVID-19). Unprepared economically, politically, and ideologically for any of them, the Federal Reserve responded by creating vast sums of new money that it threw at/lent to (at historically low interest rates) banks, large corporations, etc. Three successive exercises in trickle-down economic policy saw little trickle down. No underlying economic problems (inequality, excess systemic debts, cyclical instability, etc.) have been solved. On the contrary, all worsened. In other words, class war has been intensified.

What then is to be done? First, we need to recognize the class war that is underway and commit to fighting it. On that basis, we must organize a mass base to put real political force behind social democratic policies, parties, and politicians. We need something like the New Deal coalition. The pandemic, economic crash, and gross official policy failures (including violent official scapegoating) draw many toward classical social democracy. The successes of the Democratic Socialists of America show this.

Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies. They silenced, deflected, co-opted, and/or demonized criticisms of capitalism. Strategic decisions made by both the U.S. New Deal and European social democracy contributed to their defeats. Both always left and still leave employers exclusively in positions to (1) receive and dispense their enterprises' profits and (2) decide and direct what, how, and where their enterprises produce. Those positions gave capitalists the financial resources and power -- politically, economically, and culturally -- repeatedly to outmaneuver and repress labor and the left.

Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element. We cannot again leave capitalists in the exclusive positions to receive enterprise profits and make major enterprise decisions. The new element is thus the demand to change enterprises producing goods and services. From hierarchical, capitalist organizations (where owners, boards of directors, etc., occupy the employer position) we need to transition to the altogether different democratic, worker co-op organizations. In the latter, no employer/employee split occurs. All workers have equal voice in deciding what gets produced, how, and where and how any profits get used. The collective of all employees is their own employer. As such an employer, the employees will finally protect and thus secure the reforms associated with the New Deal and social democracy.

We could describe the transition from capitalist to worker co-op enterprise organizations as a revolution. That would resolve the old debate of reform versus revolution. Revolution becomes the only way finally to secure progressive reforms. Capitalism's reforms were generated by the system's impacts on people and their resulting demands for change. Capitalism's resistances to those reforms -- and undoing them after they happened -- spawned the revolution needed to secure them. In that revolution, society moves beyond capitalism itself. So it was in the French Revolution: demands for reform within feudal society could only finally be realized by a social transition from feudalism to capitalism.

This article was produced by Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Richard D. Wolff

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism's Crisis Deepens . He is founder of Democracy at Work .

[Jun 19, 2020] The Police Weren t Created to Protect and Serve. They Were Created to Maintain Order. A Brief Look at the History of Police

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly understood -- not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story. ..."
"... Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose -- to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions, from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism. ..."
"... What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners, their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments, as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets. ..."
"... In most countries, the police are there solely to protect the Haves from the Have-Nots. In fact, when the average frustrated citizen has trouble, the last people he would consider turning to are the police. ..."
"... Jay Gould, a U.S. robber baron, is supposed to have claimed that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. ..."
"... I spent some time in the Silver Valley of northern Idaho. This area was the hot bed of labor unrest during the 1890's. Federal troops controlled the area 3 separate times,1892, 1894 and 1899. Twice miners hijacked trains loaded them with dynamite and drove them to mining company stamping mills that they then blew up. Dozens of deaths in shoot outs. The entire male population was herded up and placed in concentration camps for weeks. The end result was the assassination of the Governor in 1905. ..."
"... Interestingly this history has been completely expunged. There is a mining museum in the town which doesn't mention a word on these events. Even nationwide there seems to be a complete erasure of what real labor unrest can look like.. ..."
"... Straight-up fact: The police weren't created to preserve and protect. They were created to maintain order, [enforced] over certain subjected classes and races of people, including–for many white people, too–many of our ancestors, too.* ..."
Jun 18, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. Tom mentions in passing the role of Pinkertons as goons for hire to crush early labor activists. Some employers like Ford went as far as forming private armies for that purpose. Establishing police forces were a way to socialize this cost.

By Thomas Neuberger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny!

One version of the "thin blue line" flag, a symbol used in a variety of ways by American police departments , their most fervent supporters , and other right-wing fellow travelers . The thin blue line represents the wall of protection that separates the orderly "us" from the disorderly, uncivilized "them" .

[In the 1800s] the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class.
-- Sam Mitrani here

It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly understood -- not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story.

To understand the true purpose of police, we have to ask, "What's being protected?" and "Who's being served?"

Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose -- to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions, from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism.

What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners, their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments, as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets.

Looking Behind Us

The following comes from an essay published at the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, an academic group for teachers of labor studies, by Sam Mitrani, Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage and author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 .

According to Mitrani, "The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system's offspring, the working class."

Keep in mind that there were no police departments anywhere in Europe or the U.S. prior to the 19th century -- in fact, "anywhere in the world" according to Mitrani. In the U.S., the North had constables, many part-time, and elected sheriffs, while the South had slave patrols. But nascent capitalism soon created a large working class, and a mass of European immigrants, "yearning to be free," ended up working in capitalism's northern factories and living in its cities.

"[A]s Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods ." [emphasis added]

America of the early and mid 1800s was still a world without organized police departments. What the Pinkertons were to strikes , these "thousands of armed men" were to the unruly working poor in those cities.

Imagine this situation from two angles. First, from the standpoint of the workers, picture the oppression these armed men must have represented, lawless themselves yet tasked with imposing "order" and violence on the poor and miserable, who were frequently and understandably both angry and drunk. (Pre-Depression drunkenness, under this interpretation, is not just a social phenomenon, but a political one as well.)

Second, consider this situation from the standpoint of the wealthy who hired these men. Given the rapid growth of capitalism during this period, "maintaining order" was a costly undertaking, and likely to become costlier. Pinkertons, for example, were hired at private expense, as were the "thousands of armed men" Mitrani mentions above.

The solution was to offload this burden onto municipal budgets. Thus, between 1840 and 1880, every major northern city in America had created a substantial police force, tasked with a single job, the one originally performed by the armed men paid by the business elites -- to keep the workers in line, to "maintain order" as factory owners and the moneyed class understood it.

"Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization , by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers."

That "thin blue line protecting civilization" is the same blue line we're witnessing today. Yes, big-city police are culturally racist as a group; but they're not just racist. They dislike all the "unwashed." A recent study that reviewed "all the data available on police shootings for the year 2017, and analyze[d] it based on geography, income, and poverty levels, as well as race" revealed the following remarkable pattern:

" Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder : in rural areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates."

As they have always been, the police departments in the U.S. are a violent force for maintaining an order that separates and protects society's predator class from its victims -- a racist order to be sure, but a class-based order as well.

Looking Ahead

We've seen the violence of the police as visited on society's urban poor (and anyone else, poor or not, who happens to be the same race and color as the poor too often are), and we've witnessed the violent reactions of police to mass protests challenging the racism of that violence.

But we've also seen the violence of police during the mainly white-led Occupy movement (one instance here ; note that while the officer involved was fired, he was also compensated $38,000 for "suffering he experienced after the incident").

So what could we expect from police if there were, say, a national, angry, multiracial rent strike with demonstrations? Or a student debt s trike? None of these possibilities are off the table, given the economic damage -- most of it still unrealized -- caused by the current Covid crisis.

Will police "protect and serve" the protesters, victims of the latest massive transfer of wealth to the already massively wealthy? Or will they, with violence, "maintain order" by maintaining elite control of the current predatory system?

If Mitrani is right, the latter is almost certain.

MK , June 19, 2020 at 12:31 am

Possible solutions? One, universal public works system for everyone 18-20. [Avoiding armed service because that will never happen, nor peace corp.] Not allow the rich to buy then or their children an out. Let the billionaires children work along side those who never had a single family house or car growing up.

Two, eliminate suburban school districts and simply have one per state, broken down into regional areas. No rich [or white] flight to avoid poor systems. Children of differing means growing up side by side. Of course the upper class would simply send their children to private schools, much as the elite do now anyway.

Class and privilege is the real underlying issue and has been since capital began to be concentrated and hoarded as the article points out. It has to begin with the children if the future is to really change in a meaningful way.

timbers , June 19, 2020 at 8:06 am

I would add items targeted as what is causing inequality. Some of these might be:

1). Abolish the Federal Reserve. It's current action since 2008 are a huge transfer of wealth from us to the wealthy. No more Quantitative Easing, no Fed buying of stocks or bonds.

2). Make the only retirement and medical program allowed Congress and the President, Social Security and Medicare. That will cause it to be improved for all of us.

3). No stock ownership allowed for Congress folk while serving terms. Also, rules against joining those leaving Congress acting as lobbyists.

4). Something that makes it an iron rule that any law passed by Congress and the President, must equally apply to Congress and the President. For example, no separate retirement or healthcare access, but have this more broadly applied to all aspects of legislation and all aspects of life.

MLTPB , June 19, 2020 at 11:11 am

Abolish the Fed and/or abolish the police?

Inbetween, there is

Defund Wall Street
Abolish banking
Abolish lending
Abolish cash
Defund fossil fuel subsidies

Etc.

Broader, more on the economic side, and perhaps more fundamental???

TiPs , June 19, 2020 at 8:34 am

I think you'd also have to legalize drugs and any other thing that leads creation of "organized ciminal groups." Take away the sources that lead to the creation of the well-armed gangs that control illegal activities.

David , June 19, 2020 at 9:32 am

Unfortunately, legalising drugs in itself, whatever the abstract merits, wouldn't solve the problem. Organised crime would still have a major market selling cut-price, tax-free or imitation drugs, as well, of course, as controlled drugs which are not allowed to be sold to just anybody now. Organised crime doesn't arise as a result of prohibitions, it expands into new areas thanks to them, and often these areas involve smuggling and evading customs duties. Tobacco products are legal virtually everywhere, but there's a massive criminal trade in smuggling them from the Balkans into Italy, where taxes are much higher. Any time you create a border, in effect, you create crime: there is even alcohol smuggling between Sweden and Norway. Even when activities are completely legal (such as prostitution in many European countries) organised crime is still largely in control through protection rackets and the provision of "security."

In effect, you'd need to abolish all borders, all import and customs duties and all health and safety and other controls which create price differentials between states. And OC is not fussy, it moves from one racket to another, as the Mafia did in the 1930s with the end of prohibition. To really tackle OC you'd need to legalise, oh, child pornography, human trafficking, sex slavery, the trade in rare wild animals, the trade in stolen gems and conflict diamonds, internet fraud and cyberattacks, and the illicit trade in rare metals, to name, as they say, but a few. As Monty Python well observed, the only way to reduce the crime rate (and hence the need for the police) is to reduce the number of criminal offences. Mind you, if you defund the police you effectively legalise all these things anyway.

km , June 19, 2020 at 11:48 am

I dunno, ending Prohibition sure cut down on the market for bootleg liquor. It's still out there, but the market is nothing like what it once was.

Most people, even hardcore alcoholics, aren't going to go through the hassle of buying rotgut of dubious origin just to save a few dimes, when you can go to the corner liquor store and get a known product, no issues with supply 'cause your dealer's supplier just got arrested.

For that matter, OC is still definitely out there, but it isn't the force that it was during Prohibition, or when gambling was illegal.

As an aside, years ago, I knew a guy whose father had worked for Meyer Lansky's outfit, until Prohibition put him and others out of a job. As a token of his loyal service, the outfit gave him a (legal) liquor store to own and run.

David , June 19, 2020 at 12:09 pm

Yes, but in Norway, for example, you'd pay perhaps $30 for a six-pack of beer in a supermarket, whereas you'd pay half that to somebody selling beers out of the back of a car. In general people make too much of the Prohibition case, which was geographically and politically very special, and a a stage in history when OC was much less sophisticated. The Mob diversified into gambling and similar industries (higher profits, fewer risks). These days OC as a whole is much more powerful and dangerous, as well as sophisticated, than it was then, helped by globalisation and the Internet.

rob , June 19, 2020 at 12:25 pm

I think ending prohibitions on substances, would take quite a bite out of OC's pocketbook. and having someone move trailers of ciggarettes of bottles of beer big deal. That isn't really paying for the lifestyle.and it doesn't buy political protection. An old number I saw @ 2000 . the UN figured(guess) that illegal drugs were @ 600 billion dollars/year industry and most of that was being laundered though banks. Which to the banking industry is 600 billion in cash going into it's house of mirrors. Taking something like that out of the equation EVERY YEAR is no small thing. And the lobby from the OC who wants drugs kept illegal, coupled with the bankers who want the cash inputs equals a community of interest against legalization
and if the local police forces and the interstate/internationals were actually looking to use their smaller budgets and non-bill of rights infringing tactics, on helping the victim side of crimes then they could have a real mission/ Instead of just abusing otherwise innocent people who victimize no one.
so if we are looking for "low hanging fruit" . ending the war on drugs is a no brainer.

flora , June 19, 2020 at 1:36 am

Thanks for this post.

"What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. " – Neuberger

In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. – Mitrani

I think this ties in, if only indirectly, with the way so many peaceful recent protests seemed to turn violent after the police showed up. It's possible I suppose the police want to create disorder to frighten not only the protestors with immediate harm but also frighten the bourgeois about the threate of a "dangerous mob". Historically violent protests created a political backlash that usually benefited political conservatives and the wealthy owners. (The current protests may be different in this regard. The violence seems to have created a political backlash against conservatives and overzealous police departments' violence. ) My 2 cents.

John Anthony La Pietra , June 19, 2020 at 2:20 am

Sorry, but the title sent my mind back to the days of old -- of old Daley, that is, and his immortal quote from 1968: "Gentlemen, let's get the thing straight, once and for all. The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder."

Adam1 , June 19, 2020 at 7:39 am

LOL!!! great quote. Talk about saying it the way it is.

It kind of goes along with, "Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates."

I bang my head on the table sometimes because poor white men and poor men of color are so often placed at odds when they increasingly face (mostly) the same problems. God forbid someone tried to unite them, there might really be some pearl clutching then.

rob , June 19, 2020 at 8:07 am

yeah, like Martin Luther King's "poor people's campaign". the thought of including the poor ,of all colors .. just too much for the status quo to stomach.
The "mechanism" that keeps masses in line . is one of those "invisible hands" too.

run75441 , June 19, 2020 at 8:23 am

Great response! I am sure you have more to add to this. A while back, I was researching the issues you state in your last paragraph. Was about ten pages into it and had to stop as I was drawn out of state and country. From my research.

While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system alive and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system. This distraction of a class level lower than the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate, and growing, distribution of wealth and income in the US. For the lower class, an allowed luxury, a place in the hierarchy and a sure form of self esteem insurance.

Sennett and Cobb (1972) observed that class distinction sets up a contest between upper and lower class with the lower social class always losing and promulgating a perception amongst themselves the educated and upper classes are in a position to judge and draw a conclusion of them being less than equal. The hidden injury is in the regard to the person perceiving himself as a piece of the woodwork or seen as a function such as "George the Porter." It was not the status or material wealth causing the harsh feelings; but, the feeling of being treated less than equal, having little status, and the resulting shame. The answer for many was violence.

James Gilligan wrote "Violence; Reflections on A National Epidemic." He worked as a prison psychiatrist and talked with many of the inmates of the issues of inequality and feeling less than those around them. His finding are in his book which is not a long read and adds to the discussion.

A little John Adams for you.

" The poor man's conscience is clear . . . he does not feel guilty and has no reason to . . . yet, he is ashamed. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles unheeded.

In the midst of a crowd; at a church; in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar.

He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable ."

likbez, June 19, 2020 at 3:18 pm

That's a very important observation.

Racism, especially directed toward blacks, along with "identity wedge," is a perfect tool for disarming poor white, and suppressing their struggle for a better standard of living, which considerably dropped under neoliberalism.

In other words, by providing poor whites with a stratum of the population that has even lower social status, neoliberals manage to co-opt them to support the policies which economically ate detrimental to their standard of living as well as to suppress the protest against the redistribution of wealth up and dismantling of the New Deal capitalist social protection network.

This is a pretty sophisticated, pretty evil scheme if you ask me. In a way, "Floydgate" can be viewed as a variation on the same theme. A very dirty game indeed, when the issue of provision of meaningful jobs for working poor, social equality, and social protection for low-income workers of any color is replaced with a real but of secondary importance issue of police violence against blacks.

This is another way to explain "What's the matter with Kansas" effect.

John Anthony La Pietra, June 19, 2020 at 6:20 pm

I like that one! - and I have to admit it's not familiar to me, though I've been a fan since before I got to play him in a neighboring community theater. Now I'm having some difficulty finding it. Where is it from, may I ask?

run75441, June 20, 2020 at 7:56 am

JAL:

Page 239, "The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States."

Read the book "Violence: Reflections of A National Epidemic" . Not a long read and well documented.

Carla , June 19, 2020 at 12:39 pm

MLK Jr. tried, and look what happened to him once he really got some traction. If the Rev. William Barber's Poor People's Campaign picks up steam, I'm afraid the same thing will happen to him.

I wish it were only pearl-clutching that the money power would resort to, but that's not the way it works.

JacobiteInTraining , June 19, 2020 at 9:20 am

Yeah – that quote struck me too, never seen it before. At times when they feel so liberated to 'say the quiet part out loud', then as now, you know the glove is coming off and the vicious mailed fist is free to roam for victims.

Those times are where you know you need to resist or .well, die in many cases.

That's something that really gets me in public response to many of these things. The normal instinct of the populace to wake from their somnambulant slumber just long enough to ascribe to buffoonery and idiocy ala Keystone Cops the things so much better understood as fully consciously and purposefully repressive, reactionary, and indicating a desire to take that next step to crush fully. To obliterate.

Many responses to this – https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1273809160128389120 – are like, 'the police are dumb', 'out of touch', 'a lot of dumb gomer pyles in that room, yuk yuk yuk'. Or, 'cops/FBI are so dumb to pursue this antifa thing, its just a boogieman' thinking that somehow once the authorities realize 'antifa' is a boogieman, their attitudes towards other protesters will somehow be different 'now that they realize the silliness of the claims'.

No, not remotely the case – to a terrifyingly large percentage of those in command, and in rank & file they know exactly where it came from, exactly how the tactics work, and have every intention of classifying all protesters (peaceful or not) into that worldview. The peaceful protesters *are* antifa in their eyes, to be dealt with in the fully approved manner of violence and repression.

km , June 19, 2020 at 11:56 am

In most countries, the police are there solely to protect the Haves from the Have-Nots. In fact, when the average frustrated citizen has trouble, the last people he would consider turning to are the police.

This is why in the Third World, the only job of lower social standing than "policeman" is "police informer".

cripes , June 19, 2020 at 3:35 am

The anti-rascist identity of the recent protests rests on a much larger base of class warfare waged over the past 40 years against the entire population led by a determined oligarchy and enforced by their political, media and militarized police retainers. This same oligarchy, with a despicable zeal and revolting media-orchestrated campaign–co-branding the movement with it's usual corporate perpetrators– distorts escalating carceral and economic violence solely through a lens of racial conflict and their time-tested toothless reforms. A few unlucky "peace officers" may have to TOFTT until the furor recedes, can't be helped.

Crowding out debt relief, single payer health, living wages, affordable housing and actual justice reform from the debate that would benefit African Americans more than any other demographic is the goal.

The handful of Emperors far prefer kabuki theater and random ritual Seppuku than facing the rage of millions of staring down the barrel of zero income, debt, bankruptcy, evictions and dispossession. The Praetorians will follow the money as always.

I suppose we'll get some boulevards re-named and a paid Juneteenth holiday to compensate for the destruction 100+ years of labor rights struggle, so there's that..

Boatwright , June 19, 2020 at 7:51 am

Homestead, Ludlow, Haymarket, Matewan -- the list is long

Working men and women asking for justice gunned down by the cops. There will always be men ready to murder on command as long as the orders come from the rich and powerful. We are at a moment in history folks were some of us, today mostly people of color, are willing to put their lives on the line. It's an ongoing struggle.

MichaelSF , June 19, 2020 at 12:18 pm

Jay Gould, a U.S. robber baron, is supposed to have claimed that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould

rob , June 19, 2020 at 7:58 am

So how can a tier of society(the police) . be what a society needs ? When as this story and many others show how and why the police were formed. To break heads. When they have been "the tool" of the elite forever. When so many of them are such dishonest, immoral, wanna be fascists. And the main direction of the US is towards a police state and fascists running the show . both republican and democrat. With technology being the boot on the neck of the people and the police are there to take it to the streets.

Can those elusive "good apples" turn the whole rotten barrel into sweet smelling apple pie? That is a big ask.

Or should the structure be liquidated, sell their army toys. fill the ranks with people who are not pathological liars and abusers and /or racists; of one sort or another. Get rid of the mentality of overcompensation by uber machismo. and make them watch the andy griffith show. They ought to learn that they can be respected if they are good people, and that they are not respected because they seek respect through fear and intimidation.

Is that idiot cry of theirs, .. the whole yelling at you; demanding absolute obedience to arbitrary ,assinine orders, really working to get them respect or is it just something they get off on?

When the police are shown to be bad, they strike by work slowdown, or letting a little chaos loose themselves. So the people know they need them So any reform of the police will go through the police not doing their jobs . but then something like better communities may result. less people being busted and harassed , or pulled over for the sake of a quota . may just show we don't need so much policing anyway. And then if the new social workers brigade starts intervening in peoples with issues when they are young and in school maybe fewer will be in the system. Couple that with the police not throwing their family in jail for nothing, and forcing them to pay fines for breaking stupid laws. The system will have less of a load, and the new , better cops without attitudes will be able to handle their communities in a way that works for everyone. Making them a net positive, as opposed to now where they are a net negative.
Also,

The drug war is over. The cops have only done the bidding of the organized criminal elements who make their bread and butter because of prohibition.

Our representatives can legally smoke pot , and grow it in their windowboxes in the capital dc., but people in many places are still living in fear of police using possession of some substance,as a pretext to take all their stuff,throw them in jail. But besides the cops, there are the prosecutors . they earn their salaries by stealing it from poor people through fines for things that ought to be legal. This is one way to drain money from poor communities, causing people to go steal from others in society to pay their court costs.

And who is gonna come and bust down your door when you can't pay a fine and choose to pay rent and buy your kids food instead . the cops. just doing their jobs. Evil is the banality of business as usual

Tom Stone , June 19, 2020 at 8:20 am

The late Kevin R C O'Brien noted that in every case where the Police had been ordered to "Round up the usual suspects" they have done so, and delivered them where ordered. It did not matter who the "Usual suspects" were, or to what fate they were to be delivered. They are the King's men and they do the King's bidding.

The Rev Kev , June 19, 2020 at 10:10 am

To have a reasonable discussion, I think that it should be recognized that modern police are but one leg of a triad. The first of course is the police who appear to seem themselves as not part of a community but as enforcers in that community. To swipe an idea from Mao, the police should move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. Not be a patrolling shark that attacks who they want at will knowing that there will be no repercussions against them. When you get to the point that you have police arresting children in school for infractions of school discipline – giving them a police record – you know that things have gotten out of hand.

The next leg is the courts which of course includes prosecutors. It is my understanding that prosecutors are elected to office in the US and so have incentives to appear to be tough on crime"" . They seem to operate more like 'Let's Make a Deal' from what I have read. When they tell some kid that he has a choice of 1,000 years in prison on trumped up charges or pleads guilty to a smaller offence, you know that that is not justice at work. Judges too operate in their own world and will always take the word of a policeman as a witness.

And the third leg is the prisons which operate as sweatshops for corporate America. It is in the interest of the police and the courts to fill up the prisons to overflowing. Anybody remember the Pennsylvania "kids for cash" scandal where kids lives were being ruined with criminal records that were bogus so that some people could make a profit? And what sort of prison system is it where a private contractor can build a prison without a contract at all , knowing that the government (California in this case) will nonetheless fill it up for a good profit.

In short, in sorting out police doctrine and methods like is happening now, it should be recognized that they are actually only the face of a set of problems.

MLTPB , June 19, 2020 at 11:00 am

How did ancient states police? Perhaps Wiki is a starting point of this journey. Per Its entry, Police, in ancient Greece, policing was done by public owned slaves. In Rome, the army, initially. In China, prefects leading to a level of government called prefectures .

Pookah Harvey , June 19, 2020 at 10:54 am

I spent some time in the Silver Valley of northern Idaho. This area was the hot bed of labor unrest during the 1890's. Federal troops controlled the area 3 separate times,1892, 1894 and 1899. Twice miners hijacked trains loaded them with dynamite and drove them to mining company stamping mills that they then blew up. Dozens of deaths in shoot outs. The entire male population was herded up and placed in concentration camps for weeks. The end result was the assassination of the Governor in 1905.

Interestingly this history has been completely expunged. There is a mining museum in the town which doesn't mention a word on these events. Even nationwide there seems to be a complete erasure of what real labor unrest can look like..

rob , June 19, 2020 at 11:58 am

Yeah, labor unrest does get swept under the rug. Howard zinn had examples in his works "the peoples history of the United States" The pictched battles in upstate new york with the Van Rennselear's in the 1840's breaking up rennselearwyk . the million acre estate of theirs . it was a rent strike.

People remembering , we have been here before doesn't help the case of the establishment so they try to not let it happen.

We get experts telling us . well, this is all new we need experts to tell you what to think. It is like watching the footage from the past 100 years on film of blacks marching for their rights and being told.. reform is coming.. the more things change, the more things stay the same. Decade after decade. Century after century. Time to start figuring this out people. So, the enemy is us. Now what?

Carolinian , June 19, 2020 at 11:01 am

Doubtless the facts presented above are correct, but shouldn't one point out that the 21st century is quite different from the 19th and therefore analogizing the current situation to what went on before is quite facile? For example it's no longer necessary for the police to put down strikes because strike actions barely still exist. In our current US the working class has diminished greatly while the middle class has expanded. We are a much richer country overall with a lot more people–not just those one percenters–concerned about crime. Whatever one thinks of the police, politically an attempt to go back to the 18th century isn't going to fly.

MLTPB , June 19, 2020 at 11:15 am

Perhaps we are more likely to argue among ourselves, when genetic fallacy is possibly in play.

Pookah Harvey , June 19, 2020 at 11:37 am

" the 21st century is quite different from the 19th "

From the Guardian: "How Starbucks, Target, Google and Microsoft quietly fund police through private donations"

More than 25 large corporations in the past three years have contributed funding to private police foundations, new report says.

These foundations receive millions of dollars a year from private and corporate donors, according to the report, and are able to use the funds to purchase equipment and weapons with little public input. The analysis notes, for example, how the Los Angeles police department in 2007 used foundation funding to purchase surveillance software from controversial technology firm Palantir. Buying the technology with private foundation funding rather than its public budget allowed the department to bypass requirements to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council.

The Houston police foundation has purchased for the local police department a variety of equipment, including Swat equipment, sound equipment and dogs for the K-9 unit, according to the report. The Philadelphia police foundation purchased for its police force long guns, drones and ballistic helmets, and the Atlanta police foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras.

In addition to weaponry, foundation funding can also go toward specialized training and support programs that complement the department's policing strategies, according to one police foundation.

"Not a lot of people are aware of this public-private partnership where corporations and wealthy donors are able to siphon money into police forces with little to no oversight," said Gin Armstrong, a senior research analyst at LittleSis.

Maybe it is just me, but things don't seem to be all that different.

Bob , June 19, 2020 at 11:40 am

If we made America Great Again we could go back to the 18th century.

rob , June 19, 2020 at 12:11 pm

While it is true, this is a new century. Knowing how the present came to be, is entirely necessary to be able to attempt any move forward.
The likelihood of making the same old mistakes is almost certain, if one doesn't try to use the past as a reference.
And considering the effect of propaganda and revisionism in the formation of peoples opinions, we do need " learning against learning" to borrow a Jesuit strategy against the reformation, but this time it should embrace reality, rather than sow falsehoods.
But I do agree,
We have never been here before, and now is a great time to reset everything. With all due respect to "getting it right" or at least "better".
and knowing the false fables of righteousness, is what people need to know, before they go about "burning down the house".

Carolinian , June 19, 2020 at 12:42 pm

You know it's not as though white people aren't also afraid of the police. Alfred Hitchcock said he was deathly afraid of police and that paranoia informed many of his movies. Woody Allen has a funny scene in Annie Hall where he is pulled over by a cop and is comically flustered. White people also get shot and killed by the police as the rightwingers are constantly pointing out.

And thousands of people in the streets tell us that police reform is necessary. But the country is not going to get rid of them and replace police with social workers so why even talk about it? I'd say the above is interesting .not terribly relevant.

Mattski , June 19, 2020 at 11:37 am

Straight-up fact: The police weren't created to preserve and protect. They were created to maintain order, [enforced] over certain subjected classes and races of people, including–for many white people, too–many of our ancestors, too.*

And the question that arises from this: Are we willing to the subjects in a police state? Are we willing to continue to let our Black and brown brothers and sisters be subjected BY such a police state, and to half-wittingly be party TO it?

Or do we want to exercise AGENCY over "our" government(s), and decide–anew–how we go out our vast, vast array of social ills.

Obviously, armed police officers with an average of six months training–almost all from the white underclass–are a pretty f*cking blunt instrument to bring to bear.

On our own heads. On those who we and history have consigned to second-class citizenship.
Warning: this is a revolutionary situation. We should embrace it.

*Acceding to white supremacy, becoming "white" and often joining that police order, if you were poor, was the road out of such subjectivity. My grandfather's father, for example, was said to have fled a failed revolution in Bohemia to come here. Look back through history, you will find plenty of reason to feel solidarity, too. Race alone cannot divide us if we are intent on the lessons of that history.

[Jun 19, 2020] A discriminatory informal caste system that racism create was used by neoliberals for supression of white working poor protest against deteriorating standard of living and cooping them to support economic policies of redistribution of wealth up, directly against them

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system alive and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system. ..."
"... a class level lower than the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate, and growing, distribution of wealth and income in the US. ..."
"... It was not the status or material wealth causing the harsh feelings; but, the feeling of being treated less than equal, having little status, and the resulting shame. ..."
"... In other words, by providing poor whites with a stratum of the population that has even lower social status, neoliberals manage to co-opt them to support the policies which economically ate detrimental to their standard of living as well as to suppress the protest against the redistribution of wealth up and dismantling of the New Deal capitalist social protection network. ..."
"... This is a pretty sophisticated, pretty evil scheme if you ask me. In a way, “Floydgate” can be viewed as a variation on the same theme. A very dirty game indeed, when the issue of provision of meaningful jobs for working poor, social equality, and social protection for low-income workers of any color is replaced with a real but of secondary importance issue of police violence against blacks. ..."
Jun 19, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

run75441 June 19, 2020 at 8:23 am

...A while back, I was researching the issues you state in your last paragraph. Was about ten pages into it and had to stop as I was drawn out of state and country.

From my research.

While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system alive and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system.

This distraction of a class level lower than the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate, and growing, distribution of wealth and income in the US.

For the lower class, an allowed luxury, a place in the hierarchy and a sure form of self esteem insurance.

Sennett and Cobb (1972) observed that class distinction sets up a contest between upper and lower class with the lower social class always losing and promulgating a perception amongst themselves the educated and upper classes are in a position to judge and draw a conclusion of them being less than equal.

The hidden injury is in the regard to the person perceiving himself as a piece of the woodwork or seen as a function such as "George the Porter."

It was not the status or material wealth causing the harsh feelings; but, the feeling of being treated less than equal, having little status, and the resulting shame.

The answer for many was violence.

James Gilligan wrote "Violence; Reflections on A National Epidemic." He worked as a prison psychiatrist and talked with many of the inmates of the issues of inequality and feeling less than those around them. His finding are in his book which is not a long read and adds to the discussion.

A little John Adams for you.

"The poor man's conscience is clear . . . he does not feel guilty and has no reason to . . . yet, he is ashamed. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles unheeded.

In the midst of a crowd; at a church; in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar.

He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable."

likbez June 19, 2020 1:25 pm
That’s a very important observation. Racism, especially directed toward blacks, along with “identity wedge,” is a perfect tool for disarming poor white, and suppressing their struggle for a better standard of living, which considerably dropped under neoliberalism.

In other words, by providing poor whites with a stratum of the population that has even lower social status, neoliberals manage to co-opt them to support the policies which economically ate detrimental to their standard of living as well as to suppress the protest against the redistribution of wealth up and dismantling of the New Deal capitalist social protection network.

This is a pretty sophisticated, pretty evil scheme if you ask me. In a way, “Floydgate” can be viewed as a variation on the same theme. A very dirty game indeed, when the issue of provision of meaningful jobs for working poor, social equality, and social protection for low-income workers of any color is replaced with a real but of secondary importance issue of police violence against blacks.

This is another way to explain “What’s the matter with Kansas” effect.

[Jun 16, 2020] How Woke Politics Keeps Class Solidarity Down by GREGOR BASZAK

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for corporations that ultimately take workers for granted. ..."
"... Today, we find Lincoln statues desecrated . Neither has the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry , one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent protests unscathed. To many on the left, history seems like the succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be served if we scrap the past and start from a blank slate. As a result, Lincoln's appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost to time. ..."
"... Ironically, this will only help the cause of Robert E. Lee -- and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane labor to keep themselves going. ..."
"... Before black slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured servant is bound for a number of years to his master, i.e. he can't pack up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.) ..."
"... But in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the North also weren't truly human. Such unholy antebellum figures as the social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond urged that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too. Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source did not stop at black people, after all. ..."
"... Always remember Barbara Fields's formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss. ..."
"... Michael Lind argues in his new book The New Class War that many powerful businesses in America today continue to rely on the work of quasi indentured servants. Hungry for unfree, cheap workers, corporations in Silicon Valley and beyond employ tens of thousands of foreign workers through the H-2B visa program. These workers are bound to the company that provided them with the visa. If they find conditions at their jobs unbearable, they can't switch employers -- they would get deported first. In turn, this source of cheap labor effectively underbids American workers who could do the same job, except that they would ask for higher pay. ..."
"... We're getting turned into rats. Naturally, this is no fertile soil for solidarity. And with so many jobs precarious and subcontracted out on a temporary basis, there is preciously little that most workers can do to fight back this insidious managerial control. Free labor looks different. ..."
"... It's hard to come out of the 2020 primaries without realizing that the corporations that run our mainstream media will do anything to protect their right to abuse cheap labor. ..."
"... At this point in history, to the extent that black people suffer any meaningful oppression at all, its down to disproportionate poverty rates, not their racial background. ..."
"... I agree one hundred percent with your take on Biden. Let me add something else: he is a war hawk who not only voted for the Iraq war but used his position as the chairman of an important committee to promote it. ..."
"... Because of slavery alot of bad political policy was incorporated in the founding documents. If a police officer is about to wrongly arrest you because you are black , you do not care if his hatred stems from 400 years of discrimination against blacks. Rather you care that he won't kill you in this encounter because of his racism. ..."
"... Baszak believes racism has no life of its own, it exists only as a tool of the bosses. This is vulgar Marxism. At least since the decades after Bacon's Rebellion ended in 1677, poor whites have invested in white supremacy as a way of boosting their social status. Most Southern families owned no slaves, yet most joined the Civil War cause. ..."
"... They made a movie that beautifully touches this in the 1970s with Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor called " Blue Collar ." ..."
"... "That's exactly what the company wants: to keep you on their line," says Smokey, the coolest and most strategically minded of the crew. "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white -- everybody -- to keep us in our place." ..."
"... The core thesis in this piece is the animating foundation of The Hill's political talk show "Rising." Composed of a populist Bernie supporter (Krystal Ball) and populist conservative (Saagar Enjeti) as hosts, they frequently highlight the purpose of woke cultural battles is to distract everyone for their neoliberal economic models ..."
Jun 16, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for corporations that ultimately take workers for granted.

Former injured Amazon employees join labor organizers and community activists to demonstrate and hold a press conference outside of an Amazon Go store to express concerns about what they claim is the company's "alarming injury rate" among warehouse workers on December 10, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

On April 2, 1865, in the dying days of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln wandered the streets of burnt out Richmond, the former Confederate capital. All of a sudden, Lincoln found himself surrounded by scores of emancipated men and women. Here's how the historian James McPherson describes the moving episode in his magisterial book Battle Cry of Freedom :

Several freed slaves touched Lincoln to make sure he was real. "I know I am free," shouted an old woman, "for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him." Overwhelmed by rare emotions, Lincoln said to one black man who fell on his knees in front of him: "Don't kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter."

Lincoln's legacy as the Great Emancipator has survived the century and a half since then largely intact. But there have been cracks in this image, mostly caused by questioning academics who decried him as an overt white supremacist. This view eventually entered the mainstream when Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote misleadingly in her lead essay to the "1619 Project" that Lincoln "opposed black equality."

Today, we find Lincoln statues desecrated . Neither has the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry , one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent protests unscathed. To many on the left, history seems like the succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be served if we scrap the past and start from a blank slate. As a result, Lincoln's appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost to time.

Ironically, this will only help the cause of Robert E. Lee -- and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane labor to keep themselves going.

***

The main idea driving the "1619 Project" and so much of recent scholarship is that the United States of America originated in slavery and white supremacy. These were its true founding ideals. Racism, Hannah-Jones writes, is in our DNA.

Such arguments don't make any sense, as the historian Barbara Fields clairvoyantly argued in a groundbreaking essay from 1990. Why would Virginia planters in the 17th century import black people purely out of hate? No, Fields countered, the planters were driven by a real need for dependable workers who would toil on their cotton, rice, and tobacco fields for little to no pay. Before black slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured servant is bound for a number of years to his master, i.e. he can't pack up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.)

After 1776 everything changed. Suddenly the new republic claimed that "all men are created equal" -- and yet there were millions of slaves who still couldn't enjoy this equality. Racism helped to square our founding ideals with the brute reality of continued chattel slavery: Black people simply weren't men.

But in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the North also weren't truly human. Such unholy antebellum figures as the social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond urged that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too. Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source did not stop at black people, after all.

Always remember Barbara Fields's formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss.

The true cause of the Civil War -- and it bears constant repeating for all the doubters -- was whether slavery would expand its reach or whether "free labor" would reign supreme. The latter was the dominant ideology of the North: Free laborers are independent, self-reliant, and eventually achieve economic security and independence by the sweat of their brow. It's the American Dream. But if that is so, then the Civil War ended in a tie -- and its underlying conflict was never really settled.

***

Michael Lind argues in his new book The New Class War that many powerful businesses in America today continue to rely on the work of quasi indentured servants. Hungry for unfree, cheap workers, corporations in Silicon Valley and beyond employ tens of thousands of foreign workers through the H-2B visa program. These workers are bound to the company that provided them with the visa. If they find conditions at their jobs unbearable, they can't switch employers -- they would get deported first. In turn, this source of cheap labor effectively underbids American workers who could do the same job, except that they would ask for higher pay.

America's wealth rests on this mutual competition between workers -- some nominally "free," others basically indentured -- whether it be through unjust visa schemes or other unfair managerial practices.

Remember that the next time you read a public announcement by the Amazons of this world that they remain committed to "black lives matter" and similar identitarian causes.

Fortunately, very few Americans hold the same racial resentments in their hearts as their ancestors did even just half a century ago. Rarely did we agree as much than when the nation near unanimously condemned the death of George Floyd at the hands of a few Minneapolis police officers. This is in keeping with another fortunate trend: Over the last 40 years, the rate of police killings of young black men declined by 79% percent .

But anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for our corporations, even despite the evidence that people in this country have grown much less bigotted than they once were: As a management tool, anti-racism sows constant suspicion among workers who are encouraged to detect white supremacist sentiments in everything that their fellow workers say or do.

We're getting turned into rats. Naturally, this is no fertile soil for solidarity. And with so many jobs precarious and subcontracted out on a temporary basis, there is preciously little that most workers can do to fight back this insidious managerial control. Free labor looks different.

And so, through a surprising back door, the true cause for which Robert E. Lee chose to betray his country might still be coming out on top, whether we remove his statues or not -- namely, the steady supply to our ruling corporations of unfree workers willing to hustle for scraps.

It's time to follow Abraham Lincoln's urging and get off our knees again. We should assert our rights as American citizens to live free from economic insecurity and mutual resentment. The vast majority of us harbor no white supremacist views, period. Instead, we have so many more things in common, and we know it.

Another anecdote from the last days of the Civil War, also taken from Battle Cry of Freedom, might prove instructive here: The surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 essentially ended the Civil War. The ceremony was held with solemn respect for Lee, though one of Grant's adjutants couldn't help himself but have a subtle dig at Lee's expense:

After signing the papers, Grant introduced Lee to his staff. As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded, "We are all Americans."

Gregor Baszak is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a writer. His articles have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Spectator USA, Spiked, and elsewhere. Follow Gregor on Twitter at @gregorbas1.

Megan S • 15 hours ago

It's a bit off-topic but this is a big reason I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary this year, he was the only candidate talking about how businesses demand that cheap labor, illegal labor, replace American labor. For this, the corporate media called him a racist, an anti-semite, a dangerous radical. None of his opponents aside from Elizabeth Warren had anything to run on aside from pseudo-woke touchy-feely bs. And somehow, with the media insisting that Joe Biden was the only one who could beat Trump, we ended up with the one candidate who was neither good on economics, good for American workers, or offering platitudes about wokeness.

It's hard to come out of the 2020 primaries without realizing that the corporations that run our mainstream media will do anything to protect their right to abuse cheap labor.

JonF311 Victor_the_thinker • 8 hours ago

Racism is very real. If it weren't it couldn't be used to "divide and conquer" the working calss. we can walk and chew gum and the same time: oppose racism, and also oppose exploitive labor practices.

Bureaucrat Victor_the_thinker • an hour ago • edited

What kind of polemic, unsupported statement is "black fast food workers are the ones who gave us the fight for $15"? How about it was a broad coalition of progressives (of all colors)? Moreover, $15 minimum wage is a poor, one-size-fits-all band-aid that I doubt even fits ONE scenario. Tackling the broader shareholder capitalism model of labor arbitrage (free trade/mass immigration), deunionization, and monopolistic hurdles drafted by corporations is where it actually matters. And on that, we are seeing the inklings of a populist left-right coalition -- if corporate-funded race hustlers could only get out of the way.

Bureaucrat JonF311 • 2 hours ago • edited

That's the problem. We CAN'T chew gum and walk at the same time. Every minute focusing on racial friction is a minute NOT talking about neoliberal economics. What's the ratio of air time, social media discussion, or newspaper inches are devoted to race vis-a-vis the economic system that has starved the working class -- which is disproportionately black and brown? 10 to 1? 100 to 1? 1000 to 1? If there are no decent working class jobs for young black and brown men, then it makes it nearly impossible to raise families. Let's be clear: Systemic racism is real, but it is far less impactful than economic injustices and family dissolution.

Selvar Victor_the_thinker • 33 minutes ago • edited

Class really isn't the primary issue for black people.

That's a frankly ridiculous statement. At this point in history, to the extent that black people suffer any meaningful oppression at all, its down to disproportionate poverty rates, not their racial background. No one--except a few neurotic, high-strung corporate HR PMC types--cares about "microaggressions". Even unjust police shootings of blacks are likely down to class and not race--despite the politically correct narrative saying otherwise.

Putting racial identity politics as an equal (or even greater) priority than class-based solidarity creates an absurd system where an upper-middle class black woman attending Yale can act as if a working class white man is oppressing her by not acknowledging his "white privilege", and not bowing to her every demand. It's utterly delusional to think that sort of culture is going to create a more just or equal world.

joeo Megan S • 9 hours ago shiva

Biden is a Rorschach test, people see whatever they want in a party apparatchik. Trump has been Shiva, the destroyer of the traditional Republican party. How else do you explain the support among Multi-Billionaires for the Democratic party. Truly ironic.

Jessica Ramer Megan S • 8 hours ago

I agree one hundred percent with your take on Biden. Let me add something else: he is a war hawk who not only voted for the Iraq war but used his position as the chairman of an important committee to promote it. I understand that he still wants to divide Iraq into three separate countries--a decision for Iraqis to make and not us. If we try to implement that policy, it would doubtless lead to more American deaths--to say nothing of Iraqi deaths.

So not only is he not good for American workers, he is not good for the American soldier who is disproportionately likely not to be from the elite classes but rather from the working and lower-middle class.

The only other Democratic candidate who opposed war-mongering besides Sanders was Tulsi Gabbard. I watched CNN commentary after a debate in which she participated. While the other participants received lots of commentary from CNN talking heads. she got almost nothing. She was featured in a video montage of candidates saying "Trump"; other than that, she was invisible in the post-debate analysis.

Megan S Jessica Ramer • 7 hours ago

I don't know how far it travelled outside of Democratic primary voters, but I recall Biden's campaign saying that they were planning to be sort of a placeholder that would pass the torch to the next generation. He's insinuated that he only wants to serve one term and saw jumping into the race as the only way to beat Trump. Not the most exciting platform for the Democrats to run on.

As depressing as this primary was, it's good to see that the rising generation of Democrats was resistant to platitudes and demanded actual policy proposals.

Shame the party elders fell for the same old tricks yet again. I just hope that once there are more of us, we can have a serious policy debate in both major parties about free trade, immigration, inequality. The parties' voters aren't all that far apart on economics, yet neither of us is being given what we want. Whichever party sincerely takes a stand for the American working class stands to dominate American politics for a generation.

kouroi Megan S • 5 hours ago

"Shame the party elders fell for the same old tricks yet again."

Oops, they tripped, poor oldies, not good in keeping their balance, eh?!

Bureaucrat Megan S • 2 hours ago • edited

The problem with Biden's "placeholder" comments is that he specifically mentioned it for Pete Buttigeig, the McKinsey-trained career opportunist who believes in his bones the same neoliberal economics and interventionist foreign policies as the last generation. Same bad ideas, new woke packaging.

Megan S Bureaucrat • 2 hours ago

On the bright side, young people despise Buttigieg and his attempt to cast us all as homophobic didn't really catch on outside of corporate media.

Bureaucrat Megan S • an hour ago

Kamala Harris and Susan Rice, both tops on the VP list, will do just fine in place of Buttigieg - he's slated to revive TPP as the new USTR cabinet lead.

kouroi • 14 hours ago

And just like that Mr. Baszak has become the second favorite writer here at TAC, after Mr. Larison...

stephen pickard • 9 hours ago

Because of slavery alot of bad political policy was incorporated in the founding documents. If a police officer is about to wrongly arrest you because you are black , you do not care if his hatred stems from 400 years of discrimination against blacks. Rather you care that he won't kill you in this encounter because of his racism.

To me, I have always thought that America's original sin was slavery. Its stain can not be completely wiped out.

And I further believe that if Native Americans would have enslaved the newly arrived Europeans, and remained the ruling majority, white people would be discriminated against today.

So the problem is not that white people are inherently evil, or other races are inherently good. It is that because of slavery black people are bad, white people are good.

As a nation we have never been able to wash out the stain completely. Never will. Getting closer to the promised land is the best we are going to do. Probably take another 400 years.

In everyday encounters no one cares how discrimination began, just treat me like you want to be treated. Pretty simple.

Randolph Bourne • 2 hours ago

"As a management tool, anti-racism sows constant suspicion among workers who are encouraged to detect white supremacist sentiments in everything that their fellow workers say or do."

The author does not offer one smidgen of proof that any company uses antiracism to divide workers. It might be plausible that it's happened, but Baszak has no data at all.

Over the last 40 years, the rate of police killings of young black men declined by 79% percent.

You think this is an accident? It came about through intense pressure on the police to stop killing Black people -- exactly the sort of racial emphasis the author seems to be decrying. Important to note that the non-fatal mistreatment has remained high.

The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss

Baszak believes racism has no life of its own, it exists only as a tool of the bosses. This is vulgar Marxism. At least since the decades after Bacon's Rebellion ended in 1677, poor whites have invested in white supremacy as a way of boosting their social status. Most Southern families owned no slaves, yet most joined the Civil War cause. The psychological draw of racism, its cultural strength, are obviated by Barszak. And I bet Barbara Fields does not consider racism an epiphenomenon of economics.

Bureaucrat • 2 hours ago

They made a movie that beautifully touches this in the 1970s with Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor called "Blue Collar."

"That's exactly what the company wants: to keep you on their line," says Smokey, the coolest and most strategically minded of the crew. "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white -- everybody -- to keep us in our place."

Bureaucrat • an hour ago

The core thesis in this piece is the animating foundation of The Hill's political talk show "Rising." Composed of a populist Bernie supporter (Krystal Ball) and populist conservative (Saagar Enjeti) as hosts, they frequently highlight the purpose of woke cultural battles is to distract everyone for their neoliberal economic models -- a system that actually has greater deleterious impact on black communities.

This video is one recent example of what you'll rarely see in mainstream media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chq_VxzDsSc

[Jun 16, 2020] Krystal Ball: The American dream is dead, good riddance

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Debt-free is the new American dream ..."
Jun 12, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Krystal Ball exposes the delusion of the American dream.

About Rising: Rising is a weekday morning show with bipartisan hosts that breaks the mold of morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before. The show leans into the day's political cycle with cutting edge analysis from DC insiders who can predict what is going to happen.

It also sets the day's political agenda by breaking exclusive news with a team of scoop-driven reporters and demanding answers during interviews with the country's most important political newsmakers.

Owen Cousino , 4 days ago

Debt-free is the new American dream

poppaDehorn , 4 days ago

Got my degree just as the great recession hit. Couldn't find real work for 3 years, not using my degree... But it was work. now after 8 years, im laid off. I did everything "right". do good in school, go to college, get a job...

I've never been fired in my life. its always, "Your contract is up" "Sorry we cant afford to keep you", "You can make more money collecting! but we'll give a recommendation if you find anything."

Now I'm back where i started... only now I have new house and a family to support... no pressure.

[Jun 02, 2020] It didn t happen overnight by Ken Melvin

Under neoliberalism (and generally under any form of capitalism without countervailing force) the wages tend to deteriorate to the starvation level
Jun 02, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

Sound too familiar? Sometime in the late 80s (??) Americans began to see day labors line up at Home Depot and Lowe's lots in numbers not seen since The Great Depression. Manufacturing Corporations began subbing out their work to sub-contractors, otherwise known as employees without benefits; Construction Contractors subbed out construction work to these employees without benefits; Engineering Firms subbed out engineering to these employees without benefits; Landscapers' workers were now sub-contractors/independent contractors; Here, in the SF Bay Area, time and again, we saw vans loads of undocumented Hispanics under a 'Labor Contractor' come in from the Central Valley to build condos; the white Contractor for the project didn't have a single employee; none of the workers got a W-2. Recall watching, sometime in the 90s (??), a familiar, well dressed, rotund guest from Wall Street, on the PBS News Hour, forcefully proclaiming to the TV audience:

American workers are going to have to learn to compete with the Chinese; Civil Service employees, factory employees, are all going to have to work for less

All this subcontracting, independent contractors, was a scam, a scam meant to circumvent paying going wages and benefits, to enhance profit margins; a scam that transferred more wealth to the top. Meanwhile back at The Ranch, after the H1B Immigration Act of 1990, Microsoft could hire programmers from India for one-half the cost of a citizen programmer. Half of Bill Gates' fortune was resultant these labor savings; the other half was made off those not US Citizens. Taking a cue, Banks, Bio-Techs, some City and State Governments began subcontracting out their programming to H1Bs. Often, the subcontractors/labor contractors (often themselves immigrants) providing the programmers, held the programmers' passports/visas for security.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, friends of Bush/Cheney made fortunes on clean up contracts they subbed out for next to nothing; the independent/subcontractor scam was now officially governmentally sanctioned.

By about 2000 we began to hear the term gig-workers applied to these employees without benefits. Uber appeared in 2007 to be followed by Lift. Both are scams based on paying less than prevailing wages, on not providing worker benefits,

These days, the nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in America, shows footage of Food Banks in California with lines 2! miles long. Many of those waiting in these lines didn't have a real job before; they were gig-workers; they can't apply for Unemployment Benefits. It is estimated that 1.6 million American workers (1% of the workforce) are gig-workers; they don't have a real job. That 1% is in addition to the 16 million American workers (10% of the workforce) that are independent contractors. Of the more than 40 million currently unemployed Americans, some 17 million are either gig-workers or subcontractors/independent contractors. All of these are scams meant to transfer more wealth to the top. All of these are scams with American Workers the victims; scams, in a race to the bottom.

Denis Drew , May 31, 2020 10:51 am

Ken,

Read this by the SEIU counsel Andrew Strom -- and tell me what you think:
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/

Democrats in the so called battle ground states would clean up at the polls with this. Why do you think those states strayed? It was because Obama and Hillary had no idea what they really needed. Voters had no idea what they SPECIFICALLY needed either -- UNIONS! They had been deunionized so thoroughly for so long that they THEMSELVES no long knew what they were missing (frogs in the slowly boiling pot).

In 1988 Jesse Jackson took the Democratic primary in Michigan with 54% against Dukakis and Gephardt. Obama beat Wall Street Romney and red-white-and-blue McCain in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. But nobody told these voters -- because nobody seems to remember -- what they really needed. These voter just knew by 2016 that Democrats had not what they needed and looked elsewhere -- anywhere else!

Strom presents an easy as can be, on-step-back treatment that should go down oh, so smoothly and sweetly. What do you think?

ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:04 pm

Denis

Thanks for your comment and the link. Wow! Where to start, huh?

SEIU was a player from the get go, but I don't want to go there just now.

Before Reagan, there was the first rust belt move to the non-union south. Why was the south so anti-union? I think this stuff is engendered from infancy and most of us are incapable of thinking anew when it comes to stuff our parents 'taught' us. MLK was the best thing that ever happened to the dirt-road poor south, yet they hated him and they hated the very unions that might have lifted them up. They did seem to take pleasure in the yanks' loss of jobs.

I think the Reagan era was prelude to what is going on now, i.e., going backward while yelling whee look at me go. No doubt, Reagan turned union members against their own unions. But, the genesis of demise probably lay with automation and the early offshoring to Mexico. By Reagan, the car plants were losing jobs to Toyota and Honda and automation. By 1990, car plants that had previously employed 5,000, now automated, produced more cars employing only 1200. At the time, much of the nation's wealth was still derived from car production.

Skipping forward a bit, the democrats blew it for years with all their talk about the 'middle-class' without realizing it was the 'disappearing middle-class'. They ignored the poor working-class vote and lost election after election.

I've come to not like the term labor, think it affords capital an undeserved status, though much diminished, I think thought all workers would be better off in a union. Otherwise, as we are witnessing, there is no parity between workers and wealth; we are in a race to the bottom with the wealth increasingly go to the top.

ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:15 pm

Matthew – thanks for your comment

I think that we are into a transition (about 45 yrs into) as great as the industrial revolution. We, as probably those poor souls of the 18th and 19th centuries did, are floundering, unable to come to terms with what is going on.

I also think that those such as the Kochs have a good grasp of what is going on and are moving to protect themselves and their class.

ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:21 pm

EMichael, thanks for the comment

Are you implying that the politicians are way behind the curve? If so, I think that you are right.

Let me share what I was thinking last night about thinking:

Descartes' problem was that he desperately wanted to make philosophy work within the framework of his religion, Catholicism. Paul Krugman desperately wants to make economics all work within the Holy Duality of Capitalism and Free Markets. Even Joe Stiglitz can't step out of this text. All things being possible, it is possible that either could come up with a solution to today's economic problems that would fit within the Two; but the odds are not good. Better to think anew.

We see politicians try and try to find solutions for today's problems from within their own dogmas/ideologies. Even if they can't, they persist, they still try to impose these dogmas/ideologies in the desperate hope they might work if only applied to a greater degree. How else explain any belief that markets could anticipate and respond to pandemics? That markets could best respond to housing demand?

  1. Interesting and fine writing.
anne , May 31, 2020 1:49 pm

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1267060950026326018

Paul Krugman @paulkrugman

Glad to see Noah Smith highlighting this all-too-relevant work by the late Alberto Alesina 1/

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-30/racism-is-the-biggest-reason-u-s-safety-net-is-so-weak

Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died last week, found that ethnic divisions made the country less effective at providing public goods.

7:50 AM · May 31, 2020

The Alesina/Glaeser/Sacerdote paper on why America doesn't have a European-style welfare state -- racism -- had a big impact on my own thinking 2/

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/why_doesnt_the_u.s._have_a_european-style_welfare_state.pdf

For a long time anyone who pointed out that the modern GOP is basically a party that serves plutocratic ends by weaponizing white racism was treated as "shrill" and partisan. Can we now admit the obvious? 3/

  1. a long, long time. Possibly forever.
anne , May 31, 2020 1:56 pm

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/why_doesnt_the_u.s._have_a_european-style_welfare_state.pdf

September, 2001

Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?
By Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote

Abstract

European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors appear to explain the differences between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity in the US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor.

rick shapiro , May 31, 2020 2:07 pm

This dynamic is not limited to low-skill jobs. I have seen it at work in electronics engineering. When I was a sprat, job shoppers got an hourly wage nearly twice that of their company peers, because they had no benefits or long-term employment. Today, job shoppers are actually paid less than company engineers; and the companies are outsourcing ever more of their staffing to the brokers.
Without labor market frictions, the iron law of wages drives wages to starvation levels. As sophisticated uberization software eliminates the frictions that have protected middle class wages in the recent past, we will all need to enlist unionization and government wage standards to protect us.

ken melvin , May 31, 2020 2:29 pm

Rick

The big engineering offices of the 70s were decimated and worse by the mid-90s; mostly by the advent of computers w/ software. One engineer could now do the work of 10 and didn't need any draftsman.

rick shapiro , May 31, 2020 2:40 pm

I was speaking of engineers with equal skill in the same office. Many at GE Avionics were laid off, and came back as lower paid contract employees.

[Jun 02, 2020] So we're going to tell our soldiers that we're redeploying them from the Middle East to the midwest? What do we think they're going to say, 'yeah, sure, no problem?' Guess again."

Trump's threat to deploy the military here is an excessive and dangerous one. Mark Perry reports on the reaction from military officers to the president's threat:
Jun 02, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Senior military officer on Trump statement: "So we're going to tell our soldiers that we're redeploying them from the Middle East to the midwest? What do we think they're going to say, 'yeah, sure, no problem?' Guess again."

-- Mark Perry (@markperrydc) June 2, 2020

Earlier in the day yesterday, audio has leaked in which the Secretary of Defense referred to U.S. cities as the "battlespace." Separately, Sen. Tom Cotton was making vile remarks about using the military to give "no quarter" to looters. This is the language of militarism.

It is a consequence of decades of endless war and the government's tendency to rely on militarized options as their answer for every problem. Endless war has had a deeply corrosive effect on this country's political system: presidential overreach, the normalization of illegal uses of force, a lack of legal accountability for crimes committed in the wars, and a lack of political accountability for the leaders that continue to wage pointless and illegal wars. Now we see new abuses committed and encouraged by a lawless president, but this time it is Americans that are on the receiving end. Trump hasn't ended any of the foreign wars he inherited, and now it seems that he will use the military in an llegal mission here at home.

Megan S • an hour ago

The military is the only American institution that young people still have any real degree of faith in, it will be interesting to see the polls when this is all over with.

[Jun 02, 2020] Cornel West America Is A Failed Social Experiment, Neoliberal Wing Of Democratic Party Must Be Fought

See also End of empire Blueprint or scramble — RT Renegade Inc. Of the many important interviews you've done, this is one of the most important and best.
Notable quotes:
"... our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for sale, you can't deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose. ..."
"... The system cannot reform itself. We've tried black faces in high places ..."
"... You've got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver's seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don't know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces -- show more black faces. ..."
"... So when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they're the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion. ..."
May 29, 2020 | www.realclearpolitics.com
Dr. Cornel West said on Friday we are witnessing the failed social experiment that is the United States of America in the protests and riots that have followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. West told CNN host Anderson Cooper that what is going on is rebellion to a failed capitalist economy that does not protect the people. West, a professor, denounced the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is all about "black faces in high places" but not actual change. The professor remarked even those black faces often lose legitimacy because they ingriatiate themselves into the establishment neo-liberal Democratic party.

"I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment," West said. "What I mean by that is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America's failure, its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way people can live lives of decency. The nation-state, it's criminal justice system, it's legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties."

From commentary delivered on CNN Friday night:

DR. CORNEL WEST: And now our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for sale, you can't deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose.

So when you get this perfect storm of all these multiple failures at these different levels of the American empire, and Martin King already told us about that...

The system cannot reform itself. We've tried black faces in high places. Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.

And what happens is we have a neofascist gangster in the White House who doesn't care for the most part. You've got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver's seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don't know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces -- show more black faces.

But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security [Secretary] and they couldn't deliver.

So when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they're the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion.

... ...

[Jun 02, 2020] There is increasing evidence that certain gangs and other nefarious outside agitators are engaged in deliberate property damage and vandalism during the recent protests against police brutality--demonstrating that they are trying to hijack these protests

Organized crime in the USA is not a myth and its connections to law enforcement also is not a myth. They are ideal provocateurs for riots. Also they want their piece of action too ;-)
Jun 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
ak74 , Jun 2 2020 0:49 utc | 132
News Flash!!!

There is increasing evidence that certain gangs and other nefarious outside agitators are engaged in deliberate property damage and vandalism during the recent protests against police brutality--demonstrating that they are trying to hijack these protests and are not sincerely concerned about the issue of racism against African Americans/minorities in the US or police repression.

I wonder if William Barr or the American Regime will now finally declare these groups as "terrorists"?

Police at Protests All Over the Country Caught Destroying Property

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/police-at-protests-all-over-the-country-caught-destroying-property/

[Jun 02, 2020] Two goons who work at a fancy nightclub (aka Mob Headquarters) and one ends up dead. Smells like a mob hit; ordered and paid for by who is the right question

Jun 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Trailer Trash , Jun 1 2020 19:10 utc | 37

It is my informal observation that riots tend to collapse from exhaustion after about three days. That's not happening this time, as every new day sees more and more house arrest orders (called "curfew", a nice antiseptic term) across the country.

Current events bring to mind the 1933 failed fascist coup d'etat exposed by General Smedley "War is a Racket" Butler. Instead of organizing half a million war veterans by the VFW, today's "Business Plot" organizers would have at their disposal one million already trained and equipped paramilitary police forces.

In such a scenario there is no reason for local cops to know who is pulling strings; all they have to do is follow orders, which they are more than willing to do, especially with commanders giving them football-style pep talks before going out to break heads.

It's well-documented that the spooks have been trying to get rid of Trump since the election, first with "Russia-gate", then arresting and/or driving out all his trusted staff, then the impeachment. Why should anyone think the spooks have given up? How many times did they try to kill Castro?

If the idea that a spook-led coup d'etat is in progress really has merit (I have "medium confidence"), it will be enforced by the police, not the Army or even National Guard units. So far, Guard units have not fired on protesters and many are not armed. I strongly suspect the army is not reliable, and commanders know it :

In Denver, Guard troops are carrying nonlethal weapons, including batons, tasers, and pepper spray. "They were fully embedded with Denver PD," said Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Loh, Colorado's adjutant general. "The Denver police chief Paul Pazen said if we have to use deadly force and I want my police officers to do it , and I want you to be in support."

National Guard are recruited with boatloads of TV ads all promoting how Guardsmen are used to help their neighbors during natural disasters. Those ads never feature Guardsmen facing down or shooting angry protesters, and Guardsmen want to believe they are there "to help". The police, however, are under no such illusions and affirm their willingness to kill civilians every time they strap on their side-arm.

If Guardsmen get itchy trigger fingers and shoot civilians without orders, well that just happens sometimes, not a big deal. But if commanders give the order to shoot and they don't, that is a huge crisis which I assume commanders would want to avoid.

--------
From the BBC timeline :

During this attempt [to put Floyd in the patrolcar], at 20:19, Mr Chauvin pulled Mr Floyd out of the passenger side, causing him to fall to the ground, the report said.

He lay there, face down, still in handcuffs.

This suggests he was pulled out of the car by Chauvin for the express purpose of killing him. His cool demeanor is striking. He knows he is openly killing Floyd while being filmed but remains confident he is protected.

Two goons who work at a fancy nightclub (aka Mob Headquarters) and one ends up dead. Smells like a mob hit; ordered and paid for by who is the right question.

Alpi , Jun 1 2020 20:28 utc | 55

The death of George Floyd was ruled a HOMICIDE by independent autopsy.

https://www.rt.com/usa/490441-george-floyd-died-asphyxia-neck/

This report, combined with the fact that Derek Chauvin knew and worked with the victim, makes this homicide premeditated or at the very least a 2nd degree murder.

The fact that the other officers did not intervene makes them complicit in the act and should be brought up on manslaughter charges and accessory to commit murder.

Charging the other officers will help slightly in tamping down the riots, although it may be too late. The wheels have been placed in motion and this is morphing into something bigger than George Floyd.

RJPJR , Jun 1 2020 20:33 utc | 57
Look closely at the film of the end of the murder when the ambulance came for the victim:

https://twitter.com/littllemel/status/1266393141906726912

First responders immediately examine the victim for any signs of life, and they come prepared with equipment to resuscitate the victim if possible. Not these men.

They got out of the ambulance and moved in fast, picked up his body like it was a huge sack of potatoes, and THREW him on to the gurney. Obviously, they knew that he was dead, knew that he was supposed to be dead.

They were NOT first responders in any sense, but openly armed and uniformed policemen.

Consider...

[Jun 02, 2020] As the world watches the US being confronted with massive riots, looting, chaos and heightened violence, US officials, instead of reflecting on the systematic problems in their society that led to such a crisis, have returned to their old 'blame game' against left-wingers, 'fake news' media and 'external forces....

Jun 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jun 1 2020 17:14 utc | 15

It's True how this analysis sees and describes what's occurring within the Outlaw US Empire, more than validating Cornel West's assessment, except it misses the major component--Class--while seeing lizard's list:

"As the world watches the US being confronted with massive riots, looting, chaos and heightened violence, US officials, instead of reflecting on the systematic problems in their society that led to such a crisis, have returned to their old 'blame game' against left-wingers, 'fake news' media and 'external forces....'

"[O]bservers see a weak, irresponsible and incompetent leadership navigating the country into a completely opposite direction, with all-out efforts to deflect public attention from its own failure.

"Mass protests erupted in a growing numbers of cities in the US over the weekend, and at least 40 cities have imposed curfews, while the National Guard has been activated in 14 states and Washington DC, according to US media reports ... [P]rotests across the country continued into a sixth straight night.

"More Americans have slammed the US president for inciting hatred and racism, and US officials, who turn a blind eye to the deep-seated issues in American society, including racial injustice, economic woes and the coronavirus pandemic, began shifting the blame to the former US president, extremists, and China for inflaming the social unrests."

Blaming Chinese, Russians and/or Martians isn't going to help Trump. Without doing a thing, Biden has risen to a lead of 8-10% in the most recent polling. Trumps many mistakes have dug him a hole that now seems to be collapsing in upon him. He's cursed worse than Midas as everything he attempts turns out a big negative and only worsens the situation.

[Jun 02, 2020] How you define "oppression" ?

Jan 03, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

soru 12.31.19 at 6:39 pm 21 ( 21 )

The problem is in how you define "oppression".

For example if you take a marxian definition of l class, it means people who don't own the means of production, that easily means the bottom 80% of the population. However a large part of this group is usually considered middle class, and is not really seen as oppressed.

I don't think this is right; unlike 'exploited', Marx doesn't use the word 'oppression' in any technical or unusual way, just in it's usual sense.

So a prosperous middle class person in a liberal democracy is not oppressed. A Marxist would merely point out that they would be in a more capitalist society; one without a universal franchise that requires the rich to seek political allies.

people of the working class don't feel they are working class, but rather identify as blue collars

If you look into the actual details of vote tallies; you find more or less the precise opposite. There are a key block of people who, objectively speaking, earn most of their income from stocks that they own, in the form of pension funds. Up until recently, this block was the victim of false consciousness; they identified as something like 'blue collar', based on the jobs they used to do, and the communities they they used to belong to. As of the last few elections, political activity by the Republicans and Tories has managed to overcome that, so they now vote based on their objective class interests. Those who rely on a small lump of capital have mostly the same class interests as those in possession of more; fewer environmental regulations, lower minimum wages, and so forth.

Meanwhile, most of the current working class don't get to vote, because they lack citizenship in the countries in question.

[Jun 01, 2020] Riots underline the need for systemic social change. An end to vulture capitalism which has caused most of the problems associated with extreme income inequity.

Jun 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

Nancy O'Brien Simpson , says: Show Comment June 1, 2020 at 2:09 pm GMT

@mark green It is interesting how both sides think they know the other side. Liberals think that Deplorables are redneck Nascar people with zero education. Rightists think the left are deluded commie pinkos, radical queers and pink pussy hatted idiots.

To help with your education I have protested the death of George Floyd in Cincinnati for two days. The protests were mostly young persons and half were white. About two thousand were in our park yesterday to hear speeches. The speeches were about systemic social change. An end to vulture capitalism which has caused most of the problems associated with extreme income inequity.

Also, an end to the endless insane wars fought for profit and American hegemony in places we do not belong. No one is horrified at the violence, we are surprised it did not begin sooner. Desperate people act in desperate ways. The system needs to change.

[Jun 01, 2020] Class struggle and the reaction of the neoliberal society to riots in the USA

Notable quotes:
"... It's also true that the oligarchy will continue to preserve the system it's created in the U.S. through all available means, using its militarized police forces as its loyal street level enforcers. Change would happen very quickly if enough police turned and join with the "mobs". ..."
Jun 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

by lizard

hauled from a comment

I think this relevant to how fractured the discourse is. it's a repost from my litter watering hole.

I know it's going to be difficult to accept what I'm about to say because people get very invested in their chosen narratives, but it's important that you at least be exposed to the notion that it's all true.

It's true that now is the time to realize what's at stake, but instead of acting collectively for our mutual benefit, the cognitive challenge of accepting that all these things can be true at the same time will keep us tied to one of these things to the exclusion of all the others.

It's hard work, I know. But I have faith in you.

Posted by b on June 1, 2020 at 16:08 UTC | Permalink

this analysis sees and describes what's occurring within the Outlaw US Empire, more than validating Cornel West's assessment, except it misses the major component--Class--while seeing lizard's list:

"As the world watches the US being confronted with massive riots, looting, chaos and heightened violence, US officials, instead of reflecting on the systematic problems in their society that led to such a crisis, have returned to their old 'blame game' against left-wingers, 'fake news' media and 'external forces....'

"[O]bservers see a weak, irresponsible and incompetent leadership navigating the country into a completely opposite direction, with all-out efforts to deflect public attention from its own failure.

"Mass protests erupted in a growing numbers of cities in the US over the weekend, and at least 40 cities have imposed curfews, while the National Guard has been activated in 14 states and Washington DC, according to US media reports ... [P]rotests across the country continued into a sixth straight night.

"More Americans have slammed the US president for inciting hatred and racism, and US officials, who turn a blind eye to the deep-seated issues in American society, including racial injustice, economic woes and the coronavirus pandemic, began shifting the blame to the former US president, extremists, and China for inflaming the social unrests."

Blaming Chinese, Russians and/or Martians isn't going to help Trump. Without doing a thing, Biden has risen to a lead of 8-10% in the most recent polling. Trumps many mistakes have dug him a hole that now seems to be collapsing in upon him. He's cursed worse than Midas as everything he attempts turns out a big negative and only worsens the situation.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 1 2020 17:14 utc | 15

It's also true that the oligarchy will continue to preserve the system it's created in the U.S. through all available means, using its militarized police forces as its loyal street level enforcers. Change would happen very quickly if enough police turned and join with the "mobs". Otherwise any positive change in the prevailing structure will be extremely incremental if at all, and will be resisted at every level until it collapses because there is nothing left worth to exploit.

Posted by: krypton | Jun 1 2020 17:24 utc | 18


Posted by: Noirette | Jun 1 2020 17:26 utc | 19

Imho the present protests, social 'unrest,' in the USA will just die out as usual, nothing will be accomplished - what are the politcal demands? zero.. - on to the next chapter of misery and oppression.

Posted by: Noirette | Jun 1 2020 17:26 utc | 19

Indeed, and there was no other goal by stirring up these protest to the public murder of Floyd in plain daylight, after decades of deideologization of the US masses by brainwashing through US education system, TV, Hollywood, and so on.

Provocate the poor masses to find no way than to emotionally revolt through a brute action broadcasted to the four corners of the US through the media, to then show the rightful protesters as disorganized anarchist riotters without any vison or idea ( with unestimable help by white supremacists and cops infiltrated, and even by rich blonde boys stealing surf boards as if there was no tomorrow...)so as to show the middle and upper classes that this will be the aspect of the country in case socialist policies would be put in practice. This is to appeal once again, and possibly the last one, to the greedy individualist allegevd "winner" to once more vote against its own interest, as after the elections all what would not be looted by the poor would be looted by the state. Then it will come the gnashing of teeth and regrets on not having suppoorted those poor people when they were being murdered in the streets.

But, may be, some would even be grateful of being quirurgically robed by the state ( thorugh their bank accounts and propieties value going down the hole...) instead of by these obviously majority of needed people....needed at least of respect....

Posted by: H.Schmatz | Jun 1 2020 17:42 utc | 20

"Antifa" only shows up and exists when it is needed, then magically disappears; same as Ali Queada and ISIS ...

This!

<> <> <> <> <>

Reposting my earlier comment on the Open Thread:

ZH reports that 6 people have died in the protests. Dozens of protesters and police have been injured. Tens of millions of dollars in property damage, police overtime, and cost of the likely spread of coronavirus ('second wave' now being blamed on the protesters).

All because the authorities will not appropriately charge the killers of George Floyd.

Instead, Trump and MSM turn the focus to "antifa". How convenient. MSM says nothing of the killing of 26-year old Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia weeks before and the attempted cover-up of his killing.

How many more have to die before the authorities act appropriately? How much more destruction and silent spread of coronavirus?

<> <> <> <> <>

The protesters say that a manslaughter charge against Chauvin is an injustice. Chauvin was a veteran officer who KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING when he remained on Floyd for more than 3 minutes after he had become non-responsive.

The protesters say that the other officers are accessories to murder because they did nothing to stop it.

Every reasonable person understands that the protesters have valid points. I would say that there's a consensus that Chauvin should be charged with Second-degree murder and the other officers charged as accessories. But the authorities drag their feet - while America burns.

!!

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jun 1 2020 17:44 utc | 21

Posted by: Lozion | Jun 1 2020 17:49 utc | 22

a)refrain from looting and that specifically the the small properties is a stupidity that will backfire quickly!
b) the demonstrations leaders must organize their own security
squads to prevent provocateurs from outside.
Fm these tasks the 1st one is rather difficult to reach, yes.The second one is much easier.

Posted by: augusto | Jun 1 2020 16:43 utc | 6

[May 29, 2020] It s not a civil war until the *other* civilians start shooting at the rioters

May 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard Steven Hack , May 29 2020 13:54 utc | 18

It's not a civil war until the *other* civilians start shooting at the rioters. At this point, it's just the usual police repression.

Now given that thousands of people who previously never owned a firearm have now acquired them - although it is unclear how many of them will be concealed carriers, given the variance in state laws - it's only a matter of time before some people start shooting. Like the Korean shop owners in LA notably did during the Rodney King riots IIRC.

But it won't be a civil war until a significant number of people on both sides are actually shooting.

There's a guy named Selco Begovic who survived the civil war in Bosnia. He writes articles for prepper Web sites and he has book out. He has vividly described conditions of life in a civil war. Most people in the US are not going to handle that sort of thing well. Try this one as it pertains to b's post.

How the SHTF in Bosnia: Selco Asks Americans, "Does this sound familiar?"

Trisha , May 29 2020 15:02 utc | 32

The true enemies of humanity are corporations, so the violence is not a "civil war", but revolt. Along those lines, it's not "looting" but sabotage. And the "police" are not peace-keepers but militarized enforcers.

It's a complete waste of time engaging in electoral "politics." Politicians are corporate whores doing their master's bidding, as are the "police."

Thanks b, for another incisive post.

Nemesiscalling , May 29 2020 16:07 utc | 44
Blacks occupy a disproportionate piece of those in poverty.

Poverty breeds a lot of different evils and many of them are self-defeating cycles.

... ... ...

karlof1 , May 29 2020 21:26 utc | 90
Just finished listening to the latest interview given by Michael Hudson , "Defining a Tyrant," whose focus is on the necessity of applying debt forgiveness to those residing within the Outlaw US Empire as the economic affects of COVID-19 will be much worse than we've already seen. Those who want to get to the current moment can begin listening at the 40 minute mark (yes, it's just audio). You'll need to note that the unemployment numbers as I've been writing for awhile now are greatly understated, although the host Gary Null does allude to that reality as NYC itself is emptying out--imagine Wall Street sitting in the middle of a ghost metropolis. As you'll learn, Trump's MAGA Mantra is 100% hollow without enacting a wide ranging debt write-off--even if factories could be put back into business, the Outlaw US Empire's economy would still remain very uncompetitive because of the issue of debt service and privatized health care--issues I've written about before.

And so the main topic: Civil War. Or, is it? Reality demands it be named Class War, for that's what it is in reality. Hudson maps out how its done and by whom while naming the abettors. The Popular Forces number 280 million, not including those too young/old/infirm to bear arms. The Forces of Reaction minus the paid forces of coercion number well under 100,000. Even adding in police and military, it's still 280 million to perhaps 10 million. And even if only half of the 280 million stand up, that's 140 million. The rallying cry ought to be It's better to die standing up for your rights versus groveling on your knees. Too bad all of the above's too large for one Tweet.

willie , May 29 2020 21:31 utc | 91
The way they provoked the violence on smashing shop windows with forehammer is exactly what was witnessed inParis when apparent "black block" types did the same and then got back in their policevan.
I note that in France Riot police is clad in robocop armour and that this armour is a weapon in itself,it deshumanizes the man inside to himself,and to others.A strike of his arm is much more powerful than if he were dressed as your american cop on patrol,probably they give them steroid or something to be able to move rapidly with all the weight.They must feel like the Hulk!

Now it would be a sign of peaceful government if just any political party would make a ban on those outfits.

vinnieoh , May 29 2020 21:51 utc | 93
So the medical examiner concluded that there was no evidence of choking or suffocation, and instead was the result of his "restraint" exacerbating underlying conditions, and suggesting there was the possibility of intoxication or drugs, which is the basis for the pre-determination that Chauvin will only be charged with 3rd degree murder, which of course they'll try to whittle down to manslaughter (the coincidental charge.)

Let me see if I've got this straight: a man that is being restrained by the neck, who eventually dies from no other action, who repeatedly pleads that "I can't breath," who onlookers see and record that the man can not in fact breath, and the medical examiner finds no evidence of choking or strangulation.

Further, Officer Chauvin, in close physical contact with the eventual corpse of his victim, must surely have felt the life ebbing from George Floyd. No way no how this mother fucker gets charged with anything other than 1st degree murder. His accomplices get charged with accessory to 1st degree murder.

Dr Wellington Yueh , May 29 2020 21:59 utc | 97
Note to peaceful protestors: CAPTURE THE PROVOCATEUR!!!!!

If you see somebody doing this shit, don't wag your finger at him, get that fucker and firmly-but-peacefully eject him from the crowd.

CitizenX , May 29 2020 22:10 utc | 102
Do yourself a favor and read-

"War is a Racket" -Smedley Butler 1933
"Beyond Vietnam - Time to Break the Silence" -MLK 1967
"Art Truth and Politics" -Harold Pinter 2005

What has changed in 100 yrs of uSSa Empire? Foreign policy? Domestic policy?
Economic policy? All have become worse.

The u$$a Regime lies, cheats, steals, rapes, murders, tortures, overthrows, bombs,
invades, destroys, and loots with impunity Global wide.
How a citizen of this Rogue nation can feel good about that is beyond hypocrisy.

This Regime and the humans behind this sickening system must be replaced.
The Military Surveilance Police state must end. The Humans behind this system must be replaced
by any means necessary. Both the safety of the world and domestically rely on their removal.

When finished "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" and coming to terms with the truly Evil nature of the human beings operating and supporting this system- perhaps you will becomea full human being. Get Up Stand Up.

The difference between ignorance and delusions are substantial.
Ignorance being the lack of knowledge. Delusion being the presence of false
knowledge. Where do you stand?

I don't need protection from the police.
But We ALL need protection FROM the police state.
Will you fight to defend yourself, your family, your neighbor or fellow human being
against a cruel vile corrupt system? Selfishness and greed are no excuse for complacency.
What is worth defending- your property or your virtues?

I have long been disgusted by the u$$a regimes domestic and foreign policies. Which means I have long been disgusted by my fellow citizens (human beings) which support and operate this vile system.

Revolution-
Complacency and passive complicit citizens Or values, humaneness and justice?

Where do you stand? When do you stand for a meaningful life of society?

lysias , May 29 2020 22:24 utc | 106
The white working and lower middle classes will not support violent rioting by blacks over a black issue. This is not a way to start a revolution.

What's more, the latest reporting I read in the Washington Post is that Floyd initially resisted arrest. The early reporting that he did not resist arrest was apparently incorrect.

Moreover, the medical evidence suggests that he died not from asphyxiation or a broken neck, but because of comorbidities.

Floyd had a lengthy criminal record.

If you want a revolution in the U.S., wait a month or two until there are mass evictions.

H.Schmatz , May 29 2020 22:30 utc | 108
It seems that the revolution will not happen after all, just has been declared curfew...

This is a warning to anybody who would dare to revolt against the coming misery conditions of life while the oligarchs continue enriching themselves and looting every penny available.

This is a secondary gain from the pandemic, as we were accustomed to multiple declared state of alarm throughout the world, they thinks that going a step further would not cause any shock....

There have been equally violent revolts in France and Chile continuously during the past year, and in France again in the banlieus, and then curfew was not declared...

This is the land of the free....There you have your fascist state turning on yourselves...
When they came for the Venezuelans, seized their assets and embassies, I did nothing; when they came for the Iranians and murdered Soleimani, I said nothing; when they came for the communists in the Odessa House of Unions, I did not move a finger; when they slaughtered people at the four cardinal points of the world, I did continue living my "American Dream" as if the thing would not go with me...until I did awaken to find myself in the same nightmare....

https://twitter.com/edukabak/status/1266055032883023872/photo/1

Do you think that were not for the riots of the last nights, Chauvin would had been detained and charged?

Richard Steven Hack , May 29 2020 22:50 utc | 112
I've suggested in the past that civil war was unlikely in the US because that would requires a significant percentage of the electorate to actually take sides and shoot someone - and most of the population is so anti-gun these days that such a scenario was unlikely, especially over political issues that aren't usually considered as *directly* adversely affecting most of the population, at least in their minds. It would also require some direct organization on both sides and I don't see anyone capable of that on the national scene.

What I can easily see happening, however, is the sort of multi-city, large-scale rioting that occurred in the Sixties and in other parts of the world, leading to a declaration of martial law in at least some, possibly many, larger cities, if not nation-wide (a lot of rural areas would likely not be affected.) Economic issues and issues of social repression are usually the causes of large-scale violence historically in most countries. Most "political" issues usually boil down to either ethnic or economic or repression issues.

The US doesn't have really that much ethnic issues, except in the Southwest over Latino immigration. The US has racial, economic and repression issues, however. Most of the time they just simmer, with local limited outbreaks of violence. But in cases of blatant repression, or under severe economic pressure, they can explode into wider-scale violence.

And we've got both on the horizon. The impact of the pandemic (and the government's clueless response, thanks to Trump and previous Presidents) on the economy is likely to produce extreme economic pressure, especially on the middle class and the poor. Adding the extreme militarization of the US police over the last several decades, and this is a recipe for large-scale violence that continues for more than a few days or a week. Once police over-reaction and the appearance of the National Guard to control rioting results in the sort of deaths like in the well-known Kent State incident, then like in Ukraine we could start to see cops and National Guard fatalities from snipers. Next we could see things like the 1985 Philadelphia police bombing of the MOVE headquarters and the use of armed drones (Connecticut has a law banning armed drones - but not for police.) The next step beyond that is curfew, and the next step beyond that is martial law.

The next step beyond that is not civil war - it's explicit fascism. And that ends in revolution - which then usually recycles into either more fascism or "modified: fascism (see France in the 1800's.)

Bottom line: It's not going to get better. One of the many things preppers have been warning against is national repression. They warned against natural disasters like hurricanes and no one listened until Katrina. They warned against pandemics and no one listened - until today. They've been warning against national repression - like the Selco article I linked to. Better listen this time.

The US government has been preparing for some time:
Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

Maybe you should: How To Prepare for Civil Unrest: 30 Steps You Can Take Now

[May 23, 2020] Coronavirus had shown Brezhnev socialism and the US neoliberalism are never as far apart as people imagined

Highly recommended!
May 23, 2020 | discussion.theguardian.com

Comment edited for clarity

Bolsheviks put ideology above and before the people needs; Neoliberals put capital above people. Neoliberals are the next-worst thing after Boslheviks (although nobody can match Bolsheviks as for excesses including Stalin terror) .

That's why both now in the USA and in the USSR before the dissolution we have a lot of "death of despair" That said, why would anybody trust neolibral pols ?

twiglette , 11 Apr 2019 05:13

Coronavirus had shown Brezhnev socialism and the US neoliberalism were never as far apart as people imagined. Two sides of a coin. A theological dispute.

[May 23, 2020] Who are serfs

Money quote: ""Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd." -- that's definition of a serf -- a neoliberal serf
I feel a lot of people just use the term neoliberalism as a term of a specific abuse of labor via debt slavery. .
May 23, 2020 | discussion.theguardian.com

TenTribesofTexas , 11 Apr 2019 01:15

2 simple points that epitomize neo liberalism.

1. Hayek's book 'The Road to Serfdom' uses an erroneous metaphor. He argues that if we allow gov regulation, services and spending to continue then we will end up serfs. However, serfs are basically the indentured or slave labourers of private citizens and landowners not of the state. Only in a system of private capital can there be serfs. Neo liberalism creates serfs not a public system.

2. According to Hayek all regulation on business should be eliminated and only labour should be regulated to make it cheap and contain it so that private investors can have their returns guaranteed. Hence the purpose of the state is to pass laws to suppress workers.

These two things illustrate neo-liberalism. Deception and repression of labour.

marshwren , 10 Apr 2019 22:29
As a matter of semantics, neo-liberalism delivered on the promise of freedom...for capitalists to be free of ethical accountability, social responsibility, and government regulation and taxes. And people can't understand why i'm a socialist.

[May 23, 2020] Neoliberalism promised freedom instead it delivers stifling control by George Monbiot

Highly recommended!
From comments: " neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives. Also, the work of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation."
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
"... The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with nationhood. ..."
Apr 10, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

Thousands of people march through London to protest against underfunding and privatisation of the NHS. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Images M y life was saved last year by the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure to remove a cancer from my body . Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from the floor. I've just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff had objected to a decision by the National Health Service to privatise the hospital's cancer scanning . They complained that the scanners the private company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital's own machines. Privatisation, they said, would put patients at risk. In response, as the Guardian revealed last week , NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel if its staff continued to criticise the decision.

The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech, promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.

Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence.

Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In his book Bureaucracy , published in 1944, he argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised – confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be reduced to cogs "in a vast bureaucratic machine", deprived of initiative and free will.

By contrast, those who labour within an "unhampered capitalist system" are "free men", whose liberty is guaranteed by "an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote". He forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And those votes become a source of power.

His ideas, alongside the writings of Friedrich Hayek , Milton Friedman and other neoliberal thinkers, have been applied in this country by Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Theresa May and, to an alarming extent, Tony Blair. All of those have attempted to privatise or marketise public services in the name of freedom and efficiency, but they keep hitting the same snag: democracy. People want essential services to remain public, and they are right to do so.

If you hand public services to private companies, either you create a private monopoly, which can use its dominance to extract wealth and shape the system to serve its own needs – or you introduce competition, creating an incoherent, fragmented service characterised by the institutional failure you can see every day on our railways. We're not idiots, even if we are treated as such. We know what the profit motive does to public services.

So successive governments decided that if they could not privatise our core services outright, they would subject them to "market discipline". Von Mises repeatedly warned against this approach. "No reform could transform a public office into a sort of private enterprise," he cautioned. The value of public administration "cannot be expressed in terms of money". "Government efficiency and industrial efficiency are entirely different things."

"Intellectual work cannot be measured and valued by mechanical devices." "You cannot 'measure' a doctor according to the time he employs in examining one case." They ignored his warnings.

Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control.

Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself.

Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test , depriving children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics . Universities urge their researchers to write quick and superficial papers , instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores under the research excellence framework.

As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania claims to address.

New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the public sector. Amazon has patented a wristband that can track workers' movements and detect the slightest deviation from protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples' keystrokes, language, moods and tone of voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the micro-chipping of their staff . As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out , neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. "Everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise."

The freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital , gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no argument or complaint.

Attempts to resist are met by ever more extreme methods, such as the threatened lawsuit at the Churchill Hospital. Such instruments of control crush autonomy and creativity. It is true that the Soviet bureaucracy von Mises rightly denounced reduced its workers to subjugated drones. But the system his disciples have created is heading the same way.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Pinkie123 , 12 Apr 2019 03:23

The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to legitimise itself.

Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt.

The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with nationhood.

A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of democracy. The final restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no separate market and state, just a totalitarian market state.

glisson , 12 Apr 2019 00:10
This is the best piece of writing on neoliberalism I have ever seen. Look, 'what is in general good and probably most importantly what is in the future good'. Why are we collectively not viewing everything that way? Surely those thoughts should drive us all?
economicalternative -> Pinkie123 , 11 Apr 2019 21:33
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate from 'the market'?
economicalternative -> ADamnSmith2016 , 11 Apr 2019 21:01
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing. Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping its implementation.
economicalternative , 11 Apr 2019 20:42
Finally. A writer who can talk about neoliberalism as NOT being a retro version of classical laissez faire liberalism. It is about imposing "The Market" as the sole arbiter of Truth on us all.
Only the 'Market' knows what is true in life - no need for 'democracy' or 'education'. Neoliberals believe - unlike classical liberals with their view of people as rational individuals acting in their own self-interest - people are inherently 'unreliable', stupid. Only entrepreneurs - those close to the market - can know 'the truth' about anything. To succeed we all need to take our cues in life from what the market tells us. Neoliberalism is not about a 'small state'. The state is repurposed to impose the 'all knowing' market on everyone and everything. That is neoliberalism's political project. It is ultimately not about 'economics'.
Pinkie123 , 11 Apr 2019 13:27
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left (Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives. Also, the work of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.


Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices, they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know there would be socialism. This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is, neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t totalitarianism. Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical (market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are measured, with absurd results.

It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.

However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes that Hayek railed against.

manolito22 -> MrJoe , 11 Apr 2019 08:14
Nationalised rail in the UK was under-funded and 'set up to fail' in its latter phase to make privatisation seem like an attractive prospect. I have travelled by train under both nationalisation and privatisation and the latter has been an unmitigated disaster in my experience. Under privatisation, public services are run for the benefit of shareholders and CEO's, rather than customers and citizens and under the opaque shroud of undemocratic 'commercial confidentiality'.
Galluses , 11 Apr 2019 07:26
What has been very noticeable about the development of bureaucracy in the public and private spheres over the last 40 years (since Thatcher govt of 79) has been the way systems are designed now to place responsibility and culpability on the workers delivering the services - Teachers, Nurses, social workers, etc. While those making the policies, passing the laws, overseeing the regulations- viz. the people 'at the top', now no longer take the rap when something goes wrong- they may be the Captain of their particular ship, but the responsibility now rests with the man sweeping the decks. Instead they are covered by tying up in knots those teachers etc. having to fill in endless check lists and reports, which have as much use as clicking 'yes' one has understood those long legal terms provided by software companies.... yet are legally binding. So how the hell do we get out of this mess? By us as individuals uniting through unions or whatever and saying NO. No to your dumb educational directives, No to your cruel welfare policies, No to your stupid NHS mismanagement.... there would be a lot of No's but eventually we could say collectively 'Yes I did the right thing'.
fairshares -> rjb04tony , 11 Apr 2019 07:17
'The left wing dialogue about neoliberalism used to be that it was the Wild West and that anything goes. Now apparently it's a machine of mass control.'

It is the Wild West and anything goes for the corporate entities, and a machine of control of the masses. Hence the wish of neoliberals to remove legislation that protects workers and consumers.

[May 21, 2020] Covid-19 Straw Breaks Free Trade Camel's Back

Notable quotes:
"... After claiming that "economists have argued for centuries that trade is good for the economy as a whole", Goldberg has also noted that "trade generates winners and losers", with many losing out, and urges acknowledging "the evidence rather than trying to discredit it, as some do." Following Samuelson and others, she recommends compensating those negatively effected by trade liberalization, claiming "sufficient gains generated by open trade that the winners can compensate the losers and still be better off" without indicating how this is to be done fairly. ..."
"... "Free" trade means removing regulations and tariffs. As Michael Hudson reminds us, in Classical economics, it used to mean free of the unproductive burdens of the rentiers. ..."
"... There's a growing realisation on our continent that outsiders aren't going to lead us to the promised land. ..."
"... This redistribution never happens, the rich get richer in a role reversal of "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Any attempt to have the rich share the hamburger is greeted with a "not now!" and a assurance that if the rich stop continuously getting richer at this particular point in time then everything will collapse. ..."
"... The best understanding of what is going on in Africa I got from Jared Diamond – book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". And for background – "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Global climate heating is going to destroy Africa, already is. The usual story, no water, no forests, too much heat and humidity. It's a terrible reckoning. And largely not of their making. ..."
May 20, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was Assistant Director-General for Economic and Social Development, Food and Agriculture Organization, and who received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007. Originally published by Inter Press Service

Economic growth is supposed to be the tide that lifts all boats. According to the conventional wisdom until recently, growth in China, India and East Asian countries took off thanks to opening up to international trade and investment.

Such growth is said to have greatly reduced poverty despite growing inequality in both sub-continental economies and many other countries. Other developing countries have been urged to do the same, i.e., liberalize trade and attract foreign investments.

Doha Round 'Dead in Water'

However, multilateral trade negotiations under World Trade Organization (WTO) auspices have gone nowhere since the late 1990s, even with the so-called Doha Development Round begun in 2001 as developing countries rallied to support the US after 9/11.

After the North continued to push their interests despite their ostensible commitment to a developmental outcome, the Obama administration was never interested in completing the Round, and undermined the WTO's functioning, e.g., its dispute settlement arrangements, even before Trump was elected.

To be sure, the Doha Round proposals were hardly 'developmental' by any standards, with most developing countries barely benefitting, if not actually worse off following the measures envisaged, even according to World Bank and other studies.

GVC miracle?

According to the World Bank's annual flagship World Development Report (WDR) 2020 on Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains , GVCs have been mainly responsible for the growth of international trade for two decades from the 1990s.

GVCs now account for almost half of all cross-border commerce due to 'multiple counting', as products cross more borders than ever. Firms' creative book-keeping may also overstate actual value added in some tax jurisdictions to minimize overall tax liability.

WDR 2020 claims that GVCs have thus accelerated economic development and even convergence between North and South as fast-growing poor countries have grown more rapidly, closing the economic gap with rich countries.

Automation, innovative management, e.g., 'just-in-time' (JIT), outsourcing, offshoring and logistics have dramatically transformed production . Labour processes are subject to greater surveillance, while piecework at home means self-policing and use of unpaid household labour.

WDR 2020 Out of Touch

WDR 2020 presumes trends that no longer exist. Trade expansion has been sluggish for more than a decade, at least since the 2008 global financial crisis when the G20 of the world's largest economies and others adopted protective measures in response.

GVC growth has slowed since, as economies of the North insisted on trade liberalization for the South, while abandoning their own earlier commitments as the varied consequences of economic globalization fostered reactionary jingoist populist backlashes.

Meanwhile, new technologies involving mechanization, automation and other digital applications have further reduced overall demand for labour even as jobs were 'off-shored'. Trump-initiated trade policies and conflicts have pressured US and other transnational corporations to 'on-shore' jobs after decades of 'off-shoring' .

Nonetheless, WDR 2020 urges developing countries to bank on GVCs for growth and better jobs. Success of this strategy depends crucially on developed countries encouraging 'offshoring', a policy hardly evident for well over a decade!

As the last World Bank chief economist , albeit for barely 15 months, Yale Professor Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg recently agreed , "the world is retreating from globalization". "Protectionism is on the rise -- industrialized countries are less open to imports from developing countries. In addition, there is by now a lot of competition".

The Covid-19 crisis has further encouraged 'on-shoring' and 'chain shortening', especially for food, medical products and energy. Although the Japanese and other governments have announced such policies, ostensibly for 'national security' and other such reasons, Goldberg has nonetheless reiterated the case for GVCs in Covid-19's wake .

Trade Does Not Lift All Boats

After claiming that "economists have argued for centuries that trade is good for the economy as a whole", Goldberg has also noted that "trade generates winners and losers", with many losing out, and urges acknowledging "the evidence rather than trying to discredit it, as some do." Following Samuelson and others, she recommends compensating those negatively effected by trade liberalization, claiming "sufficient gains generated by open trade that the winners can compensate the losers and still be better off" without indicating how this is to be done fairly.

Compensation and redistribution require transfers which are typically difficult to negotiate and deliver at low cost. Tellingly, like others, she makes no mention of international transfers, especially for fairly redistributing the unequal gains from trade among trading partners.

Interestingly, she also observes, "There are plenty of examples, especially in African countries, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few even when the tide rises, only very few boats rise. Growth doesn't trickle down and doesn't improve the lot of the poor."

Unlikely Pan-Africanist

After decades of World Bank promotion of the 'East Asian miracle' for emulation by other developing countries, especially in Africa, Greek-born American Goldberg insists that what worked for growth and poverty reduction in China will not work in Africa today.

Echoing long time Bank critics, she argues, "If trade with rich countries is no longer the engine of growth, it will be more important than ever to rely on domestic resources to generate growth that does trickle down and translates to poverty reduction."

Instead, as if supporting some contemporary pan-Africanists, she argues, "Africa needs to rely on itself more than ever. The idea that export-led industrialization as it happened in China or East Asia is going to lead growth in Africa becomes less and less plausible".

She argues that "the African market is a very large market with incredible potential. It has not been developed yet. So, regional integration might be one path forward. Rather than opting for global integration, which may be very hard to achieve these days when countries are retreating from multilateralism, it might be more feasible to push for regional trade agreements and create bigger regional markets for countries' goods and services".

Acknowledging "We are still a very long way from there because most countries are averse to this idea -- they see their neighbors as competitors rather than countries they can cooperate with", not seeming to recognize the historical role of the Bank and mainstream trade economists in promoting the 'free trade illusion' and discrediting pan-Africanism.

chuck roast , May 20, 2020 at 9:01 am

hear him, and hear him
Econospeak at its best. Filled with cliches and "on the one hand(s)." This articles perfectly describes why social distancing can ultimately be a boon to mankind. This fellow Sundaram can self isolate at home and still get a paycheck. He can begin puttering about in his garden and start growing his own food. Eventually, he will find this activity to be far more rewarding than cogitating on the various cost and benefits of the international value chains, and will be spending more and more time in his garden. UBI will kick in. He will decide to disengage from "globalization" and being a public nuisance and adopt this new, socially beneficial lifestyle permanently. By doing "piecework at home" he will add to real gross domestic product, and he, the economy and the rest of the planet will be immeasurably improved.

The Historian , May 20, 2020 at 10:49 am

Good analysis. But part of my confusion with this article started with the headline: "Covid-19 Straw Breaks Free Trade Camel's Back"

What free trade? Nothing in the article discusses free trade and I doubt that there has ever been free trade for a very long time. Is this more Econospeak?

I do agree with the author that the way trading is done now, however he defines it, has not risen all boats.

Amfortas the hippie , May 20, 2020 at 1:33 pm

Regarding the existence of "Free Trade"
I watched this in real time when Nafta passed(i was agin it, and voted for Perot accordingly, both times)
I knew a middle class mexican american guy father of a friend of mine. His business, pre-Nafta, was going to his extended familia's ranch/farm(100 acres) in Tamaulipas, and returning with fruits and veggies and vanilla and a whole bunch of "junk" like that metal yard art and terra cotta birdbaths and such.
had a dually pickup and a 20 foot trailer.
Post Nafta, this was suddenly illegal he wasn't part of the Club, and went to work as a cook along side me and his son.
since that time, I've heard essentially the same story from numerous mexican american folks who used to do similar stuff.
nafta killed that small time cross border trade and the only "Freedom" involved was for the Maquiladora-owners, US Welfare Corn Corporations and the Cartels.
anecdata, of course, but still
if "they" were really for "free trade", they'd allow me to legally sell a frelling egg or tomato or grow some weed, for that matter(high demand, low quality unstable supply).

Susan the other , May 20, 2020 at 2:24 pm

I voted for ross perot too. I even went across the street and talked to my neighbors – the last time I did that – as they always say, it's like staring into the eyes of a chicken – oh so "liberal" at the time – To them Ross Perot was just an insufferable hick. But I loved the guy. And he was right. I think he lived in the same neighborhood as little George in Dallas – but Ross didn't want us to spread our resources too thin whereas little George saw MidEast oil as our best security. So now that that has blown up, it's regionalism v. globalism. It's a brake on turbo trade. It's not a fix. We don't want to be lulled into thinking we've achieved something like a trade balance and an environmental balance – that will take a century – and only if we stop fibbing to ourselves.

Bsoder , May 20, 2020 at 3:28 pm

I worked for Ross, for a while post GM (1987). I liked him very much, although we fought quite a bit. Mostly, I agreed with his public policy outlook, when I didn't and it came up I told him. He didn't surround himself with the wights that the Orange Menace does. Striking -he was very loyal to people in his orbit. NAFTA had protections for labor, unions, & the environment they just never were enforced. There must be some 'law' that says anything neoliberal turns into a racket over time, so it was with NAFTA.

Left in Wisconsin , May 20, 2020 at 4:53 pm

The NAFTA protections for workers were just hand waves. Lance Compa, who is at Cornell, ran the US office trying to get the labor provisions (weak as they were) enforced. As I recall, they were never able to bring even a single case forward.

Adam Eran , May 20, 2020 at 2:32 pm

"Free" trade means removing regulations and tariffs. As Michael Hudson reminds us, in Classical economics, it used to mean free of the unproductive burdens of the rentiers.

As for NAFTA, one might figure shipping a bunch of subsidized Iowa corn down to Mexico would impair the income of Mexican farmers.. The NAFTA treaty compensates the big ones.

Corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world. The little (uncompensated by NAFTA) Mexican farmers were only keeping the disease resistance and diversity of the corn genome alive with the varieties they grew .But they weren't making any money for Monsanto So they were hung out to dry and migration to "Gringolandia" increased dramatically not all of it "legal."

In the wake of NAFTA, not only did Mexico experience capital flight (remember the Clinton administration's $20 billion bank bailout?), Mexico's real median income declined 34%. (Source: Ravi Batra's Greenspan's Fraud ).

One has to go back to the Great Depression to find that kind of decline in the U.S. Of course that provoked no great migration Oh wait! The Okies!

Imagine the Okies exiting the dust bowl to go to California where they would be caged, separated from their families, and ultimately shipped back to Oklahoma, where they would either be very miserable or even starve. That's what we've been doing to the Mexican refugees U.S. actions created never mind the fact that U.S. military and political attacks on its southern neighbors have been going on for literally centuries. (Between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. is responsible for 41 changes of government south of its borders).

Incidentally, the Harvard-educated neoliberal, Carlos Salinas Gotari, the Mexican president who signed NAFTA, was so despised he had to spend at least the initial years of his retirement in Ireland.

It's not for nothing that the guys who stand up to the Yanquis (Castro!) are heroes in the South.

taunger , May 20, 2020 at 6:47 am

It's amazing how economists can focus solely on economic activity, and the thought that something like climate change or politics might make their pronouncements useless isn't even rebutted.

John Wright , May 20, 2020 at 11:54 am

This reference: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-co2-isnt-falling-more-during-a-global-lockdown/

Has that one of the Covid-19 lockdown effects has been a fall in expected incremental CO2 added to the atmosphere in 2020 relative to 2019:

"Forecasters expect emissions to fall more than 5% in 2020, the greatest annual reduction on record. But it's still short of the 7.6% decline that scientists say is needed every year over the next decade to stop global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.*.

Yes, the earth's climate is one of the uncompensated losers of the world's current system of economic growth.

Economists seem to be forever optimizing for the GDP measure, while giving lip service to "uncompensated losers" such as workers and the earth's climate.

TomDority , May 20, 2020 at 8:16 am

Me, being a cynic and all – I thought the way trade worked in the real world (not the one described by well paid economists) was a multi step process

1) target developing country by undermining their core farming, self sustaining activity and export industries through cheap importation of grains and crops and other goods – thus making it impossible for locals to survive through their own industry

2) simultaneous loans (investment) to the country (economic aid) and corruption of political leaders designed to enable step three

3) Whence said country is indebted – force country to export whatever (mineral) wealth onto a glutted market to pay back its debts – this is easily done as the labor component is ripe for the picking/ fleecing

4) crush the country into economic austerity for as long as it takes to enslave its citizens and grab everything of value from the country

5) pretend that the IMF etc did such a great job – but the countries people (victims) or government did not do enough and must take care of themselves better

The Rev Kev , May 20, 2020 at 9:58 am

I think that you covered the Standard Operation Procedure here in better detail than I could. I would only add to point 2) that the bankers will go to these local leaders and show them how to hide their money and help them set up accounts in a place like the Caymans as part of the service.

And if that economist wants to find where all of Africa's wealth is going, he might want to start in the City of London and New York first.

David , May 20, 2020 at 8:43 am

I share the general sense of confusion. I'm not quite sure what the point of this essay is. It's full of wild generalisations like:
"According to the conventional wisdom until recently, growth in China, India and East Asian countries took off thanks to opening up to international trade and investment."
I don't think that's ever been conventional wisdom for Japan, Korea and China, for example, whose economies were (and in part still are) highly protected. Industrialisation in those countries was not "export-led".
It also confuses "trade" in the old sense, of countries importing things they couldn't produce and exporting what they could, with "trade" in the new sense of moving stuff around the world largely for financial reasons. Trade in the classic sense may have benefited the country as a whole (though this is debatable) but trade in the current sense was never intended to. Likewise I hadn't heard that globalisation had fostered a "jingoist backlash" – jingoism after all means aggressive calls for war. But then the whole article is clumsily written and badly constructed.
And the idea that Africa should rely on itself is fair enough, but runs counter to every piece of advice given to Africa since independence: remember, the World Bank master plan was for African countries to grow cash-crops for export to generate cash for industrial development? We know how that worked out. And yes the African market has enormous potential but it's desperately lacking in infrastructure, which makes trade between eve adjacent nations desperately difficult. You need to fix that first.

Thuto , May 20, 2020 at 4:37 pm

There's a growing realisation on our continent that outsiders aren't going to lead us to the promised land. The obstacles to effective intra-african trade that you identify will have to be cleared before Africa's potential can be realised, and as an African I have to believe they will be, challenging as that will be.

The overthrow of Omar Al Bashir in Sudan has shown that people in Africa are agitating for real, lasting changing, liberation from the rule of corrupt leaders and true, not pseudo independence from the West and increasingly China as well.

Other leaders have taken notice of this, as have ordinary citizens across the continent. It will take time, ther'll probably be a few false starts, we'll wobble a bit but in the end I believe we'll get there.

a different chris , May 20, 2020 at 9:24 am

"trade generates winners and losers", with many losing out, and urges acknowledging "the evidence rather than trying to discredit it, as some do."

I don't known who "discredits" it.

What I see is that everybody important acknowledges it, but does squat about it. This redistribution never happens, the rich get richer in a role reversal of "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today". Any attempt to have the rich share the hamburger is greeted with a "not now!" and a assurance that if the rich stop continuously getting richer at this particular point in time then everything will collapse.

The poor, of course, ain't got until this mythical "Tuesday".

HotFlash , May 20, 2020 at 11:23 am

"the African market has enormous potential"

Indeed! Very few Africans have IoT sous-vide sticks yet, or Smart doorbells. I'll bet they are way behind on fast fashion, too. Vast market to sell them things no-one needs and that wreck the earth on credit . Just gotta get those roads built so Jeff can deliver stuff to them in 2 days.

Bsoder , May 20, 2020 at 3:39 pm

The best understanding of what is going on in Africa I got from Jared Diamond – book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". And for background – "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Global climate heating is going to destroy Africa, already is. The usual story, no water, no forests, too much heat and humidity. It's a terrible reckoning. And largely not of their making.

[May 21, 2020] How free trade actually works

May 21, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

TomDority , , May 20, 2020 at 8:16 am

Me, being a cynic and all – I thought the way trade worked in the real world (not the one described by well paid economists) was a multi step process

1) target developing country by undermining their core farming, self sustaining activity and export industries through cheap importation of grains and crops and other goods – thus making it impossible for locals to survive through their own industry

2) simultaneous loans (investment) to the country (economic aid) and corruption of political leaders designed to enable step three

3) Whence said country is indebted – force country to export whatever (mineral) wealth onto a glutted market to pay back its debts – this is easily done as the labor component is ripe for the picking/ fleecing

4) crush the country into economic austerity for as long as it takes to enslave its citizens and grab everything of value from the country

5) pretend that the IMF etc did such a great job – but the countries people (victims) or government did not do enough and must take care of themselves better

The Rev Kev , , May 20, 2020 at 9:58 am

I think that you covered the Standard Operation Procedure here in better detail than I could. I would only add to point 2) that the bankers will go to these local leaders and show them how to hide their money and help them set up accounts in a place like the Caymans as part of the service.

And if that economist wants to find where all of Africa's wealth is going, he might want to start in the City of London and New York first.

[May 15, 2020] The Illusion of 'Free Markets' and 'Free Trade' by George D. O'Neill

There is a cost and "True cost". The latter is often hidden and might higher the the cost.
Notable quotes:
"... The Price Mechanism Theory only works well when there is honest and accurate information to understand the true costs, but our leadership is corrupt and has not been honest with us. In order to protect both American interests and American citizens, it is important to develop mechanisms to fully understand the consequences of many of our policies and who is making them. Who ..."
May 15, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Our elites have been responding to incentives which are beneficial to their institutions, and China, but detrimental to America.

A shell of a piano in the lobby of the Lee Plaza Hotel. The decades-long decline of the U.S. automobile industry is acutely reflected in the urban decay of Detroit, the city lovingly referred to as Motor City. (Photo by Timothy Fadek/Corbis via Getty Images) George D. O'Neill Jr. We have come to a point in our nation's public discourse where there is a widespread realization that many of the economic policies pursued and promoted by our political, business and media elites have failed us in multiple ways. We have heard our trade policies called "Free Trade" and "Free Market", but those statements were often dishonest.

When crafting these agreements, our elites have been responding to incentives which are beneficial to their institutions but detrimental to the well-being of American citizens.

... ... ...

The same is true for manufacturing businesses. The closing of a factory has huge costs for a neighborhood: unemployed people. Not just those from the factory, but the people who work at companies which supply goods and services to that factory. The consequences of a factory closing cascades through the economy. The tax base for that neighborhood is also eroded, which reduces the community's ability to maintain and deliver essential services and support civic institutions.

We cannot just turn off a factory like a light switch and turn it back on at will when the Chinese decide to raise their prices at a later date.

None of this takes into account the quality of the goods that we receive. We have just become aware that more than 90% of our pharmaceutical antibiotics are manufactured in China. When you hear of the big drug recalls, keep in mind many of them are from China, which is famous for ubiquitous and flagrant corruption as well as a disregard for quality control. Do we really know if our antibiotics are safe?

Now, back to our leadership, which we have relied on to guide our nation. Their incentives often lead them to make choices which do not benefit the American people. The Chinese have famously made generous deals with a sitting vice-president's son and a Secretary of State's stepson that likely insured high level government silence about their predatory practices. The Chinese have purchased important media assets, such as the largest film distribution company in America and inked lucrative media deals with huge media companies to purchase silence about their predatory behavior. The same is true with many other industries.

... ... ...

The Price Mechanism Theory only works well when there is honest and accurate information to understand the true costs, but our leadership is corrupt and has not been honest with us. In order to protect both American interests and American citizens, it is important to develop mechanisms to fully understand the consequences of many of our policies and who is making them. Who is making the decisions is often just as important as what is being decided.

George D. O'Neill, Jr., an artist, is the founder of The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy and a board member of The American Ideas Institute, the parent of The American Conservative. Mr. O'Neill has been in the mining industry for more than four decades. He and his wife reside in Florida.

Kessler • 20 hours ago

Correct. The so called "free markets & trade" worked in conditions after WWII, when US goverment used it's military and political influence to set up favorable economic & trade conditions for US. It's an utopian vision, that has nothing to do with real world.
MPC • 19 hours ago • edited
It's important to recognize that it's not realistic to do all manufacturing in America, at least in the short term. We consume too much. Before the virus, we were already running on all cylinders as employment was concerned and have been for a few years.

There is a significant difference however in our trade dependencies being on China, versus Japan, Mexico, Vietnam, or India. The former is a geopolitical rival, the latter are not. In fact, laying groundwork to move more of our trade to the latter builds up China's regional rivals at the expense of China, and at comparatively less expense to us.

It's not healthy for a future multipolar world for such a capable power projector as China to be so disproportionately profiting from declining hegemon America.

The Coolie MPC • 10 hours ago • edited
If you think the hallowing of the US economy with it increasing wage inequalities, outsized wealth allocation to financial sectors, increasingly political divisions, etc. is because CHINA BAD, then you are no different than the other corporate profiteers who dug us in this hole in the first place. This is how the corporatists are trying to avoid blame for their fundamentalist policies over the past four decades. They lash out, "It's only the BAD Chinese, everything will be better if we just move it to Vietnam/Bangladesh/Ethiopia."
MPC The Coolie • 10 hours ago • edited
You ascribe things to me that have nothing to do with what I said. The Chinese are not bad, just a competitor, and China is not responsible for America's own choices.

You're just replacing one utopian thinking about free trade, with another about economic protectionism. The world doesn't fit neatly around ideological dogma.

Until you square America's overconsumption you have to tolerate trade deficits. You can make strategic choices about where they come from at least. Free traders were not honest about impacts on domestic industry. Domestic protectionism is not being honest about the fact that for it to succeed, consumption of imported goods, and some domestic, to free up capacity to import substitute, has to tank, without the prospect of enough domestic production happening to replace them, and certainly not at anything like the price levels that exist currently.

In the long run overconsumption should be attacked. Strategic, mutually beneficial trade relationships will still exist. In the short run we should be more careful about the source of trade deficits. Overconsumption will not be solved overnight. But that's not a neat campaign slogan.

The Coolie MPC • 8 hours ago
I don't disagree with the problems of an over-consumption reliant economy, which prefers we purchase new TVs every 3 years, smartphones every 2 years, and 3 new winter coats every season. But it's a huge fallacy to imagine that reallocating production to Vietnam or Bangladesh will reduce China's power. Who will be creating those factories? Sorry, Chinese investment. Where will the logistics chain need to connect? Sorry, all roads will lead to China - both for its 1.4 billion consumer and their ability to control the higher end of the manufacturing. When will they demand China's inclusion in a grouping like TPP? Sorry, within 1-2 years of signing that supposed "Keep China Out" agreement. Guess whose economies will be even more reliant on China? You guessed it, all those supposed U.S. allies who want no part in global decoupling.
Wally • 17 hours ago • edited
It was ok to let low margin manufacturing move offshore because Americans were going to move up the value chain. These other countries, like China, would develop their economy, lift a few billion people out of poverty, and transform themselves into beacons of freedom and democracy across the developing world. The globalists told us this over and over again. China (and India) would make our plastic junk and we would sell them financial products and services like credit default swaps and make a killing!

And that's how it worked out. The bankers made out. No one cared about the displaced factory workers because it was their own fault they weren't smart enough to become Wall Street masters of the universe. Buying American, we were told way back in the 80s by Saint Ronald Reagan was a scam to support corrupt unions and lazy management. How dare they demand, for example, that Japanese car makers locate here in the US. We should just let them import what they want and let Ford go bankrupt. Union busting was more important than anything else.

MPC Wally • 11 hours ago
What you want with trade is to keep it somewhat balanced, and watch employment. To continue the example Japan exports roughly twice to us what we export to them. Ideally that'd be more even, but who is going to make more products to export to Japan, or produce Japanese products here? You'll have to fight for workers already being employed elsewhere. And many on the right probably would not like the idea of more immigrants to help staff production, or to free up Americans to staff it.

America does suck up too many talented people into well paid jobs that do little to advance us, but certainly not enough to correct the trade imbalances of every country we trade with. Probably not even Japan whose imbalance is a tiny fraction of China's.

America's trade imbalances are a collaboration between foreign producers seeing opportunities, domestic elites seeing major profit, but most importantly Americans themselves whose consumption impulses are so, so lucrative. Americans cannot make all the stuff that Americans want right now. Enter immigrants. Enter outsourcing. Enter major trade deficits. People profit on the exchange, but this is a setup that America collectively has voted for with its wallet, over and over again.

kouroi MPC • 10 hours ago
Also America makes/made products that other people don't want. From 2 by 4 lumber in inches and feet, when the rest of the world is in metric system, to oversize fridges and pick-up trucks that do not fit in the European or Japanese size houses and roads.
Kent • 16 hours ago
"Deliver a good product at a price and quality acceptable to the customer."

LOL. Obviously a failed businessman. The purpose is to put your customer's money in your pocket. If your customer is making a profit off of your product, raise the price. If the customer balks and buys from a different vendor, buy all the vendors. Create a monopoly. Once you have a monopoly, stop paying whiney American workers who expect decent pay and respect, and have Chinese slaves make your product. The purpose of the "Free Market" is not about price. It's about maximizing shareholder value. It's not about creating good jobs, America or any of that other nostalgia from the pre-Free Market days.

It's about liberty. The liberty of the property and capital owning class to keep their wealth (their wealth is the same thing as your labor), in their hands and away from you and your stupid government's grubby, unwashed hands.

FND Kent • 15 hours ago
The ideal market conditions result in happy customers and profitable businesses. Its true that ideal market conditions often don't prevail when a monopoly is created. But what makes it even worse is when government enables those conglomerates to become even larger by making it impossible for small businesses to compete due to onerous regulations and gobbletygook tax loopholes gained by conglomerate lobbyists.

I believe the economic policies based on the dominant economic theory in Germany is the best approach for a solid, competitive economy. That theory is Ordo-liberalism, which allows government to make sure a proper legal environment for the economy exists to maintain a healthy level of competition through measures that adhere to market principles.

The Ordo-liberalists believe if the state does not take active measures to foster competition, firms with monopoly power will emerge, which will not only subvert the advantages offered by the market economy, but also possibly undermine good government, since strong economic power can be transformed into political power. We have seen this happen in the US and it is BIPARTISAN. In fact some of the worst examples of unholy alliances between corporations and government come from the Dem side of the aisle.

joeo • 14 hours ago
The open markets, open borders policy has been good for the elite but detrimental for the US. Millions of immigrants were let in as the jobs they could perform were outsourced to China and Asia in general. Consumer electronics,textiles,steel, appliances, automotive and manufacturing of all sorts were allowed to leave. Not everyone can be a coder, work on Wall Street, for the Government or Academia. This same elite is aghast at the rise of Trump, what else could anyone have reasonably expected?
Harry Huntington • 14 hours ago
The problem is Milton Friedman was wrong about central planning. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was written when communication systems were poor, so localized information was better. With modern data collection, "big data" analysis, AI and other such tools central planning exists and works. We call the winners in that planning world companies like Walmart and Amazon. We also know that central planning in the US worked with less than perfect data. The War Production Board in the US in WWII did allocate production of all those things necessary to manufacture Milton Friedman's needle (or more likely a cotter pin). There were imperfections but we let those run over into the consumer segment of goods. Flash forward to today, the "free market" is the myth used to convince average American to allow hedge funds, private equity, and companies like Bain Captial ship their jobs overseas. Especially as we move to robots, there is no reason to import any manufactured goods. Likewise, those pesky environmental rules we have? There is no reason we don't apply those rules to things people seek to sell in the US market--meaning we could make an importer prove goods were manufactured according to US standards. Health and safety standards are not sources of "comparative advantage" in free market theories.
kouroi Harry Huntington • 10 hours ago
And this is why the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Iranians, Japanese, Europeans, Koreans, don't want their economies run from Wall Street and carefully control the shares owned by outsiders.
Tradcon • 13 hours ago • edited
I think on the topic of "planning" its important to clarify. Some call any government intervention an example of "central planning" while others apply that term only to Soviet-style Gosplan. Either way the "Knowledge Problem", while true to an extent, is incomplete. The fact of the matter is we don't need to know everything about the market to make correct decisions regarding what economic goals we want to set, and there is a scale, a difference, between something like the American System and Gosplan. Julius Krein's article in the American Compass was excellent, I'll link it below. One need only look to the success of the East Asian Tigers or to the US from 1791-1965 (dates vary) to see the success of a healthy sort of developmentalist "planning". Not all planning has to be adverse to private business, the most successful types are done in conjunction with it. There will be imperfections whether the government is involved or not, the fact that imperfections will exist or that mistakes might be made is no excuse for inaction, especially when that inaction leads to the situation we're currently in regarding pharmaceuticals.

https://americancompass.org...

kouroi Tradcon • 10 hours ago
How about all the externalities that an unregulated free-market tends to forget?
Tradcon kouroi • 5 hours ago
Yes Krein goes into that. A market does not take into account national security.
kouroi Tradcon • 2 hours ago
Yes, interesting article. I liked how quickly in the article it started talking about risk and the important role government has in mitigating that risk.

What is also missing from this entire discussion about free markets, which is essential and it is eschewed or pooh-pooed or entirely not acknowledged by libertarians and conservatives alike (not that progressive / liberals talk about it), is what is the role of representative democracy in steering how economy (which is a means to an end, not an end to itself) should work, what is the role of government, and who's really the sovereign (We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.....).

Is the government by the people and for the people or it isn't? Are there proper mechanisms in place to oversee how well operations are conducted by government, according to approved budgets? Is government supposed to do forecasting and crystal balling solely by using think tank reports or should have internal professional and knowledgeable analysts doing this work (I swear on the constitution of the US to serve, etc., etc, etc.).

All this rabbit hole over which libertarians and conservatives starting with Reagan have been pooping on. Nixon nowadays, or Eisenhower wouldn't be accepted by Republicans, nor FDR by Democrats... And talking about free markets and democracy, it is puzzling to have just a duopoly entrenched in the marketplace of political ideas in the US. Everything else is literally killed.

HistoryProf • 12 hours ago
It's too easy to just blame corrupt elites and therefore let the system itself completely off the hook. Any system that allows for a small number of private entities to twist everything to their personal advantage is a system with major structural flaws. The essential core of the problem is that any system pursued too rigidly and ideologically will lead to short-sighted decisions that ultimately lead to perverse and absurd outcomes.Offshoring most of our manufacturing wasn't a corrupt decision made by a small cabal of villains. It was a logical, yet ultimately destructive, result of blind and unthinking pursuit of pure "free trade."

Imagine a society (like the U.S.) to be like an organism with a heart, lungs, brain, limbs, etc. Now imagine that each part of the body is told to maximize its own benefit without any concern for the organism as a whole.

Those in charge of the brain say "We function better with more blood flow, so let's block off blood flow to the arms and legs so that we get more. Great idea!" Now the organism's brain is doing great, but its arms and legs wither and die.

"We are benefiting from the increased blood flow too," says the lungs, "but the heart just isn't producing enough for us to really flourish." What if we outsource blood pumping to an external entity that promises us more volume? So now the heart dies and what is left of the organism is now hooked to an external machine to keep it alive.

"Why do we have to rely on an inefficient mouth and teeth to give us our source material?" chimes the stomach. "How about a feeding tube to give us cheaper and faster raw materials?" Etc etc etc.

On and on it goes with some parts doing great from their perspective, but with the overall organism being hollowed out and weakened.

The best type of economic system in a country is a mixed one that blends together capitalism with some degree of central thinking and planning (egads, heresy!) about how decisions could adversely affect the long term health of the country as a whole.

kouroi HistoryProf • 10 hours ago
Nice comparison. Are you letting us think and believe that one part of the body ends up thinking that is in fact totally independent and can leave all the rest wither and die? With deep psychopathic tendencies, that filters all the stimuli and the information received from the body, except its own?

No wonder revolutions happen...

Inn caritas • 12 hours ago
"Libertarianism" was never about liberty: it's just swapping the dictatorship of the state for the dictatorship of the market.
Egyptsteve Inn caritas • 9 hours ago
Libertarianism: Let me smoke my weed, have my gay sex, and don't make me pay any taxes.
L RNY • 11 hours ago
The communists had said that capitalism would sell the seeds of its own destruction. Our elites came up with free trade but chose to ignore that free trade was merely a facade to export jobs and import goods with them skimming the profit. They chose to ignore all the financial (and political) machinations like currency rigging, state subsidies, forced state sharing or ownership of technology when off shored to China, they choise to ignore prison labor and others. This isnt about free trade or free markets because there is no such thing. Every nation has a different social welfare system, medical system, tax system, copyright and patent system, system of legal bribery and payoff, etc and each is meant to tip the scales of free markets and free trade to their advantage (and in the case of China a technological and monopolistic and militaristic advantage). We are now at a point where the game and the cards have been revealed though the Democrats have been profiting for so long that they want to keep the game going with the Chinese and other foreign nations (its easy money to line their pockets and their campaign funds since they dont have to listen to their constituents diverse views...they just need to manage them and listen to Chinese demands). Id say the american citizenry is boiling mad and arent far away from boiling over but we shall see where it goes or if it goes anywhere. To date Trumps restrictions on immigration and his trade deals are better than the nonexistent policies of the democrats but they are will woefully catering to the elites and lacking in spine and substance to do as Trump promised.
kouroi L RNY • 10 hours ago
I think prison labour is more relevant and widespread in the US rather than China. China has all the political interest to provide work for all the free multitudes teaming in their cities and countryside, why to give that to prisoners?

Same as the story with the Uighur camps. Just seen recently a Reuters article on the Russian vessel arriving in Germany to finish laying down the NS2 pipeline, with satellite pictures, etc. Just a ship. However, there was no picture provided to the world to show the massive developments required to house 1 million people, not one, and I looked.

Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine to see statements that don't stand close scrutiny.

Mario Diana • 8 hours ago • edited
The Price Mechanism Theory only works well when there is honest and accurate information to understand the true costs [ ]

You're conflating the economic with the political. There is nothing wrong with Mises' work on prices and how they coordinate an advanced, widely distributed, division-of-labor economy. It works in the "macro" as well as the "micro" -- because that is an artificial distinction (something Mises could tell you about, too).

The fallacy is imagining that economic theory is the be-all-end-all. When people think that, they ignore political considerations and consequences, to the detriment of society at large. The bottom line is there is nothing wrong with free trade among free countries in a peaceful world. The political situation of the present world, however, demands a somewhat more modified approach. If these are the "true costs" you're talking about, fine. But you've expressed it in such a way as to muddy the waters of what is an honest and accurate economic theory.

Amicus Brevis Mario Diana • 2 hours ago • edited
That is because he doesn't understand what really happened in China. If you read this thread you also see many theories. They are all based on preconceptions and not actually reading about what happened China after the gang of four were ousted. They understand the consequences and they theorize about the cause. But they don't have to theorize. There is an actual history.

China was not selling cheap products to the United States until about three decades after the job transfers started and it was almost already done by then. The truth is, China had nothing to export but its labor. It did that by letting American and other companies set up in China for exploitative wages and protected them by denying its people any rights. They then built products under American management and training. The products were then shipped back to the US as "Chinese" products. But they really were American products made in China. The companies here were not protecting China. They were protecting themselves directly. The jobs transfer was not an unfortunate side effect. It was the whole point. China had nothing to trade. Mao had destroyed the economy.

Steveb • 7 hours ago
I recall a long time ago when there was a documentary on this topic and one of the workers from a electric appliance manufacturing facility was interviewed. They were complaining about the Chinese manufactures taking over their product line with cheaper products and causing layoffs at the plant. The moderator asked them where they shopped, they replied "Walmart". When the moderator pointed out that Walmart was the leader in offshoring to get cheaper products, like the appliances they made, they just stared.

You are going to somehow have to make Americans pay more for the same thing they can get cheaper from China. Who is going to do that? Not going to be those workers you are trying to protect, they don't have the money to do that. Price is king to them, it is only those snobby liberal types that can afford to do that.

Lets say you manage to get our factory worker to buy 1 expensive American shirt instead of 3 cheap Chinese shirts for the same price. They are not going to get 3 times the life out of that shirt so they are in the hole for that purchase.

Lets say you are really persuasive and the workers really do change, what about all the rest of the people that were employed in the retail and supply chain? What are they going to do? You just put them out of business. You are just deciding to move around who is unemployed.

What about the exporters? Do you really think that China is going to buy American products if you don't buy theirs? How did Trumps trade war work out? Have we won yet? As I recall it cost the average consumer between 500 and 1000 dollars by the time all the tariffs were applied and the farmers and ranchers in the Midwest that exported there are now on government welfare because they could not sell their products. His new "deal" was panned by economists as being nothing more than a minor cosmetic change, the same as the updated NAFTA deal that really changed little.

It is fun to blame the elites but it is a bit simplistic as the american workers have not had a problem sacrificing a few other workers to save some of their own money. If you want to change that you are going to have to start at the bottom and work up.

− +

Gregtown Tradcon • 5 hours ago

It should be mentioned that the cheap clothing we buy is rarely made in China. China has leveled up and no longer makes the general crap people buy. The shirt cheap t-shirt I'm wearing was made in Vietnam.
aha! • 4 hours ago
A free market with foreign governments is an impossibility. We would have to know every single that is happening within their government and that will never happen. Indeed our internal free market is fading away due to cronyism and secrecy within our own governments. Tax breaks to lure businesses to your state are anti-free market (not to mention the taxes still have to be paid, by the people who are already there). Tax breaks and subsidies to companies already in your state (like windmills and solar panels) are anti-free market. So the conclusion that I draw is the Democrat and Republican parties are imbeciles and crooks and both parties must be destroyed.
Amicus Brevis • 3 hours ago • edited
If you believe economic efficiency is the primary value, you would say, "if the Chinese are stupid enough to sell us products below their costs, we should be happy to take advantage of their stupidity." True enough .

But it is not true that is what is happening. It never happened. Chinese invited American companies to manufacture in China. China was selling labor. Not products. It had no products to sell. But when the American companies in China use Chinese labor to manufacture American products the products come to America marked "made in China". But all that the Chinese really sold was cheap labor without rights .

The second thing to know is that the Chinese forbid American companies to use their own brand names in China. They had to create Chinese companies that are 51% Chinese owned but wholly American managed with Chinese management in training. The Americans operated as if they were at home. The only difference is that they had Chinese under studies and the line workers were Chinese. The American companies didn't care because they were making money hand over foot. So when they spoke of "free trade" we were selling out America workers and bringing home cheap goods that our public loved. This was called globalism. That was phase one.

In the second stage, the Chinese quietly reminded the Americans that these were Chinese companies and it was time to begin to promote their Chinese understudies. The Americans didn't care because they still maintained control from America. And they could always find spots for the management back home. But from the Chinese point of view, they now had American technology in Chinese companies, run by Chinese. The technology was now theirs.

They felt free to grow their businesses with wholly owned and controlled subsidiaries since they now owned the technology. This was when the American companies began to scream about intellectual property. They cared because the interests of the rich were now being hurt. When they were stealing American jobs, that was Ok. Only then did our government see a problem. Shipping American jobs overseas is globalism, but shipping patents and copyrights is not. Globalism was always a con. It never existed. It was simply a smokescreen to exploit cheap, unprotected labor in the developing world. They knew from the start that it was not good for America. It was not a discovery. They didn't care because it made them rich.

Fletcher • an hour ago
Though I largely agree with the premise of this article the assumptions latent in mr. O'Neill's thinking specifically the US government has to do anything in reflection to the Chinese Communist politburo misses the point of freedom and property rights, in an economy free of the regulatory burden that the oligarchs in pose on the market through their governmental collusion not to mention the tax burden that helps to maintain the shipping lanes to China the American manufacturer will be fine. It should also be said for me environmental point of view free of state protection the perpetrators of mountaintop removal coal mining,glyphosate manufacture etc. Would find themselves much more vulnerable to civil lawsuit/tort law.

[May 14, 2020] Libertarians who are extraordinarily sensitive to the least legal limitation on negative freedom are usually completely immune to the idea that structural features of capitalist society are coercive and freedom-limiting

May 14, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

Anarcho 05.06.20 at 3:18 pm 5

"Libertarians who are extraordinarily sensitive to the least legal limitation on negative freedom are usually completely immune to the idea that structural features of capitalist society are coercive and freedom-limiting. "

I think you will discover that those who coined the term libertarian (libertarie) which the propertarians knowning stole in the 1950s are well aware of those structural features -- as Proudhon argued, property is both theft and despotism.:

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/160-years-libertarian

Please don't let these defenders of private tyranny continue their abuse of the good left-wing word libertarian.

[May 11, 2020] What is the neoliberal freedom exactly? Freedom to be replaced by a machine, without any forward thinking plan by society? Freedom to be hungry? Freedom to rampage and kill others?

May 11, 2020 | www.unz.com

Ilya G Poimandres , says: Show Comment May 9, 2020 at 6:01 am GMT

@onebornfree Anti what freedom exactly? Freedom to be replaced by a machine, without any forward thinking plan by society? Freedom to be hungry? Freedom to rampage and kill others?

This American freedom is an ideology on par with the nihilistic ideology of ISIS. It is an embrace of materialism through Epicurianism. Why exactly is this freedom to crave endlessly, superior to the freedom the CCP aims for its people – freedom from destitution?

You say they are enslaved, but they would say you are enslaved. You say that society enslave their individuality, they would say your individualism enslaved your society.

Any chance of finding a balanced middle ground? Cause the Chinese are closer to it atm.

[May 07, 2020] Neoliberal society does not fare well in any large scale epidemic: The neoliberal dogma of "Freedom for the nihilistic narcissistic ego individual over everything else" lead to anto-social behaviour -- many people today willingly prefer to rake risk and to go to concerts and beer gardens than to deny themselves those small joys in favor of their compatriots

May 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

DontBelieveEitherPr. , May 6 2020 19:21 utc | 2

Well, you were indeed right. And your reporting better than most if not all MSM articles written by other laymen. And all without any professional experience. Just by trusting in scientific methods, data and knowledge, instead of making a conspiracy out of thin air.
In those times, that is an amazing achievement.

But when i hear how few people are tested, when i hear of multiple deaths in my circle of people, and see the society unable to unite against such a threat, i dont have much hope for how this will go on.
The last 4 sentences say everything about our western societies, including us Germans.
The only profiteers are the rich, toilet paper and noodle merchants, and politicians (who now race each other in opening up BEER GARDENS and CONCERTS with 100 people).


Many people today willingly prefer to go to concerts and beer gardens than to deny themselves those small joys in favor of their compatriots.
Our society is doom. The neoliberal dogma of "Freedom for the nihilistic narcissistic ego individual over everything else" destroyed what was left of it.

bevin , May 6 2020 19:21 utc | 3

Here Lee, look at this series of reports: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/06/nurs-m06.html

"..At one New York City nursing home, the Isabella Geriatric Center in Manhattan's Washington Heights, nearly 100 of its 705 residents have died..."

"..In Medfield, Massachusetts, north of Boston, COVID-19 has killed 54 residents over the past four weeks at the Courtyard Nursing Care Center. An additional 117 residents and 42 employees have tested positive for the virus..."

" A shocking 84 residents have died at the facility since the virus outbreak. Eighty-one employees have tested positive for the coronavirus.

"... deaths at the Soldiers' Home were initially hidden from both the mayor of Holyoke and local health officials, who only became aware of the developing situation when employees at the facility reached out to them. Staff said management at the facility refused to provide them with PPE and instructed them to crowd patients together from multiple wards into a single ward as a solution to staffing shortages due to infections..."

"..A particularly gruesome discovery took place in mid-April when police found 17 corpses piled up at the Subacute and Rehabilitation Center in Andover, New Jersey. The bodies were stacked in a small morgue designed to hold a maximum of four bodies. The more than 2,000 deaths of staff and residents in New Jersey's long-term facilities account for about 40 percent of the state's coronavirus-related deaths."

There's more much more. And not just from the United States either.

[May 05, 2020] Governments are developed to establish justice, ensure tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Without these no market is possible. There is no "free market" without government.

May 05, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

jadan , May 5 2020 12:29 utc | 153

William Gruff | May 5 2020 10:46 utc | 144

Markets are created and managed by government, Mr. Gruff. Governments are developed to establish justice, ensure tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Without these no market is possible. There is no "free market" without government.

[May 03, 2020] "Pleonexia, sometimes called pleonexy, originating from the Greek , is a philosophical concept which roughly corresponds to greed, covetousness, or avarice, and is strictly defined as 'the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others', suggesting what Ritenbaugh describes as 'ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one's own benefit'"

May 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , May 1 2020 18:22 utc | 63

Pleonexia is a concept I introduced into a discussion of a similar topic about 2 or so years ago on this board as being at the root for the decline and fall of the Outlaw US Empire. Here's what Wiki says about it at the link:

"Pleonexia, sometimes called pleonexy, originating from the Greek πλεονεξία, is a philosophical concept which roughly corresponds to greed, covetousness, or avarice, and is strictly defined as ' the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others ', suggesting what Ritenbaugh describes as ' ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one's own benefit '" [My Emphasis]

That trait's shared by all Imperialist nations all of which arose based on the same Greco-Roman foundations or learned those traits from them as in the case of the Japanese. Indeed, that such traits aren't recognized speaks to the illiteracy of those rising to or placed in leadership positions as they seem to be totally unaware of the numerous lessons within Greek and Roman literature/culture--lessons known by the Founders and others 250 years ago when to be considered educated you had to know Greek, Latin, and their classical literature. As Walter says, it's a Greek Tragedy; but the play began in the last quarter of the 19th Century as has also been written about.

Those running the Outlaw US Empire seem oblivious to the wall they're about to run the nation into, or we might say it's a cliff that will take the nation into the abyss. The G-20 determined last year that a new global currency to conduct commerce was required to replace the dollar. A short discussion and linking of articles occurred on that topic yesterday between me and Likklemore. Bevin insisted we discuss the failure of Capitalism and what needs to come next as its replacement. I've advocated the need for a steady-state socialist system as the new global political-economy. As I reported, a prominent Singaporean in promoting his newest book wrote in The Economist that the advent of the pandemic marks the start of the Asian Century thanks to the gross Moral Failure of the West and the Outlaw US Empire as its lead nation.

How does a group of people get cured of Pleonexia? It's likely way too late for the current crop of oligarchs; but what of their heirs who were presumably schooled in similar fashion to their elders, and their progeny? I'm with Hudson in that their wealth must be written down close to zero, and the new system emplaced will not allow a repetition. Meanwhile, someone needs to get busy writing about the current Tragedy such that future generations can learn its lessons so they're not repeated.

[Apr 27, 2020] Pandemic Exposes Liberalism's Free Trade, Open Borders Road To National Suicide by Martin Sieff

Notable quotes:
"... Countries that have allowed their domestic industry to decay have found they cannot now produce the crucial equipment they need, from respirators to gas masks. Countries with strong manufacturing bases like China, or with a prudent nationalist sense of preparing ahead for emergencies like Russia, have done far better. The shortage of respirators in Britain has become more than a national scandal: It is a national shame. That is another inexorable consequence of the pernicious doctrine of Free Trade. ..."
"... While half the counties in the United States remain so far virtually free of the virus, infections have soared in most major metropolitan areas, especially in so-called Sanctuary cities. Invariably these centers are ruled by liberal Democrats where illegal immigrants congregate. ..."
"... the ruling elites of the West have mindlessly embraced Open Borders and Free Trade ..."
"... Russia suffered the full horrors of the merciless laissez-faire, unregulated Free Market policies of the liberal West in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin never woke up to the catastrophe that Bill Clinton and Larry Summers were inflicting on his country. ..."
"... National social responsibility has succeeded where the crazed, simplistic theories of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Ayn Rand all palpably failed. ..."
"... The ravages of Liberalism – its Open Borders and Free Markets – have already stripped the West of all its defenses, social, demographic, industrial and economic. ..."
"... open border free trade globalism was an EPIC scam foisted on us ..."
"... Liberals have been selling out American workers for decades, and getting personally wealthy the whole time. Bill, Hillary, Barack, now Joe. ..."
"... This is not a coincidence. The worst part is how they profess to care so much about the underprivileged, unless that person is a worker put out of a job by imports. What a bunch of sleaze balls. ..."
"... NWO Billionaire Globalists have imposed this nightmare on the USA and other citizens of the Western world. ..."
Apr 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Open Borders and Free Trade induce national suicide slowly and gradually, without the victims waking up to what is going on until it is too late. But the coronavirus has brought home with global clarity that human societies need governments and regulated borders for their own survival.

The bottom line is clear, societies that have had open borders to previous major centers of infection and transmission, like Iran and Italy which kept open strong flows of people to and from China in the early stages of pandemic, suffered exceptionally badly.

Countries obsessed with maintaining liberal values and open borders like France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the U.S. also suffered disproportionately.

Countries that have allowed their domestic industry to decay have found they cannot now produce the crucial equipment they need, from respirators to gas masks. Countries with strong manufacturing bases like China, or with a prudent nationalist sense of preparing ahead for emergencies like Russia, have done far better. The shortage of respirators in Britain has become more than a national scandal: It is a national shame. That is another inexorable consequence of the pernicious doctrine of Free Trade.

I documented this history in some detail in my 2012 book " That Should Still Be Us ".

There, I showed how even the French Revolution of 1789 was in fact triggered by the catastrophic Free Trade Treaty that hapless King Louis XVI approved with England only three years before. It led immediately to the worst economic depression in French history which triggered revolution. In three years, liberal Free Trade succeeded in destroying a society that had flourished for a thousand years and the most powerful state Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire.

In his classic television series and accompanying book "How the Universe Changed", the great British broadcaster and historian James Burke showed how the discipline of statistics was responsible for discovering the way the cholera bacteria spread through contaminated water in 19th Century London, then the largest urban area ever experienced.

Today, we see a similar pattern in the spread of the coronavirus: While half the counties in the United States remain so far virtually free of the virus, infections have soared in most major metropolitan areas, especially in so-called Sanctuary cities. Invariably these centers are ruled by liberal Democrats where illegal immigrants congregate. They are the places where the values and consequences of Free Trade and Open Borders most clearly flourish. And they ar ealso the places where the terrifying costs of those policies are most evident as well. The chickens have come home to roost.

Countries like Russia and China itself, which have reacted most quickly and decisively to shut down international and domestic travel, have been able to keep their numbers of infections and rates of spread down.

In Europe, by contrast, the impact of the virus has been appalling, The European Union has been as useless as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio,. Pro-EU liberal national leaders like President Emmanuel Macron in France and the venerable Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany (Berlin's version of Nancy Pelosi) just sat back in bemused silence till it was too late. In Italy and Spain, the political splintering of societies has woefully added to the chaos.

This is in fact a very old lesson indeed: The ruling elites of the world should not have had to relearn it.

But for more than 225 years, the ruling elites of the West have mindlessly embraced Open Borders and Free Trade. Yet these have always been mere assertions of prejudice and mindless faith: They have never been proven to be true in any scientific manner.

Instead, when we look at the factual evidence of economic history over the past two centuries, it has always been the case that developing industrial societies which protect their manufactures behind strong tariff barriers flourish with enormous foreign trade and balance of payments surpluses. Then the living standards of their people soar.

In contrast, free market societies too powerless, or just too plain dumb to protect their economic borders get swamped by cheap manufactures and their domestic industries get decimated. This was the case with liberal free market Britain caught between the rising Protectionist powers of the United States, Japan and Germany for the next century.

It has been true for the decline of American industry since the 1950s, the more the United States embraced global free trade, the more its own domestic manufactures and their dependent populations suffered. This never bothered the liberal intellectual elites of the East and West Coast at all. It still doesn't. Having inflicted lasting ruin and despair on hundreds of millions of people for generations, they despise their victims as "deplorables" for crying out in pain and seeking to end the disastrous policies.

Russia suffered the full horrors of the merciless laissez-faire, unregulated Free Market policies of the liberal West in the 1990s. Boris Yeltsin never woke up to the catastrophe that Bill Clinton and Larry Summers were inflicting on his country. Over the past two decades, Russia's recovery from that Abyss under President Vladimir Putin has been miraculous. National social responsibility has succeeded where the crazed, simplistic theories of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Ayn Rand all palpably failed.

The coronavirus pandemic therefore should serve as a wake up call to the peoples of the West, what Thomas Jefferson memorably called "A Fire Bell in the Night." They need to start following Russia's examples of self reliance, prudent preparation and maintaining strong borders.

The ravages of Liberalism – its Open Borders and Free Markets – have already stripped the West of all its defenses, social, demographic, industrial and economic.

The West is out of time: The Audit of Pandemic has been taken, and the reckoning is now due.

xxx

best thing that trump ever did was to hire navarro to shape the nationalist econ policies

open border free trade globalism was an EPIC scam foisted on us

they are doing the same to the kids right now with their globalist warming claptrap

xxx

Liberals have been selling out American workers for decades, and getting personally wealthy the whole time. Bill, Hillary, Barack, now Joe.

This is not a coincidence. The worst part is how they profess to care so much about the underprivileged, unless that person is a worker put out of a job by imports. What a bunch of sleaze balls.

xxx

There is nothing "compassionate" about open borders. It is a total myth / scam. Stealing a country's right to free association and control of its own borders is the ULTIMATE betrayal.

NWO Billionaire Globalists have imposed this nightmare on the USA and other citizens of the Western world. No different then the kings & dictators of the past these tyrants control our lives like we are slaves. True compassion would entail (among other things) exporting commerce, jobs & freedom to every corner of the globe. It's becoming more obvious everyday why this is never even discussed. Globalism is about spreading tyranny & poverty not freedom & wealth. Open borders is a one way ticket to Hell. 💀 Time to rise up and stop this national suicide.

xxx

Liberals will still be only concerned with racism and global rights instead of border security. Nothing trumps that for them. Not even death. How it's possible for us to be racist again 1.5B Chinese when we are the vast minority compared to them is something that liberals have yet to explain to me.

[Apr 15, 2020] While personal freedom is largely illusory, it seems to me that one has a contractual right to expect good parents, good teachers, good bosses and so forth. That's a legalistic constitutional right to exchange the individual's right to violence in exchange for protection

Apr 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Walter , Apr 15 2020 12:35 utc | 177

Personal freedom is largely illusory. One spends most of ones life under the control of others, parents, teachers, bosses, officers, cops, judges, jailers, or sleeping. I wonder if it's a "right" at all.

However, it seems to me that one has a contractual right to expect good parents, good teachers, good bosses and so forth. That's a legalistic constitutional right to exchange the individual's right to violence in exchange for protection. A contact. Individuals sometimes retain a fraction...the right to self-defense...but this is very limited, and dicey too.

And - especially - one, everyone, does have a natural right to demand Justice, fairness, and to be left alone. This is a Natural Right. It comes from the outside, from God, if you like. Dogs and horses, for example express themselves, and kick and bite and krap on your desk, if they're seriously mislead, (mistreated) Man also has the natural right.

So, Personal freedom seems to be an imprecise term, and seems to have at least two, probably several, manifestations.

[Apr 15, 2020] Personal freedom is not an unlimited right. Diana Johnstone has given a convincing argument for its limits. One's freedom and rights end where they infringe on the freedom and rights of others

Apr 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Personal freedom is not an unlimited right. Diana Johnstone has given a convincing argument for its limits. One's freedom and rights end where they infringe on the freedom and rights of others:

[V]irtually all key aspects of any civilized society go contrary to the absolutism of individual rights. Every civilized society has some sort of legal system, some basic rules that everyone is expected to follow. Most civilized societies have a public education and (except for the United States) a public health insurance system designed to benefit the whole population. These elements of civilization include constraints on individual freedom.

The benefits to each individual of living in a civilized society make these constraints acceptable to just about everybody. The health of the individual depends on the health of the community, which is why everyone in most Western countries accepts a single payer health insurance system. The only exception is the United States, where the egocentricities of Ayn Rand are widely read as serious thought.

It is without doubt that masks are helpful to limit the spreading of the epidemic. An infected person begins to spread viruses by breathing, talking, singing or coughing on day 2 after the infection. Only on day 5 or 6 will the symptoms of the disease set in. Some people will never feel symptoms but can still infect others usually up to day 10 after the infection.

Masks stop the viruses one sheds from reaching other persons. They do this effectively.

Posted by b on April 14, 2020 at 18:12 UTC | Permalink

[Mar 28, 2020] Free market and wage arbitrage

Mar 28, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Kessler • 11 hours ago

I'd add another consideration.

Let's say Bob can make 10 high-quality wigets per hour, while Jim can make 8 medium-quality wigets per hour. Bob gets paid 100$, while Jim gets paid 50$. Bob is more efficient and productive worker. But he will be fired and replaced by Jim, because Jim's cost of labor is lower. In this case market will eliminate the more productive worker in favor of a less productive one.

Now, within one nation this difference in wages will be very unlikely and quickly adjusted by the market. But between nations, Jim could be living in a poor country, where he can afford to survive on 50$, while Bob lives in a rich country with high rents and high product costs, so he'd barely get by on 100$.

So, how much of the global trade is increasing overall value due to local advantages and how much is just shifting value from some people in favor of others? And shouldn't we favor the first and minimize the second?

tz1 • 10 hours ago
We did test the antifragility.

Warnings like this have been happening over the past decade, and there are books (Poorly made in China) showing each part of the threat.

Each time, it was "Interview with a Zombie" with someone from NR, or Cato, or Mises, or even here, gurgling "Freeeeee Traaaade; Laaaazeeeee Faaaaire".

Trade has frictional costs. The shipping between the Ricardian tautological countries is not free. If it costs $10,000 to send the products to the destination, there is no comparitive advantage. Nature provides barriers.

But even worse, there is NO free trade, just regulatory arbitrage. Lets say you need to open a factory. You can:

1. Open it here and wait for the swarms of agents from OSHA, EEOC, EPA, IRS, etc. to harrass you and eat out your substance, and your workers to be treated like people, and have to get loans from an often hostile banking system that prefers wall street ETFs. An implacable bunch of socialists and SJWs that think Capitilists are evil and capitalism must be destroyed or just people on power trips will constantly try to close you down and bankrupt you personally and throw you in prison.

2. Open it in China where they will kick farmers off the land and build it for you, and staff it with disposable workers and you can just dump pollution into the local stream. There will be the customary cultural cronyism and corruption, but that's what a consultant is for (Poorly made in china, whats wrong with China). But it is the symbiont that wants to keep the host healthy so there will be the most blood to skim.

3. Open it in Mexico where it also has different customs than China, but the crony corruption is still far easier to deal with and less expensive than the Destroyer Obamabots.

john • 7 hours ago
Capitalism is really good at optimizing for lowest cost, it is really bad at dealing with "externalities" like a once in a hundred year global pandemic. Governments should take the "long view" well at least 4-5 years at a time. Corporations look at things more quarter to quarter.
Jorge Morales Meoqui • 3 hours ago
As Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile, the two authors are making a straw men argument with regard to David Ricardo.

I don't blame them. They are repeating what is written in most economics textbooks about the theory of comparative advantage. How they should know that this textbook theory is based on a misinterpretation of Ricardo's famous numerical example. (See here: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/...

Ricardo did not assume that prices would remain stable, nor did he recommended that a nation should specialise in one major industry or that no two agents should specialise in the same industry. Depending on a single supplier is indeed a risky bet, but that is not what their original case for free trade recommended. On the contrary, it was meant to be a remedy against national and foreign monopolies.

Many lessons can be learned from the present crisis. To make countries less vulnerable or fragile to pandemics like COVID-19, we need robust public health care systems that covers all its residents. The health care system needs to have excess capacities (hospital beds, medical personal, ) and sufficient stocks (masks, ventilators, ) to handle the significant increase in the number of patients during pandemics. We need more international cooperation, coordination and solidarity, not less. So the exact opposite of protectionism and national solo efforts.

[Mar 28, 2020] Contrary to free-market catechism, the pursuit of profit frequently runs contrary to the public's well-being

Mar 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

obwandiyag , says: Show Comment March 27, 2020 at 5:32 pm GMT

"Contrary to free-market catechism, the pursuit of profit frequently runs contrary to the public's well-being. This is especially true in an industry devoted to inventing and manufacturing health-giving and life-saving drugs."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/3/gilead-orphan-drug-remdesivir-coronavirus

The free market is for chumps and the parasties who feed on them.

[Mar 28, 2020] On disappearance of certain drugs

Highly recommended!
Mar 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

obwandiyag , says: Show Comment March 26, 2020 at 9:03 pm GMT

They have every right to suppress cures and raise prices.

It's the free market. Don't you people get it?

Realist , says: Show Comment March 27, 2020 at 11:51 am GMT
@obwandiyag

They have every right to suppress cures and raise prices.

It's the free market. Don't you people get it?

Sadly that's what the free market means to the wealthy and powerful.

Oracle , says: Show Comment March 27, 2020 at 2:43 pm GMT
More activity on the dark, unethical side of capitalism. There's an entire history of it, opium wars, Atlantic slave trade, pornography, control of political agents through pedophilia. The list does go on and strangely enough it's usually the same actors.

[Mar 23, 2020] If you'd ever tried to set up a business here in the UK, you'd realise pretty quickly that you are under complete and utter control of the government in every aspect

Mar 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

TJ , Mar 22 2020 20:57 utc | 74

@1 vk

If you'd ever tried to set up a business here in the UK, you'd realise pretty quickly that you are under complete and utter control of the government in every aspect and they own your business by dint of the taxes and the loans you have to take out from their banker friends, we have soft communism because the government owns you but pretends not to. Magna Carta is dead and it's only possible resuscitation would be a Runnymede 2 Electric Boogaloo.

[Mar 22, 2020] Mask piracy among neoliberal nations: Wonderful show of world-wide solidarity

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... 1) Pompeo and Grenell reportedly arguing that coronavirus has created window of opportunity for a direct strike on a weak and divided Iran. ..."
"... Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisian has criticized the #UK for not delivering millions of masks #Iran bought in preparations ahead of #Covid19 outbreak. The London govt. refused to deliver them citing US sanctions! Note that Germany took supplies meant for Switzerland, The US via the Italian Mafia (I suppose) gets masks from Bergamo. etc. ..."
Mar 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Stonebird , Mar 21 2020 21:25 utc | 31

I just think that the US "Intelligence" and most of the US Administration just haven't got it. I suppose when you are waiting for the "rapture" anything that can add to the chaos is to be included.

1) Pompeo and Grenell reportedly arguing that coronavirus has created window of opportunity for a direct strike on a weak and divided Iran. They were arguing about the severity of the strike.

2) Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisian has criticized the #UK for not delivering millions of masks #Iran bought in preparations ahead of #Covid19 outbreak. The London govt. refused to deliver them citing US sanctions! Note that Germany took supplies meant for Switzerland, The US via the Italian Mafia (I suppose) gets masks from Bergamo. etc. Wonderful show of world-wide solidarity.

Pompeo should hold his "rapture" in his hot little hand and .....

[Mar 21, 2020] Tulsi Gabbard says insider traders should be 'investigated prosecuted,' as Left and Right team up on profiteering senator

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "better prepared than ever ..."
"... "akin to the 1918 pandemic." ..."
"... "Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading," ..."
"... "Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks." ..."
"... "stomach churning," ..."
"... "For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this," ..."
"... "Richard Burr had critical information that might have helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself." ..."
"... "If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest," ..."
"... "calling for immediate investigations" ..."
"... "for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading laws." ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Mar 21, 2020 | www.rt.com

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, commenters from all sides have demanded swift punishment for US senators who dumped stock after classified Covid-19 briefings. Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has called for criminal prosecution. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) has received daily briefings on the threat posed by Covid-19 since January. Burr insisted to the public that America was ready to handle the virus, but sold up to $1.5 million in stocks on February 13, less than a week before the stock market nosedived, according to Senate filings . Immediately before the sale, Burr wrote an op-ed assuring Americans that their government is "better prepared than ever " to handle the virus.

Also on rt.com Liberal icon Sean Penn wants a 'compassionate' army deployment to fight Covid-19

After the sale, NPR reported that he told a closed-door meeting of North Carolina business leaders that the virus actually posed a threat "akin to the 1918 pandemic." Burr does not dispute the NPR report.

In a tweet on Saturday, former 2020 presidential candidate and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard called for criminal investigations. "Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading," she wrote.

"Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks."

Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending coronavirus epidemic should be investigated & prosecuted for insider trading (the STOCK Act). It is illegal & abuse of power. Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks. https://t.co/rbVfJxrk3r

-- Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) March 21, 2020

Burr was not the only lawmaker on Capitol Hill to take precautions, it was reported. Fellow Intelligence Committee member Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and her husband sold off more than a million dollars of shares in a biotech company five days later, while Oklahoma's Jim Inhofe (R) made a smaller sale around the same time. Both say their sales were routine.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) attended a Senate Health Committee briefing on the outbreak on January 24. The very same day, she began offloading stock, dropping between $1.2 and $3.1 million in shares over the following weeks. The companies whose stock she sold included airlines, retail outlets, and Chinese tech firm Tencent.

She did, however, invest in cloud technology company Oracle, and Citrix, a teleworking company whose value has increased by nearly a third last week, as social distancing measures forced more and more Americans to work from home. All of Loeffler's transactions were made with her husband, Jeff Sprecher, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.

Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) have joined the clamor of voices demanding punishment. Ocasio-Cortez described the sales as "stomach churning," while Omar reached across the aisle to side with Fox News' Tucker Carlson in calling for Burr's resignation.

I am 💯 with him on this 😱 https://t.co/Gbi3i2BagY

-- Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) March 20, 2020

"For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this," Carlson said during a Friday night monolog. "Richard Burr had critical information that might have helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself."

As of Saturday, there are nearly 25,000 cases of Covid-19 in the US, with the death toll heading towards 300. Now both sides of the political aisle seem united in disgust at the apparent profiteering of Burr, Loeffler, and Feinstein.

Right-wing news outlet Breitbart savaged Burr for voting against the STOCK Act in 2012, a piece of legislation that would have barred members of Congress from using non-public information to profit on the stock market. At the same time, a host of Democratic figures - including former presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Kirsten Gillibrand - weighed in with their own criticism too.

"If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest," Yang tweeted on Friday.

If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest.

-- Andrew Yang🧢 (@AndrewYang) March 20, 2020

Watchdog group Common Cause has filed complaints with the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee "calling for immediate investigations" of Burr, Loeffler, Feinstein and Inhofe "for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading laws."

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

[Mar 21, 2020] Tucker Senator Burr sold shares after virus briefing

Highly recommended!
Mar 21, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Bowhead31 , 5 hours ago

The problem is these people no longer see themselves as public servants.

Maria Summers , 6 hours ago

The Georgia Senator is just as guilty as the rest of them, regarding "Insider Trading".

shane passey , 3 hours ago

She's a crook just like the rest of the politicians. They say they be there for the people. But they're really there to make themselves rich

[Mar 21, 2020] Don't forget our congress critter Senator Kelly Loeffler

Mar 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

@supenau

who make profits as well. I cannot remember exactly when insider trading for them became legal but it should be no surprise to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention that they're ALL doing it. That is one reason, at least in my semi-educated opinion, they did not go after Trump for emoluments during Shampeachment, because THEY ALL DO IT.

That goes all the way to the White House, no doubt.

Marie on Sat, 03/21/2020 - 10:28am

Looks as if the crisis profiteers were on top of it:

Think about this:

Weeks before you had any inkling you were going to lose your job, was selling off millions of stocks -- and *buying* stock in a teleworking company.

-- Robert Reich (@RBReich) March 20, 2020

[Mar 13, 2020] Free trade suddenly seems like a dangerous fantasy, as nations start putting their own people first

Mar 13, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

It may one day be said that the coronavirus delivered the death blow to the New World Order, to a half-century of globalization, and to the era of interdependence of the world's great nations.

Tourism, air travel, vacation cruises, international gatherings, and festivals are already shutting down. Travel bans between countries and continents are being imposed. Conventions, concerts, and sporting events are being canceled. Will the Tokyo Olympics go forward? If they do, will all the anticipated visitors from abroad come to Japan to enjoy the games?

Trump has issued a one-month travel ban on Europe.

As for the "open borders" crowd, do Democrats still believe that breaking into our country should no longer be a crime, and that immigrants arriving illegally should be given free health care, a proposition to which all the Democratic debaters raised their hands?

The ideological roots of our free trade era can be traced to the mid-19th century, when its great evangelist, Richard Cobden, rose at Free Trade Hall in Manchester on January 15, 1846, and rhapsodized: "I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe -- drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace."

In the pre-Trump era, Republicans held hands with liberal Democrats in embracing NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and most favored nation trade privileges for China.

In retrospect, was it wise to have relied on China to produce essential parts for the supply chains of goods vital to our national security? Does it appear wise to have moved the production of pharmaceuticals and lifesaving drugs for heart disease, strokes, and diabetes to China? Does it appear wise to have allowed China to develop a virtual monopoly on rare earth minerals crucial to the development of weapons for our defense?

In this coronavirus pandemic, people now seem to be looking for authoritative leaders and nations seem to be looking out for their own peoples first. Would Merkel today invite a million Syrian refugees into Germany no matter the conditions under which they were living?

Is not the case now conclusive that we made a historic mistake when we outsourced our economic independence to rely for vital necessities upon nations that have never had America's best interests at heart?

Which rings truer today? We are all part of mankind, all citizens of the world. Or that it's time to put America and Americans first!

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

EdMan • 11 hours ago

Wiping out the NWO and discrediting globalism's the silver lining to the dark cloud of the coronavirus.
IanDakar EdMan • 8 hours ago
Which leaders have been speaking of ways to reverse the ways of globalism and how close are they to obtaining power? This is going to require a changing of the elites fro mthe ones who are and will continue to push this form of globalism to the ones that are willing to switch to a new system.

(there will always be an elite. It's just a question of which ones you let wield power as not all of them are the type that we carry.)

AlexanderHistory X • 8 hours ago
Unfortunately a ton of people are still espousing open borders globalism. This includes a large number of visible elites, the vast majority, in fact.
The best thing that could happen is that those who espouse such dangerous ideas are held to account by nature. Let them get sick with the Wu flu, let them be unable to attain medication because China has restricted exports to us. Let's see what they think after they have finally begun to experience the ramifications of their ideological thinking.
Awake and Uttering a Song AlexanderHistory X • 3 hours ago
The elites will ALWAYS have access to medication they need. Most of them will NEVER "experience ramifications" in any way more than minor inconveniences.
Don Quijote • 6 hours ago
Considering that you can get from New York City to Tokyo in under 24 hours, and that there are no major city on the Planet that cannot be reached from the lower forty-eight in under 48 hours, how do you intend to reverse globalism? Ban airplanes, telephones and the internet-based communications?

Because short of that, Globalism is here to stay.

[Mar 10, 2020] Neoliberalism the ideology at the root of all our problems by George Monbiot

Highly recommended!
Under neoliberalism inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve: Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations and redefines citizens as consumers
Notable quotes:
"... Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you'll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? ..."
"... Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness , the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump . ..."
"... Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. ..."
"... Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. ..."
"... We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. ..."
"... Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers. ..."
"... Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. ..."
"... It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative' ..."
"... Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating " investor-state dispute settlement ": offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes , protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre. ..."
"... Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one ..."
"... Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one. ..."
"... When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel . ..."
"... Those who own and run the UK's privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world's richest man. ..."
"... Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can't Afford the Rich , has had a similar impact. "Like rent," he argues, "interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort". ..."
"... Chris Hedges remarks that "fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the 'losers' who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment". When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation . To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant. ..."
"... Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities. ..."
"... The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch , two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement . We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that "in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised". ..."
"... The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. ..."
"... Neoliberalism's triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years. ..."
"... What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it's not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century. ..."
Apr 16, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative? @GeorgeMonbiot

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you'll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness , the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump . But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin's theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

See also Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us by Paul Verhaeghe, Sep 24, 2014

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe . We are all neoliberals now.

***

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the gradual development of Britain's welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom , published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises's book Bureaucracy , The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as "a kind of neoliberal international": a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement's rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute , the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute , the Institute of Economic Affairs , the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute . They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek's view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal . But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes 's economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, "when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up". With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter's administration in the US and Jim Callaghan's government in Britain.

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan 'there is no alternative'

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, "it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised."

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan "there is no alternative". But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet's Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – "my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism". The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers , endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Naomi Klein documented that neoliberals advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted. Photograph: Anya Chibis/The Guardian

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine , neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet's coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as "an opportunity to radically reform the educational system" in New Orleans .

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating " investor-state dispute settlement ": offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes , protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel .

In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all phone services and soon became the world's richest man. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters

Those who own and run the UK's privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world's richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can't Afford the Rich , has had a similar impact. "Like rent," he argues, "interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort". As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land , Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that "fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the 'losers' who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment". When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation . To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to "cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them".

***

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch , two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement . We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that "in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised".

The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Today, the relationship has been reversed

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. "The market" sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What "the market wants" tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. "Investment", as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities "camouflages the sources of wealth", leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil ; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners ; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively . But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom , Bureaucracy or Friedman's classic work, Capitalism and Freedom .

***

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism, Locke and the Green party | Letters Read more

Neoliberalism's triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it's not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

George Monbiot's How Did We Get into This Mess? is published this month by Verso. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) ) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Topics Economics

[Mar 09, 2020] One day, Americans will fully understand , with horrible consequences, that not every single human transaction must revolve around making a few people obscenely rich

Mar 09, 2020 | www.unz.com

TKK , says: Show Comment March 9, 2020 at 5:06 pm GMT

@Commentator Mike In America, you are on your own.

At international arrivals in Atlanta, the overwhelmingly black TSA staff are not taking temps by infrared or taking any pro active measures. If they are, it was hidden from me. It seems- obtuse- to constantly harp on the catastrophe that is AA hires- but there it is.

Its the busiest airport in the world, BTW.

A sinister side note; Delta offered me an $83 upgrade for first class when I went in to delay another trip. It's a $6000 ticket to fly first class. My total would have been a little over $500. Dangling the carrot as everyone cancels.

One day, Americans will fully understand , with horrible consequences, that not every single human transaction must revolve around making a few people obscenely rich.

[Mar 03, 2020] "Predatory capitalism", which clearly describes what neoliberalism is.

Highly recommended!
Mar 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

chu teh , Mar 4 2020 0:50 utc | 80

Tonymike | Mar 3 2020 18:08 utc | 26

re ... Your house foreclosed upon by shady bank: naked capitalism, .0001% paid on interest savings: naked capitalism, poor wages: naked capitalism, dangerous workplace: naked capitalism, etc. ...

"naked capitalism" is not a clear description. Consider using "predatory capitalism", which clearly describes what it is.

Here's the Wiki dictionary definition:

Predatory--

1. relating to or denoting an animal or animals preying naturally on others.
synonyms: predacious, carnivorous, hunting, raptorial, ravening;
Example: "predatory birds".

2. seeking to exploit or oppress others.
synonyms: exploitative, wolfish, rapacious, greedy, acquisitive, avaricious
Example: "I could see a predatory gleam in his eyes"

Note where the word comes from:
The Latin "praedator", in English meaning "plunderer".

And "plunderer" helps the reader understand and perhaps recognize what is happening.

Every plunderer understands.

[Mar 02, 2020] Under the rule of a repressive [neoliberal] oligarchy, freedom can be made into a powerful instrument of domination

Mar 02, 2020 | www.truthdig.com

In "One-Dimensional Man , " Marcuse revealed the fundamental truth of modern Western capitalism: "Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination . Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear -- that is, if they sustain alienation." It does not matter at all whether millions of people recognize their alienation, often blissfully unaware that their "needs" are not their own but merely produced through their superficially pleasant submission. The corporate state continues largely unchallenged.

[Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class

Highly recommended!
This was an outright declaration of "class war" against working-class voters by a "university-credentialed overclass" -- "managerial elite" which changed sides and allied with financial oligrchy. See "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite" by Michael Lind
Notable quotes:
"... By canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, the neoliberal elite saws the seed of the current populist backlash. The "soft neoliberal" backbone of the Democratic Party (Clinton wing) were incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat -- the rejection of the establishment candidate by the US population and first of all by the working class. The result has been the neo-McCarthyism campaign and the attempt to derail Trump via color revolution spearheaded by Brennan-Obama factions in CIA and FBI. ..."
Feb 19, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , February 19, 2020 12:31 pm

Does not matter.

It looks like Bloomberg is finished. He just committed political suicide with his comments about farmers and metal workers.

BTW Bloomberg's plan is highly hypocritical -- like is Bloomberg himself.

During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d'état) changed sides and betrayed the working class.

So those neoliberal scoundrels reversed the class compromise embodied in the New Deal.

The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the neoliberal managerial class and financial oligarchy who got to power via the "Quiet Coup" was the global labor arbitrage in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations.

So all those "improving education" plans are, to a large extent, the smoke screen over the fact that the US workers now need to compete against highly qualified and lower cost immigrants and outsourced workforce.

The fact is that it is very difficult to find for US graduates in STEM disciplines a decent job, and this is by design.

Also, after the "Reagan neoliberal revolution" ( actually a coup d'état ), profits were maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of the immigrant workforce (the collapse of the USSR helped greatly ). They push down wages and compete for jobs with their domestic counterparts, including the recent graduates. So the situation since 1991 was never too bright for STEM graduates.

By canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, the neoliberal elite saws the seed of the current populist backlash. The "soft neoliberal" backbone of the Democratic Party (Clinton wing) were incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat -- the rejection of the establishment candidate by the US population and first of all by the working class. The result has been the neo-McCarthyism campaign and the attempt to derail Trump via color revolution spearheaded by Brennan-Obama factions in CIA and FBI.

See also recently published "The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite" by Michael Lind.

One of his quotes:

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.

[Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. ..."
"... Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt. ..."
"... Many on the left have been incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of "Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists." ..."
"... To Lind, the case is much more straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on Social Security) and right on immigration. ..."
"... Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the working class set sector-wide wages. ..."
"... This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from the ground up. ..."
"... But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent populist backlash on itself. ..."
"... American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically run enterprises. ..."
"... In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist (albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism." ..."
"... A cursory glance at the recent impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability of the vital center from polar extremes. ..."
Jan 08, 2020 | lareviewofbooks.org

A FEW DAYS AFTER Donald Trump's electoral upset in 2016, Club for Growth co-founder Stephen Moore told an audience of Republican House members that the GOP was "now officially a Trump working class party." No longer the party of traditional Reaganite conservatism, the GOP had been converted instead "into a populist America First party." As he uttered these words, Moore says, "the shock was palpable" in the room.

The Club for Growth had long dominated Republican orthodoxy by promoting low tax rates and limited government. Any conservative candidate for political office wanting to reap the benefits of the Club's massive fundraising arm had to pay homage to this doctrine. For one of its formerly leading voices to pronounce the transformation of this orthodoxy toward a more populist nationalism showed just how much the ground had shifted on election night.

To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. The title of Lind's new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite , leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie, though he's adamant that he's not some sort of guru for a " smarter Trumpism ," as some have labeled him.

Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt.

The New Class War is a breath of fresh air. Many on the left have been incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of "Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists."

To Lind, the case is much more straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on Social Security) and right on immigration.

The strategy has since been successfully repeated in the United Kingdom by Boris Johnson, and it looks, for now, like a foolproof way for conservative parties in the West to capture or defend their majorities against center-left parties that are too beholden to wealthy, metropolitan interests to seriously attract working-class support. Berating the latter as irredeemably racist certainly doesn't help either.

What happened in the preceding decades to produce this divide in Western democracies? Lind's narrative begins with the New Deal, which had brought to an end what he calls "the first class war" in favor of a class compromise between management and labor. This first class war is the one we are the most familiar with: originating in the Industrial Revolution, which had produced the wretchedly poor proletariat, it soon led to the rise of competing parties of organized workers on the one hand and the liberal bourgeoisie on the other, a clash that came to a head in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the working class set sector-wide wages.

This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from the ground up.

But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent populist backlash on itself.

Likewise, only it can contain this backlash by returning to the bargaining table and reestablishing the tripartite system it had walked away from. According to Lind, the new class peace can only come about on the level of the individual nation-state because transnational treaty organizations like the EU cannot allow the various national working classes to escape the curse of labor arbitrage. This will mean that unskilled immigration will necessarily have to be curbed to strengthen the bargaining power of domestic workers. The free-market orthodoxy of the Club for Growth will also have to take a backseat, to be replaced by government-promoted industrial strategies that invest in innovation to help modernize their national economies.

Under which circumstances would the managerial elites ever return to the bargaining table? "The answer is fear," Lind suggests -- fear of working-class resentment of hyper-woke, authoritarian elites. Ironically, this leaves all the agency with the ruling class, who first acceded to the class compromise, then canceled it, and is now called on to forge a new one lest its underlings revolt.

Lind rightly complains all throughout the book that the old mass-membership based organizations of the 20th century have collapsed. He's coy, however, about who would reconstitute them and how. At best, Lind argues for a return to the old system where party bosses and ward captains served their local constituencies through patronage, but once more this leaves the agency with entities like the Republicans and Democrats who have a combined zero members. As the third-party activist Howie Hawkins remarked cunningly elsewhere ,

American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically run enterprises.

Thus, they would hardly be the first options one would think of to reinvigorate the forces of civil society toward self-rule from the bottom up.

The key to Lind's fraught logic lies hidden in plain sight -- in the book's title. Lind does not speak of "class struggle ," the heroic Marxist narrative in which an organized proletariat strove for global power; no, "class war " smacks of a gloomy, Hobbesian war of all against all in which no side truly stands to win.

In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist (albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism."

Looked at from this perspective, the break between the postwar Fordist regime and technocratic neoliberalism isn't as massive as one would suppose. The overclass antagonists of The New Class War believe that they derive their power from the same "liberal order" of the first-class peace that Lind upholds as a positive utopia. A cursory glance at the recent impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability of the vital center from polar extremes.

A more honest account of capitalism would also acknowledge its natural tendencies to persistently contract and to disrupt the social fabric. There is thus no reason to believe why some future class compromise would once and for all quell these tendencies -- and why nationalistically operating capitalist states would not be inclined to confront each other again in war.

Gregor Baszak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His Twitter handle is @gregorbas1.

Stourley Kracklite • 20 days ago • edited ,

Reagan was a free-trader and a union buster. Lind's people jumped the Democratic ship to vote for Reagan in (lemming-like) droves. As Republicans consolidated power over labor with cheap goods from China and the meth of deficit spending Democrats struggled with being necklaced as the party of civil rights.
The idea that people who are well-informed ought not to govern is a sad and sick cover story that the culpable are forced to chant in their caves until their days are done, the reckoning being too great.

[Feb 01, 2020] You think it's bad now, look where we're going

Feb 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Batman11 , 4 hours ago link

You think it's bad now, look where we're going.

We stepped onto an old path that still leads to the same place.

1920s/2000s – neoclassical economics, high inequality, high banker pay, low regulation, low taxes for the wealthy, robber barons (CEOs), reckless bankers, globalisation phase

1929/2008 – Wall Street crash

1930s/2010s – Global recession, currency wars, trade wars, austerity, rising nationalism and extremism

1940s – World war.

We forgot we had been down that path before.

[Feb 01, 2020] Freedom in the neo-liberal lexicon means freedom of the strong to predate on the weak. Free Trade is a particular example of this.

Feb 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Tim Glover , Jan 31 2020 19:07 utc | 9

Freedom in the neo-liberal lexicon means freedom of the strong to predate on the weak. Free Trade is a particular example of this. A rational person must expect the UK to be brutally savaged in dealing with the EU, US and China.

@1, It is true that at present not having a Mediterranean coast is an advantage. But an optimist might hope that the defeat of the US in Eurasia will bring new peace along the Belt and Road, and Africa and the ME will see the greatest boom.

[Jan 30, 2020] An excellent question, "who benefits", clearly it's not everybody. "Profitable for whom", "rights for whom", "safe for whom", "justice for whom"

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Biloximarxkelly , Jan 30 2020 19:30 utc | 84

Human. Beings. Doing Earth Life. There is no separation in our species, except that, a disconnect occurred. Who, When, What, Where, and How did the disconnect become an all powerful power? Acting as though the species Human isn't. The tap root "dis~ease" (disconnect) must be eradicated/ healed/ rejoining our species into oneness, again. Top~bottom junk yard dogs is barbaric.

Bemildred , Jan 30 2020 20:01 utc | 89

Posted by: charliechan | Jan 30 2020 19:36 utc | 85

An excellent question, "who benefits", clearly it's not everybody. "Profitable for whom", "rights for whom", "safe for whom", "justice for whom". If the answer is not "everybody", it's bullshit. What's good for corporations is not what is good for people. We are infested with economic parasites who blather on about how they are taking "care" of us and giving us "choices".

[Jan 25, 2020] Rabobank What If... The Protectionists Are Right And The Free Traders Are Wrong by Michael Every

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Yet it took until 1860 for the UK to fully embrace free trade, and even then the unpalatable historical record is that during this 'golden age', the British: Destroyed the Indian textile industry to benefit their own cloth manufacturers; Started the Opium Wars to balance UK-China trade by selling China addictive drugs; Ignored the Irish Potato Famine and continued to allow Irish wheat exports; Forced Siam (Thailand) to open up its economy to trade with gunboats (as the US did with Japan); and Colonized much of Africa and Asia. ..."
"... Regardless, the first flowering of free trade collapsed back into nationalism and protectionism - bloodily so in 1914. Free trade was tried again from 1919 - but burned-out even more bloodily in the 1930s and 1940s. After WW2, most developed countries had moderately free trade - but most developing countries did not. We only started to re-embrace global free trade from the 1990s onwards when the Cold War ended – and here it is under stress again. In short, only around 100 years in a total of 5,000 years of civilization has seen real global free trade, it has failed twice already, and it is once again coming under pressure. ..."
"... Of course, this doesn't mean liked-minded groups of countries with similar-enough or sympathetic-enough economies and politics should avoid free trade: clearly for some states it can work out nicely - even if within the EU one could argue there are also underlying strains. However, it is a huge stretch to assume a one-size-fits-all free trade policy will always work best for all countries, as some would have it. That is a fairy tale. History shows it wasn't the case; national security concerns show it can never always be the case; and Ricardo argues this logically won't be the case. ..."
Jan 25, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

"When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!" (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 4, The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill)

Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank

2020 starts with markets feeling optimistic due to a US-China trade deal and a reworked NAFTA in the form of the USMCA. However, the tide towards protectionism may still be coming in, not going out.

The intellectual appeal of the basis for free trade, Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, where Portugal specializes in wine, and the UK in cloth, is still clearly there. Moreover, trade has always been a beneficial and enriching part of human culture. Yet the fact is that for the majority of the last 5,000 years global trade has been highly-politicized and heavily-regulated . Indeed, global free-trade only began following the abolition of the UK Corn Laws in 1846, which reduced British agricultural tariffs, brought in European wheat and corn, and allowed the UK to maximize its comparative advantage in industry.

Yet it took until 1860 for the UK to fully embrace free trade, and even then the unpalatable historical record is that during this 'golden age', the British:

As we showed back in ' Currency and Wars ', after an initial embrace of free trade, the major European powers and Japan saw that their relative comparative advantage meant they remained at the bottom of the development ladder as agricultural producers, an area where prices were also being depressed by huge US output; meanwhile, the UK sold industrial goods, ran a huge trade surplus, and ruled the waves militarily. This was politically unsustainable even though the UK vigorously backed the intellectual concept of free trade given it was such a winner from it.

Regardless, the first flowering of free trade collapsed back into nationalism and protectionism - bloodily so in 1914. Free trade was tried again from 1919 - but burned-out even more bloodily in the 1930s and 1940s. After WW2, most developed countries had moderately free trade - but most developing countries did not. We only started to re-embrace global free trade from the 1990s onwards when the Cold War ended – and here it is under stress again. In short, only around 100 years in a total of 5,000 years of civilization has seen real global free trade, it has failed twice already, and it is once again coming under pressure.

What are we getting wrong? Perhaps that Ricardo's theory has major flaws that don't get included in our textbooks, as summarized in this overlooked quote

"It would undoubtedly be advantageous to the capitalists of England [that] the wine and cloth should both be made in Portugal [and that] the capital and labour of England employed in making cloth should be removed to Portugal for that purpose." Which is pretty much what happens today! However, Ricardo adds that this won't happen because "Most men of property [will be] satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations," which is simply not true at all! In other words, his premise is flawed in that:

As Ricardo's theory requires key conditions that are not met in reality most of the time, why are we surprised that most of reality fails to produce idealised free trade most of the time? Several past US presidents before Donald Trump made exactly that point. Munroe (1817-25) argued: " The conditions necessary for Free Trade's success - reciprocity and international peace - have never occurred and cannot be expected ". Grant (1869-77) noted "Within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade".

Yet arguably we are better, not worse, off regardless of these sentiments – so hooray! How so? Well, did you know that Adam Smith, who we equate with free markets, and who created the term "mercantile system" to describe the national-protectionist policies opposed to it, argued the US should remain an agricultural producer and buy its industrial goods from the UK? It was Founding Father Alexander Hamilton who rejected this approach, and his "infant industry" policy of industrialization and infrastructure spending saw the US emerge as the world's leading economy instead. That was the same development model that, with tweaks, was then adopted by pre-WW1 Japan, France, and Germany to successfully rival the UK; and then post-WW2 by Japan (again) and South Korea; and then more recently by China, that key global growth driver. Would we really be better off if the US was still mainly growing cotton and wheat, China rice and apples, and the UK was making most of the world's consumer goods? Thank the lack of free trade if you think otherwise!

Yet look at the examples above and there is a further argument for more protectionism ahead. Ricardo assumes a benign global political environment for free trade . Yet what if the UK and Portugal are rivals or enemies? What if the choice is between steel and wine? You can't invade neighbours armed with wine as you can with steel! A large part of the trade tension between China and the US, just as between pre-WW1 Germany and the UK, is not about trade per se: for both sides, it is about who produces key inputs with national security implications - and hence is about relative power . This is why we hear US hawks underlining that they don't want to export their highest technology to China, or to specialize only in agricultural exports to it as China moves up the value-chain. It also helps underline why for most of the past 5,000 years trade has not been free. Indeed, this argument also holds true for the other claimed benefit of free trade: the cross-flow of ideas and technology. That is great for friends, but not for those less trusted.

Of course, this doesn't mean liked-minded groups of countries with similar-enough or sympathetic-enough economies and politics should avoid free trade: clearly for some states it can work out nicely - even if within the EU one could argue there are also underlying strains. However, it is a huge stretch to assume a one-size-fits-all free trade policy will always work best for all countries, as some would have it. That is a fairy tale. History shows it wasn't the case; national security concerns show it can never always be the case; and Ricardo argues this logically won't be the case.

Yet we need not despair. The track record also shows that global growth can continue even despite protectionism, and in some cases can benefit from it. That being said, should the US resort to more Hamiltonian policies versus everyone, not just China, then we are in for real financial market turbulence ahead given the role the US Dollar plays today compared to the role gold played for Smith and Ricardo! But that is a whole different fairy tale...

[Jan 19, 2020] Internal Boeing Emails Claim 777X Shares MAX Problem

Jan 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Tillyoudrop , 49 seconds ago link

Greed is good, greed is right, greed works.

Neochrome , 2 minutes ago link

sacrificing the safety of the planes to drive sales higher

Good thing we sentence people to life in jail for shoplifting couple of t-shirts, safety restored.

VodkaInKrakow , 12 minutes ago link

Financialization killed Boeing. All those MBA's who dreamed up outsourced supply-chains for the Dreamliner. Thought they were going to make a lot of money through savings.

Silly rabbit MBA's... if you don't spend money? You don't make money.

MBA graduates are f*cking useless retards trained in only one system: FAILURE.

What sank McDonald Douglas - bought out by Boeing? Is the same bullsh*t that is ruining Boeing. Boeing kept a lot of board member & management failures around from McDonald Douglas. Poisoned the Boeing culture.

Bounder , 14 minutes ago link

How many of you remember all the McDonald Douglas passenger jet success stories? There wasnt any - the whole mgmt of MD was to to strip out every possible cost and maximize very profit at the expense of the end customer and the government - and these are the guys who bought Boeing - and then made the first step of moving the headquarters to chicago. Guess which party gave lots and lots of government boondoggles to MD?

VodkaInKrakow , 10 minutes ago link

Damn. Wish I would have read your comment.

I had a Polish executive tell me how proud they were as they were about to hire an American executive who graduated with an MBA.

That is, until I asked him... "Have you checked what happened to the previous companies that he worked at?"

So the Polish executive did just that. This led to a ban on hiring any American MBA. Turns out, the American MBA worked at companies, all of which FAILED.

Though, somehow, despite a track record of working at failed companies? The American was still quite well off.

VodkaInKrakow , 1 minute ago link

Boeing is a symbol of American reliability that reflected hugely upon American manufacturing.

Well, WAS a symbol of American reliability. Which casts doubt upon American manufacturing.

Confidence in American manufacturing quality is in GRAVE DOUBT. Which leads to people seeking their products elsewhere.

The US business leadership consists of crapification.

fedslayer , 20 minutes ago link

Ok but what's the alternative?

If the parts meet specifications, get the lowest price.

If you don't, you will have executives drop-shipping parts. That's what i would do.

If you don't go with the lowest-price, executives like me will rob you blind.

east of eden , 16 minutes ago link

The ******* alternative you stupid ******* americunt is already in the air. They are labelled Airbus A220 and A230, otherwise known as Bombardier CS200 and CS300 and they are sold out 15 years in advance.

VodkaInKrakow , 4 minutes ago link

That was part of the problem. The parts from Boeing's foreign suppliers MET SPECIFICATIONS.

That is, until they went to assemble the Dreamliner. Where parts did not fit together.

You see, Boeing found out LONG, LONG AGO... that it was necessary to have manufacturing close to design. That way, when parts that "met specifications" did not fit? The engineers and machinists were there to correct deficiencies. Thus leading to reliable planes that were fit together very well. Only THEN could Boeing could assemble parts in other locations and mate them together.

This never happened with the Dreamliner. Quadrupled costs. The Dreamliner only exists thanks to taxpayer subsidies through the ExIm Bank. The Dreamliner WILL NEVER BE PROFITABLE. Accounting gimmicks make it appear as if Boeing makes money on the Dreamliner.

Bay Area Guy , 28 minutes ago link

Amazing that in less than a generation, we go from "if it's not Boeing, I'm not going" to wondering what the next Boeing screw-up will be and how many will be killed as a result.

The existing 777 is a fantastic plane and, other than pilot error (Asiana at SFO), a missile attack (Malaysia 17) and some unknown (but apparently not mechanical) issue (Malaysia 370), the 777 has been the safest plane around.

Ignorance is bliss , 1 hour ago link

American executives are incentivized to manipulate their company's stock. So they squeeze the workforce and cut everything to the bone. That's why Boeing, GM, and other household names are crashing.

According to economist William Lazonick, Boeing spent $43.1 billion on stock buybacks from 2013 to 2019, raising the company's stock price to a record high just 10 days before the second crash of its 737 MAX. Boeing CEO Muilenburg collects most of his pay through stock or compensation based on financial metrics. Yet the company reportedly avoided spending the estimated $7 billion it would have needed to engineer a safer plane. Less than 10 years after a public sector bailout, GM has spent $10.6 billion on stock buybacks, while engaging in layoffs and plant closures. That amounts to $221,308 for each of the 47,897 active UAW members currently on strike at GM. Walmart spent $9.2 billion on stock buybacks from August 2018 to July 2019, which, by my calculations, could have been used to give a raise of roughly $5/ hour to each of its 1 million hourly workers instead.

Illegal , 56 minutes ago link

Boeing should have been spending all its supposed profits on R&D. The other problem is the military side of the business is grossly corrupt. Remember the blowup over Air Force 1?

flyonmywall , 24 minutes ago link

Yep. Stock buybacks.

This is what happens when the Federal Reserve lets the financial cat out the bag, and pump up the stock market to the tune of 35-60 billion every 3 days, because some hedge funds "could" fail and topple the financial system.

If multiple entities are now too important and could topple the financial system if they failed, the Fed has massively screwed up.

aldol11 , 1 hour ago link

In 1991 a Boeing purchaser told me that he would give us a contract if we transferred 51% of the shares to a minority.

This is God's truth

He added that when he could not find minority businesses that would make components according to specifications, he would buy stuff from minority owned businesses and not use it but store it in warehouses around the country indefinitely. this in order to meet a quota of 20% purchases from minority owned businesses mandated by the Feds for all government suppliers.

I can just imagine how bad the discrimination is now.

Svastic , 1 hour ago link

Good grief. Look at Boeing's board of directors anyway.

https://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/corporate-governance.page

These are politically connected animals who feed from the trough of government pork barrel a.k.a taxpayer money. Exactly what has Nikki Haley achieved in her life, except for being a pathological liar?

These animals were responsible for our reckless fiscal deficits and looming debt bombs which will soon come crashing down. Kinda good metaphor for Boeing.

BidnessMan , 46 minutes ago link

All former CFOs and politicians ( civilian and military - only political types in the military get stars ). No evidence of any engineering expertise. Sad for a once-proud global leader.

moseybear , 1 hour ago link

In the "investor economy", there is no morality. EVERYTHING is "commoditized". Even you .. your DNA. A pricetag hovers over your head like a dialog bubble. Bean counters can incorporate your morbidity and mortality into mathematical equations showing investors why cutting costs and saving 0.01% is worthy of investment. While 911 was the paradigm shift for Rights ... the Lehman "crisis" was its own "911" -- the death of the labor economy ... and rise of the "investor economy". Nobody works, trading time for dollars. They "invest" Why work? Investors can kill without being held personally responsible. They only risk their fiat capital. You die.

[Jan 16, 2020] The US strategy is to control your economy in order to force you to sell your most profitable industrial sectors to US investors, to force you to invest in your industry only by borrowing from the United States.

Jan 16, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Daniel , Jan 16 2020 21:18 utc | 36

There is a lot of talk here and in comment sections at forums about how the American Empire is going to collapse soon due to its blunders and Russia and China gaining military superiority over it. This kind of talk is a type of magical thinking and has no basis in reality. The United States' most potent weapon isn't military, it's economic, and through it the US government controls the world. That weapon is the US Dollar and ever since Nixon took it off the gold standard it has been used to further the Empire's imperial hold on the global economy. The economist Michael Hudson in an article called A Note To China (link at bottom) explains how this works:
The U.S. strategy is to control your economy in order to force you to sell your most profitable industrial sectors to US investors, to force you to invest in your industry only by borrowing from the United States.

So the question is, how do China, Russia, Iran and other countries break free of this U.S. dollarization strategy?

There are a lot of articles on alt.media sites about how China and Russia are de-dollarizing their economies in order to resist, and eventually end, the US domination of the global economy that is preventing them from maintaining independent economic policies that benefit their citizens rather than global elites and US central bankers.

Russia managed to put a stop to overt US economic imperialism after the looting spree in the post-Soviet 1990s decimated Russia's ability to provide for its citizens and degraded the country's ability to maintain economic independence. But it still ultimately got caught in the neoliberal trap. Hudson again:

Yet Russia did not have enough foreign exchange to pay domestic ruble-wages or to pay for domestic goods and services. But neoliberal advisors convinced Russia to back all Ruble money or domestic currency credit it created by backing it with U.S. dollars. Obtaining these dollars involved paying enormous interest to the United States for this needless backing. There was no need for such backing. At the end of this road the United States convinced Russia to sell off its raw materials, its nickel mines, its electric utilities, its oil reserves, and ultimately tried to pry Crimea away from Russia.

China, Hudson argues, by accepting the advice of American and IMF/World Bank economic "experts" and through Chinese students schooled in American universities in American neoliberal theory is in great danger of falling into the same trap.

The U.S. has discovered that it does not have to militarily invade China. It does not have to conquer China. It does not have to use military weapons, because it has the intellectual weapon of financialization, convincing you that you need to do this in order to have a balanced economy. So, when China sends its students to the United States, especially when it sends central bankers and planners to the United States to study (and be recruited), they are told by the U.S. "Do as we say, not as we have done."

He concludes that:

The neoliberal plan is not to make you independent, and not to help you grow except to the extent that your growth will be paid to US investors or used to finance U.S. military spending around the world to encircle you and trying to destabilize you in Sichuan to try to pry China apart.

Look at what the United States has done in Russia, and at what the International Monetary Fund in Europe has done to Greece, Latvia and the Baltic states. It is a dress rehearsal for what U.S. diplomacy would like to do to you, if it can convince you to follow the neoliberal US economic policy of financialization and privatization.

De-dollarization is the alternative to privatization and financialization.

Loosening the Empire's hold on economic and geopolitical affairs and moving to a multipolar world order is a tough slog and the Empire will use everything it can to stop this from happening. But at the moment even countries under American sanctions and surrounded by its armies, with the possible exception of Iran, aren't really fighting back. That's a bitter pill for many to swallow but wishful thinking isn't going to change the world. After all, the new world has to be imagined before it can appear and right now it's still global capitalism all the way down.

Link to article: https://michael-hudson.com/2020/01/note-to-china/

The article in full, and Hudson's work generally, is well worth reading. He is one of only a few genuinely anti-imperialist economists and he is able to explain in layman's terms exactly how the US-centric global economy is a massive scam designed to benefit US empire at the rest of the world's expense.


Ian2 , Jan 16 2020 22:03 utc | 39

I was thinking about winston2's comment in the previous thread. A good way for China and Russia to respond is to go after those in the MIC; the CEO, lobbyists, financiers, etc... If they follow the money and take them out, I suspect we all would see a dramatic turn of events. No need to publicize their early retirement. Make it messy and public but not to the point of taking out innocents.
Patroklos , Jan 16 2020 22:20 utc | 40
@ Daniel | Jan 16 2020 21:18 utc | 36

Yes, Michael Hudson is excellent, mostly because he's rare economist, that is, one who begins from the premise that the 'economy' is a set of historically-situated and specific modes of exchange and forms of human relations. Aristotle located what we call the economy in ethics and politics; we follow the fairytales of neo-classical economics and global capital by imagining that it has some scientific autonomy from human social relations. Marx was right in following Aristotle's insight by critiquing the very idea of an autonomous economy, which the chief ideological fiction of late capitalism. Sam Chambers and Ellen Meiksens-Wood are also excellent critics of this obstacle to reimagining a viable alternative to the economy as it is propagated by the US neoliberal global apparatus.

Inkan1969 , Jan 16 2020 22:34 utc | 42 S , Jan 16 2020 22:37 utc | 43
@Daniel #36:
The United States' most potent weapon isn't military, it's economic, and through it the US government controls the world. That weapon is the US Dollar and ever since Nixon took it off the gold standard it has been used to further the Empire's imperial hold on the global economy.

But at the moment even countries under American sanctions and surrounded by its armies, with the possible exception of Iran, aren't really fighting back.

The dynamics of Russian reserves composition tell us that Russia is fighting back:

                    % Reserves
Date       Dollar  Euro  Yuan Other  Gold
30.06.2017   46.3  25.1   0.1  12.4  16.1
30.09.2017   46.2  23.9   1.0  12.2  16.7
31.12.2017   45.8  21.7   2.8  12.5  17.2
31.03.2018   43.7  22.2   5.0  11.9  17.2
30.06.2018   21.8  32.0  14.7  14.7  16.8
30.09.2018   22.6  32.1  14.4  14.3  16.6
31.12.2018   22.7  31.7  14.2  13.3  18.1
31.03.2019   23.6  30.3  14.2  13.7  18.2
30.06.2019   24.2  30.6  13.2  12.9  19.1
vk , Jan 16 2020 22:50 utc | 44
@ Posted by: Daniel | Jan 16 2020 21:18 utc | 36

Exclude me from this squad. I's always from the opinion that the USA would collapse slowly, i.e. degenerate/decay. I won't repeat my arguments again here so as to spare people who already know me the repetition.

However, consider this: when 2008 broke out, some people thought the USA would finally collapse. It didn't - in great part, because the USG also thought it could collapse, so it acted quickly and decisively. But it cost a lot: the USA fell from its "sole superpower" status, and, for the first time since 1929, the American people had to fell in the flesh the side effects of capitalism. It marked the end of the End of History, and the realization - mainly by Russia and China - that the Americans were not invincible and immortals. It may have marked the beginning of the multipolar era.

--//--

The world (bar China) never recovered from 2008. Indeed, world debt has grown to another record high:

Global debt hits a record high in 2019 at 322% of GDP, or $267trn

The world governments - specially the governments from the USA, Japan and Europe - absorbed private debt (through purchase of rotten papers and through QE) so the system could be saved. But this debt didn't disappear, instead, it became public debt. What's worse: private debt has already spiked up, and already is higher than pre-2008 levels. The Too Big To Fail philosophy of the central banks only bought them time.

--//--

Extending my previous link (from the previous Open Thread) about money laundering:

No tax and chill: Netflix's offshore network

The global TV subscription streaming company, Netflix made $1.2bn in profits in 2018, of which $430m was shifted into tax havens, reports Tax Watch UK.

The estimated revenue from UK subscribers was about $860m, but most of this was booked offshore in a tax haven Dutch subsidiary. Netflix claims its UK parent company got only $48m in revenue. When the costs of Netflix UK productions were put against this, Netflix was able to avoid paying any tax at all to the UK government. Indeed, it received tax reliefs for productions in the UK from the government.

Ghost Ship , Jan 16 2020 23:10 utc | 45
Why nobody should go to Moscow fuck with Russia.

A simple question requires a simple answer. Russia's defence expenditure in PPP terms is probably in excess of $180 billion per year which buys a shedload of "capable military equipment".

Bob , Jan 16 2020 23:26 utc | 46
8 On can only hope that the "Gharles De Gaulle" get destroyed and that the french military at least take some initiative to get rid of Macron.
karlof1 , Jan 16 2020 23:40 utc | 47
It should be noted that the point Hudson's trying to make in his "Note to China" is to warn China of what if faces by using historical examples. As S points out @43, Russia's Ruble is very sound and its dollar and T-Bill holdings are extremely low. The message to China and the entire SCO community is to cease supporting the Outlaw US Empire's military by supporting its balance of payments by buying T-Bills. The sooner the SCO community, or just the core nations, can produce a new currency for use in trade, the sooner a crisis can be created within the Outlaw US Empire--essentially by turning the "intellectual weapon of financialization" against the global rogue nation foe.

[Jan 08, 2020] Deification of questionable metrics is an objective phenomenon that we observe under neoliberalism

Jan 08, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

.

  1. likbez , January 8, 2020 4:00 am

    @run75441 January 7, 2020 5:45 pm

    In my golden days, I did manufacturing throughput analysis, cost modeled parts, and reviewed component and transportation distribution. I am curious. Forget all that neoliberal stuff . . .

    Ohh, those golden days 😉

    Measurement has its place and is the cornerstone of science, but it is not equal to pattern recognition. And when applied to social phenomena with their complexity it is more often a trap, rather then an insight.

    You need to understand that.

    Deification of questionable metrics is an objective phenomenon that we observe under neoliberalism.

    A classic example of deification of a questionable metric under neoliberalism is the "cult of GDP" ("If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?") See , for example

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/24/metrics-gdp-economic-performance-social-progress

    Also see a rather interesting albeit raw take on the same ("Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." ) at:

    http://casinocapitalism.info/Skeptics/Financial_skeptic/Casino_capitalism/Number_racket/gdp_is_a_questionable_measure_of_economic_growth.shtml

    For example, many people discuss stagnation of GDP growth in Japan not understanding here we are talking about the country with shrinking population. And adjusted for this factor I am not sure that it not higher then in the USA (were it is grossly distorted by the cancerous growth of FIRE sector).

    So while comparing different years for a single country might make some limited sense, those who blindly compare GDP of different countries (even with PPP adjustment) IMHO belong to a modern category of economic charlatans. Kind of Lysenkoism, if you wish

    That tells you something about primitivism and pseudo-scientific nature of neoliberal economics.

    We also need to remember the "performance reviews travesty" which is such a clear illustration of "cult of measurement" abuses that it does not it even requires commentary. Google has abolished numerical ratings in April 2014.

    Recently I come across an interesting record of early application of it in AT&T at Brian W Kernighan book UNIX: A History and a Memoir at late 60th, early as 70th.

[Jan 02, 2020] The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It s Usefulness Happiness as an achievable goal is an illusion, but that doesn t mean happiness itself is not attainable by Darius Foroux

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." ..."
"... Recently I read Not Fade Away by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton. It's about Peter Barton, the founder of Liberty Media, who shares his thoughts about dying from cancer. ..."
Aug 22, 2019 | getpocket.com

For the longest time, I believed that there's only one purpose of life: And that is to be happy. Right? Why else go through all the pain and hardship? It's to achieve happiness in some way. And I'm not the only person who believed that. In fact, if you look around you, most people are pursuing happiness in their lives.

That's why we collectively buy shit we don't need, go to bed with people we don't love, and try to work hard to get approval of people we don't like.

Why do we do these things? To be honest, I don't care what the exact reason is. I'm not a scientist. All I know is that it has something to do with history, culture, media, economy, psychology, politics, the information era, and you name it. The list is endless.

We are who are.

Let's just accept that. Most people love to analyze why people are not happy or don't live fulfilling lives. I don't necessarily care about the why .

I care more about how we can change.

Just a few short years ago, I did everything to chase happiness.

But at the end of the day, you're lying in your bed (alone or next to your spouse), and you think: "What's next in this endless pursuit of happiness?"

Well, I can tell you what's next: You, chasing something random that you believe makes you happy.

It's all a façade. A hoax. A story that's been made up.

Did Aristotle lie to us when he said:

"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."

I think we have to look at that quote from a different angle. Because when you read it, you think that happiness is the main goal. And that's kind of what the quote says as well.

But here's the thing: How do you achieve happiness?

Happiness can't be a goal in itself. Therefore, it's not something that's achievable. I believe that happiness is merely a byproduct of usefulness. When I talk about this concept with friends, family, and colleagues, I always find it difficult to put this into words. But I'll give it a try here. Most things we do in life are just activities and experiences.

Those things should make you happy, right? But they are not useful. You're not creating anything. You're just consuming or doing something. And that's great.

Don't get me wrong. I love to go on holiday, or go shopping sometimes. But to be honest, it's not what gives meaning to life.

What really makes me happy is when I'm useful. When I create something that others can use. Or even when I create something I can use.

For the longest time I foud it difficult to explain the concept of usefulness and happiness. But when I recently ran into a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the dots connected.

Emerson says:

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."

And I didn't get that before I became more conscious of what I'm doing with my life. And that always sounds heavy and all. But it's actually really simple.

It comes down to this: What are you DOING that's making a difference?

Did you do useful things in your lifetime? You don't have to change the world or anything. Just make it a little bit better than you were born.

If you don't know how, here are some ideas.

That's just some stuff I like to do. You can make up your own useful activities.

You see? It's not anything big. But when you do little useful things every day, it adds up to a life that is well lived. A life that mattered.

The last thing I want is to be on my deathbed and realize there's zero evidence that I ever existed.

Recently I read Not Fade Away by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton. It's about Peter Barton, the founder of Liberty Media, who shares his thoughts about dying from cancer.

It's a very powerful book and it will definitely bring tears to your eyes. In the book, he writes about how he lived his life and how he found his calling. He also went to business school, and this is what he thought of his fellow MBA candidates:

"Bottom line: they were extremely bright people who would never really anything, would never add much to society, would leave no legacy behind. I found this terribly sad, in the way that wasted potential is always sad."

You can say that about all of us. And after he realized that in his thirties, he founded a company that turned him into a multi-millionaire.

Another person who always makes himself useful is Casey Neistat . I've been following him for a year and a half now, and every time I watch his YouTube show , he's doing something.

He also talks about how he always wants to do and create something. He even has a tattoo on his forearm that says "Do More."

Most people would say, "why would you work more?" And then they turn on Netflix and watch back to back episodes of Daredevil.

A different mindset.

Being useful is a mindset. And like with any mindset, it starts with a decision. One day I woke up and thought to myself: What am I doing for this world? The answer was nothing.

And that same day I started writing. For you it can be painting, creating a product, helping elderly, or anything you feel like doing.

Don't take it too seriously. Don't overthink it. Just DO something that's useful. Anything.

Darius Foroux writes about productivity, habits, decision making, and personal finance. His ideas and work have been featured in TIME, NBC, Fast Company, Inc., Observer, and many more publications. Join his free weekly newsletter.

More from Darius Foroux

This article was originally published on October 3, 2016, by Darius Foroux, and is republished here with permission. Darius Foroux writes about productivity, habits, decision making, and personal finance.

Join his newsletter.

[Jan 01, 2020] "Maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist enterprises" is self-destuctive and anti-social as it is equlent to local optimizatin of a complex social system

Jan 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

anarchyst , says: December 19, 2019 at 3:56 pm GMT

@Dutch Boy rk, employees need to make an adequate wage. Unfortunately, this premise does not exist in today's business climate.

Henry Ford openly criticized those of the "tribe" for manipulating wall street and banksters to their own advantage, and was roundly (and unjustly) criticized for pointing out the TRUTH.

Catholic priest, Father Coughlin did the same thing and was punished by the Catholic church, despite his popularity and exposing the TRUTH of the American economy and the outsider internationalists that ran it . . . and STILL run it.

Our race to the bottom will not be without consequences. A great realignment is necessary (and is coming) . .

[Dec 29, 2019] The Loss of Fair Play

Dec 27, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
This site regularly discusses the rise of neoliberalism and its consequences, such as rising inequality and lower labor bargaining rights. But it's also important to understand that these changes were not organic but were the result of a well-financed campaign to change the values of judges and society at large to be more business-friendly. But the sacrifice of fair dealing as a bedrock business and social principle has had large costs.

We've pointed out how lower trust has increased contracting costs: things that use to be done on a handshake or a simple letter agreement are now elaborately papered up. The fact that job candidates will now engage in ghosting, simply stopping to communicate with a recruiter rather than giving a ritually minimalistic sign off, is a testament to how impersonal hiring is now perceived to be, as well as often-abused workers engaging in some power tit for tat when they can.

But on a higher level, the idea of fair play was about self-regulation of conduct. Most people want to see themselves as morally upright, even if some have to go through awfully complicated rationalizations to believe that. But when most individuals lived in fairly stable social and business communities, they had reason to be concerned that bad conduct might catch up with them. It even happens to a small degree now.

Greg Lippmann, patient zero of toxic CDOs at Deutsche Bank, was unable to get his kids into fancy Manhattan private schools because his reputation preceded him. But the case examples for decades have gone overwhelmingly the other way. My belief is that a watershed event was the ability of Wall Street renegade, and later convicted felon Mike Milken, to rehabilitate himself spoke volumes as to the new normal of money trumping propriety.

Another aspect of the decline in the importance of fair dealing is the notion of the obligations of power, that individuals in a position of authority have a duty to

The abandonment of lofty-sounding principles like being fair has other costs. We've written about the concept of obliquity, how in complex systems, it's not possible to chart a simple path though them because it's impossible to understand it well enough to begin to do so. John Kay, who has made a study of the issue and eventually wrote a book about it , pointed out as an illustration that studies of similarly-sized companies in the same industry showed that ones that adopted nobler objectives did better in financial terms than ones that focused on maximizing shareholder value.

Our Brexit regulars wound up talking about these issues as part of a UK election post mortem. Hoisted from e-mail. First from David:

Around the time of the cold dawn of Friday 13 December, I began to ask myself why the whole grisly Brexit business had turned out so differently to what I, and many others, had expected. Now it's true that politics is unpredictable, but in 2015, any satirist worthy of their name would surely not have dared to imagine a sequence of events so bizarre as that which actually happened. And of course we can all be wrong, but I was basing my judgements not only on a lifetime of watching politicians at play, but also on the well-understood general principles of how politics, and especially international politics, operates.

The conclusion I came to involves conceding that, yes, politics is unpredictable, yes we all make wrong calls from time to time, but there's something more profound than that. Simply put, the traditional rules and procedures of British politics have stopped applying. It's not now possible to count on the British system for planning, forethought, rationality, strategy, tactical sense, political sense, common sense or any other kind of sense.

Consider. Cameron's referendum promise was an error of judgement, but it could have been handled very differently even so. I'd assumed that there would be some kind of threshold (55% perhaps), and some provision for a later stage of reflection and time-wasting.

I assumed that the government would be wary of the possible result, and try to de-dramatise the referendum campaign.

I assumed that Remain would do a reasonably competent job, underlining the positive benefits of EU membership.

I assumed that the result, if it was "leave" would be the beginning of a long process of reflection and discussion. A Royal Commission, or something, would be set up, with several years to work out what kind of future relationship there should be with the EU. Bits of the UK most affected (agriculture for example) would be consulted in depth. Discreet soundings would be made throughout Europe to see what our partners might accept. Only after all this was done would it be time to press the Art 50 button.

At that point, I assumed, the UK would be well prepared and, in the traditional manner, have working papers and draft treaty language to propose as soon as the negotiations started. All aspects (including NI) would have been at least thought of.

I assumed that the Cabinet would have agreed a fairly detailed set of objectives and negotiating guidelines to give to the UK delegation, fine-tuned in the light of first reactions from partners.

I assumed that the Cabinet would have agreed fallback positions and some idea of what the Tories, and Parliament, would accept.

Literally none of this was true.

Now we're not talking rocket-science here. Yes, the UK system was once pretty Rolls-Royce, but the kind of list I've given above would have seemed obvious to any middle-level functionary of any medium-sized country. Actually achieving all of it is not necessarily easy, but at least you can make a serious attempt: there are important stakes involved.

So what does this imply for the future?

Well, things are getting worse, not better. The Cabinet hasn't even begun to think yet about the future relationship. Some of them probably think Brexit is all over. I don't think there's any agreement even about the vaguest outlines of this future relationship, which means that it could be months before any political objectives emerge, if they ever do.

Which is to say that we are in for another year of Keystone Cops diplomacy, with the stakes if anything even greater.

From Clive:

Your thought-process sounds like my trains of thought. And when I think those sorts of thoughts, I think that I'm a remnant or a bygone era. Which I am.

What disappeared from that world was playing fair. Everyone played fair, or, at least, playing fair was a bedrock than you could drift away from, but, sooner or later, you fell back on it.

There will be a lot of casualties until our societies get to the stage where they can rediscover fairness. I bought a book from a second hand bookstore about the founding of the EEC, from 1978 I think the copyright said it was. When I read it, it's like it was written by some long-since vanished ancient civilisation. There were honourable intentions, strategies to deliver them, honest evaluations of emerging problems and, above all, a shared shouldering of responsibility to resolve them equitably. There was a sense of pride which leaps off the pages not at what had been achieved, but at what the prevailing culture intended to achieve. The book went on about the European ideal -- and didn't think it was in any danger of naivety.

That world has vanished -- and it's not coming back any time soon.

Brexit was a reaction to that. We can't fix it, think a majority of the U.K. population, and we're not even going to try. This is why Leave has progressed the way it has. The last thing the Leave majority (or maybe the smidge over 50% who think Leave is the best option) want to do is try to return to the failed common-cause based solutions. Johnson has no intention whatsoever of anything other than the lightest of lightweight FTAs -- or even no FTA. Anything more would be an anathema to the Thatcher-esque approach the Conservatives have on remaking UK society by severing all EU ties. This isn't really Thatcherism -- a common misconception. It's the sort of response which Thatcher would have devised, had she been placed in the same position, so is easily confused.

So this isn't some unplanned, accidental stumbling along to an unexpected surprise conclusion. It is, rather, a laser like focus on an intended destination.

Anyone expecting some great effort or thought-process to be applied by the U.K. to salvaging a relationship with the EU will be disappointed. In effect, they'd be asking for the U.K. to spend time and resources saving something that isn't, in the U.K.'s prevailing worldview, worth saving. The EU has been nothing but a bother, so the thinking goes, what's the point in trying to flog the dead horse that is the European ideal? What did it ever do for us, anyway..?

Brexit is just a here's-one-we-made-earlier example of a long-term global trend. If humanism -- or fairness as I reduced it to earlier -- makes a comeback, it might all be fixable. In the meantime, prepare for an increasingly atomised, separatist world.

Vlade's response:

I'd like to agree with you. Except I believe you're idealising it. The world was never playing fair – but it did cooperate more, because the US needed the Europe more in the cold war than it does now (when it's more of a rival, definitely in Trumps' eyes). Hell, the Soviet Block cooperated – except it didn't really, it did what the SU told it to. But it definitely didn't play fair. It did follow the rules, because the cost of breaking them was seen as too high (US was terrified I believe of France and Italy doing a deal with the SU). At least to me, following the rules and playing fair are distinct.

It's possible that the western society was more fair before 90s, I can't know. But again, I suspect that a lot of it was almost a self-protection against the SU and "communism", which disappeared in the 80s., but possibly started disappearing even in 70s (when you live with some danger for a while, you get oblivious to it).

I do think that the Brexit was a reaction to the word that was. But I disagree that it was really the EU specific reaction, as in "the EU is the source of all this". It played the part, but the underlying reasons were IMO much more varied than the EU – where I have doubts many of the people there really understood in any way, except as an externality you can rail against.

You get the crawing for the world-that-was in the US, and it doesn't have any EU. You get it in Russia, and it has the EU and the US, or, if you want, "the West" which puts conveniently both of them together.

The world as most people knew it is coming apart, and chances are it will get worse (and who knows it it ever gets better). In times like those, people want the world-that-was. Sometimes it can actually be a force for good, like after WW2 in "the west". Except even there it wasn't the world-that-was, but more of the world-we-want (on both sides of the iron curtain, there was a reason why the communist regimes were, at least initially, strongly supported by the populace). But wanting the world-that-was was also what brought Nazis and Fascist into the power.

And PlutoniumKun's:

A key casualty of neoliberalism was corporatism in its more benign form. It used to be that policy was made in the early hours in those proverbial smoke filled rooms where different groups at least made some type of attempt at compromise. This is still a feature of many countries and sectors, but I think its significant that the rot is most advanced in the neolib early adopters. It's not just the formal art of making compromises, it's the simple force of human contact when people in the same room together. It's unfortunate I think that the UK joined the EU just as it lost interest in being run by civil servants having endless meetings with sectoral interest groups. This is a core reason I think why the UK never really engaged with the EU, even if in the short term its engagement was quite effective (essentially bullying other countries into getting its way on issues like agriculture and competition policy).

But as we've discussed before, the long term destruction of the British civil service has in many ways been just as stupid, and just as damaging, as the long term destruction of Britain's manufacturing base. In both cases, the reasons have been ideological, not pragmatic.

Outsiders I think see it more clearly. I was travelling in Asia for a while and I was really surprised at how casually people would discuss what they see as the once admired anglosphere fall apart. Most Asians in my experience viewed Britain with a mixture of distrust and some awe and admiration. Now the commonest response seems to be a shrug of the shoulder or just plain schadenfreude.

This bodes particularly badly for the UK's trade negotiators when they start face to face meetings. They will be a little like late 19th Century Russia or Turkey -seen as a country who's only right to be at the top table is due to history, not present circumstances. The gradual retreat of the US from the eastern Pacific is pretty much seen as a done deal, everyone is frantically scrambling to ensure they are not caught on the hop. I'm a great believer that the true indicator of what a country sees as its future can be seen in what it spends its military budget on. Every major Asian country is spending serious cash on domestically sourced air superiority, long distance strike capability, in addition to A2AD for its brown water coasts.

There are many parts of the world where the 'old ways' are still pretty much intact – much of Europe still likes the EU and the way it works and vaguely corporatist/social democratic ways of doing things. Its easy to get carried away with stories of austerity and decay, but when I travel in Europe much of it (including countries like Spain and Portugal) look pretty good and no more or less full of discontent than they ever were. Much of northern Europe and individual countries like Portugal are doing very well indeed, and France has been defying the naysayers for as long as I've been reading English language economics papers and magazines. Its not clear to me that the foment in those countries – even in France – is much worse than its been in any given post war decade. There are cycles within cycles for these things. Ireland is, all things considered, booming economically and culturally content, austerity a long forgotten problem for most people.

What we are seeing is the postponed breakdown of the traditional centre left and rights. The wipeout of traditional left wing parties has been much commented upon, but less obvious is the breakdown of the old Christian Democrat/centre right tradition in much of Europe and other parts of the world in favour of a more libertarian/populist/nationalist form. It's just that the change has tended to be more within parties, while the left is always more fissiparous.

I think the left is slowly, very slowly, reformulating along lines closer to the older anarchy tradition, as seen by the rise of Green Parties – but it will take time before a more grassroots, collaborationist form of left wing politics really starts to make a difference. I think the libertarian/neolib wing of the right is being well and truly wiped out by the more ruthless nationalistic (I hate to use the F word) tradition. The transformation of the Tory party into an English nationalist party with a focus on serving its new working class/lower middle class base has been carried out with quite remarkable speed. The Tory business class will come to deeply regret its silence over the internal revolution that took place post the Brexit vote.

All this of course is within the context of slowing growth and a rapid climate deterioration. All bets are off in significant parts of the world as the fires rage. The only certainty about climate change is that there will be completely unforeseen negative impacts.

BillC , December 27, 2019 at 4:40 am

4th 'graph is truncated.

Massinissa , December 27, 2019 at 2:32 pm

The fourth paragraph is still incomplete at the time of this comment.

Ignacio , December 27, 2019 at 5:28 am

"Remove fairness from society and you create the conditions for revolt"

This is a quote from a march article by Ben Felton on fairness and brexit.

Ignacio , December 27, 2019 at 5:37 am

Sorry, I forgot to say that this was one of these think-provoking posts that I like so much.
In a loosing fairness world, what is the proper personal conduct one must follow? Go with the trend, or try to keep the old-style way as much as you can?

I would expect the whole spectrum of answers to this question. Fortunately, there will always be some people that put fairness forefront.

Eustache de Saint Pierre , December 27, 2019 at 7:07 am

" Fortunately, there will always be some people that put fairness forefront "

Yes Ignacio but I do hope youngsters don't become embittered by a world that is certainly a lot harsher for them than it was for me 40 odd years ago.

After a year of fighting to get money from those who have plenty of it, am now working on a transatlantic commission for a wealthy guy from Colorado, who has actually shocked me with his fairness – particularly as I was worried about the possible downsides of getting into such a far flung relationship.

He has actually kept my head above water while am waiting for a large long overdue payment from a public institution that I almost wish privatisation on for their lack of effort in addressing the situation.

I had a great Christmas trying to play Santa without the suit, with the best bit being the giant full facial smile received from one of those likely old beyond her years Roma women selling " The Big Issue " as she sat as if clinging to the wall in the pouring rain.

Winston Smith , December 27, 2019 at 7:41 am

I hope everyone at NC is having a fine Holiday can anyone post the link to some of the videos explaining neoliberalism posted at NC a short while ago? Can't seem to find them. Thanks

flora , December 27, 2019 at 7:49 am

This video is a pretty good intro.

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/neoliberalism-2/

Winston Smith , December 27, 2019 at 9:19 am

Yes that's it! Thanks.

Carla , December 27, 2019 at 2:54 pm

I've just tried, for the second time, to watch that video. For me, it is too quickly paced to be effective, or even informative -- and mind you, like other NC regulars, I KNOW this stuff. IMO, Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains" does a much better job. Yes, it takes more than 26 minutes to read -- but I think understanding what has happened to the world over the last 75 to 80 years SHOULD take more than 26 minutes.

flora , December 27, 2019 at 3:27 pm

Yes, it is quick paced. I had to do the pause-rewind-replay this or that bit, pause-rewind-replay steps several times to get what was being said. Too much condensed info for me to take in all at once.

inode_buddha , December 27, 2019 at 8:14 am

Thank you, Yves. This post is about exactly the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. Frankly I spend a lot of time mourning for what our society used to be, and the notion that nobody has the backbone to do the right thing regardless.

I spend my share of time in conversation with many people in the upper/middle class, business leaders and Conservatives in particular. The entire thinking is, "Losers cry about being fair, winners go home and bang the Prom Queen". [paraphrased]

I always ask them if this is the kind of society they want to live in, and raise their kids in. It is lizard brain, writ large.

Anyway, I just want to say "thank you" for all your efforts as a beacon in the darkness. It is comforting to know that someone else also can see.

DHG , December 27, 2019 at 8:47 am

They dont have the backbone as we are deep into the "time of the end" where the love of the greater number will cool off, they will be lovers of money and themselves, and the list goes on. This system of things is all Satans and its on the verge of being extinguished forever.

Synoia , December 27, 2019 at 8:22 am

What disappeared from that world was playing fair. Everyone played fair, or, at least, playing fair was a bedrock than you could drift away from, but, sooner or later, you fell back on it.

Was it "fair" or was it Because the Soviet Block offered an alternative, purportedly Communism but what appears to me as totalitarianism. The alternative to the Communist block had to appear more appealing for the players to gain advantage in the great game.

With the Communist block gone, do we now just see the reality, and whatever accommodation was made to have the Western/US based system more appealing has now changed. How is the US' system viewed in Latin America? As "fair?"

When the British Empire controlled much of the world, was it "fair"? I was a part of that, and I could not describe it as "fair".

In the British Empire's demolition the US played a good part of being "fair," but it was "fair" only if it advanced the US' interests. An example of this is the forgiveness of War Loans. Germany, on the Soviet systems' door step had war debts forgiven. The UK, which paid a huge penalty for fighting the wars received no such favor for its "special relationship" with the US, coupled with a not-so-polite demand to dismantle the British Empire (aka Self Determination).

I perceive the world's governing system not in terms of left and right, but as the surface of a sphere, with the the horizontal axis being changing from "free" to "totalitarian" which can be approached from the political left or the right, and the vertical axis varying from market based (neoliberal) to centrally controlled, and any country is always being affected by words or threats to slide from one point on the sphere along some rhumbh line to another point.

Katniss Everdeen , December 27, 2019 at 8:25 am

The idea of "fairness" is one of those things that used to be a lot more clear in the past than it seems to be today. In general, the rules were the rules, and anyone who decided to play accepted them. A level and "fair" playing field, with the same rules for everyone, was what determined the "winner," and made "winning" legitimate.

But lately society has apparently decided to determine the "winners" first, and change the rules to match the desired outcome. That approach has wreaked havoc with the concept of "fairness."

Everybody gets a trophy for "participation." Eliminate the electoral college because hillary didn't win it. Pretend that biological males are actually women because that's how they "self-identify," and let them "compete" against biological women instead of those with the same chromosomes.

You can't have "fairness" without rules, and playing fast and loose with the rules means you can never tell who the cheaters are.

flora , December 27, 2019 at 8:51 am

Thanks for this post. It seems like many of the economic and democratic govt and even social rules once reliably enforced by laws and custom have become mere suggestions. The idea of rules or fair play that existed from, say, the 1930's – 1980's, in the US now seem entirely overtaken by a sort of modern, re-invigorated, social Darwinism, a once rightly discredited moral theory. imo.

shinola , December 27, 2019 at 11:15 am

Ah, yes – the self-licking ice cream cone of social Darwinism. Something to the effect of:

"I won the roll of the die because I deserve to. The fact that I used a loaded die & you didn't just proves that you are a born loser."

flora , December 27, 2019 at 1:08 pm

Everything old is new again, unfortunately. Neoliberalism is like the old social Darwinism dressed up in newer, erudite, clothes. Substitute today's words 'the market' for yesterday's words 'the strongest and fittest' and you have a pretty close 1:1 match. Misapplying Darwin's studies in biology to sociology.

The following text was written for school kids' history class. It's a quick read.

http://www.american-historama.org/1881-1913-maturation-era/social-darwinism.htm

shinola , December 27, 2019 at 3:16 pm

Thanks! Good overview of the subject.

Davenport , December 27, 2019 at 3:06 pm

And way before Darwinianism, at the dawn of capitalism, we had the Puritans.

According to their doctrine, if you were wealthy it was because you were favoured by God. If you weren't wealthy, God didn't intend you to be. In every era, the selfish and the greedy have a justification.

Nothing to do with the fact that you stitched up your fellow countrymen by enclosing common land and kicking those that had used it for generations off their means of self subsistence.

Frank Little , December 27, 2019 at 9:31 am

Your comment about the courts role in eroding a sense of fairness and, by extension, trust in the system called to mind the courts' role in maintaining the vast US prison system. The Supreme Court was recently considering a case filed from a pro se prisoner and Justice Sotomayor referenced a secret policy within the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals of denying all petitions filed by pro se prisoners for thirteen years without even so much as glancing at the briefs. The policy only came to light when an employee of the court referenced it in their note before committing suicide, apparently out of guilt.

The Fifth Circuit happens to include Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate of any state. Eventually the policy was reversed, but in practice I'm sure most filings from pro se petitioners in prison are met with a similar lack of interest and consideration. Perhaps there are good reasons to dismiss some filings quickly given the large backlogs and legal rumors and nonsense that makes it way through prisons.

However, the courts remain the last best hope for prisoners in trying to overturn wrongful convictions or address abuse at the hands of prison officials, at least for now. If the courts are happy to deny these people fair consideration for efficiency's sake unless they can secure outside counsel you can bet this abuse and neglect will continue. Maybe that sounds like a fine trade-off to those in power now, but the long-term effect is the erosion of trust and confidence in the system beyond just those directly affected.

Steve Ruis , December 27, 2019 at 9:42 am

Another consequence of the loss of fair play is a termination of the phenomenon that many workers, especially white collar workers, wanted to believe that their employer was trustworthy and, as a consequence, they trusted their employer at a higher level that is or was warranted. This trust was mis-placed to some extent but served as a bulwark when relationships between employee and employer became strained.

I wonder now, whether this is still the case. It seems not to be. Granted employers have earned their employees distrust or, at a bare minimum, lack of trust that formerly was granted (due to wishful thinking).

Pelham , December 27, 2019 at 10:44 am

I know exactly what you're talking about. Before I was laid off, I watched as many colleagues were shown the door. Oddly from a trust perspective, most of these people were vastly more talented and experienced than the employees who continued to keep their jobs. (Though, of course, from a strictly shareholder perspective, their high pay levels justified their dismissal.)

So from the canned employees' point of view, after years of awards, high praise and affirmation from management, the fact that they were being hustled out the door (sometimes literally) amounted to a profound betrayal of trust. And you could see it in the look of shock on many of their faces.

When my time came, I had absorbed the lesson and had completely detached my ego from my work, no longer taking any pride in what I did for a living. And I never will again as long as I'm working for someone else, even an employer who in the moment is kind and appreciative. They can turn on you in a heartbeat, and for the flimsiest of reasons.

James , December 27, 2019 at 3:47 pm

Or, we are all temporary employees, whether we know it or not.

Carolinian , December 27, 2019 at 9:46 am

Just to add in impeachment (prexit?), it once was considered a big deal that Nixon lied ("the coverup is worse than the crime"). And lying was at the center of the Clinton impeachment. But that's less true with the current dispute and perhaps that's because the impeachers themselves are shamelessly lying. The truth no longer seems to matter to anyone as long as a fairy tale "narrative" can be found to substitute. Perhaps it's not so much that the world has become more evil or selfish but that modern society has a serious reality problem. People still understand fairness but simply pretend they are being fair as long as nobody is challenging their narrative (see Amazon post today). And that may be because we are saturated with media that are all too willing to tell us what we want to hear.

Thank goodness for NC where some of us come–and for a long time–to find out the truth. Perhaps it's not just a coincidence that many of those who hang out here seem to be older–old enough to remember a time when truth mattered.

Off The Street , December 27, 2019 at 10:57 am

A little more patience, but not too much, is needed in awaiting the inevitable and continuing sunlight disinfectant applied to so many top level employees of the FBI, DOJ, their institutions and other malefactors in other branches. When, not if, that day arrives, when perp walks, trials, sentencing, mea culpas and much feckless deflection and gnashing of teeth occur, then will there be some perception of a symbolic return to the fairness that was once felt by much of the country. The preponderance of evidence, not punditry or spin, points to likely criminal convictions, ruined careers and discredited institutions. Repairing those institutions, and regaining public trust will be difficult given the inertia and FUD residues that have built up, but we do have a country at stake for all of us.

There are many other aspects of the justice system that need review and reform, as noted by other commenters. Without some highly publicized changes to those institutions to restore some initial and fundamental element of trust, then people both in the US and abroad will have doubts about the Rule of Law. Most people do not want to have a country where that statue of a blindfolded justice has to peek to see who is trying to tip the scales.

The Rev Kev , December 27, 2019 at 9:49 am

The main word used here is fairness but what we are really talking about is justice. It does not matter what country or culture that we are talking about, we all know when we are being treated fairly, or justly, and when we are suffering an injustice. An example? Two people have a meal together when one reaches over and helps themselves to the food on the other person's plate. That sort of unfairness can get you killed in some places. But likely that feeling of unfairness or injustice is universal.

And here is the crux of neoliberalism. It picks sinners and losers – deliberately – and abandons those they deem to be losers. But it does not do so on the basis of worth but on what it perceives to be worth which is why a college sports coach or administrator can earn millions while a professor earns peanuts. If anything, there is a strong streak of Social Darwinism to this as a justification to who these "winners" are. But most of us can think of people in business, sports, politics, etc. who in reality aren't worth two bits based on their performance.

The result for the UK? Those designated the losers who were abandoned, policed and watched by the winners saw their chance to strike back at them by picking Leave in the Brexit campaign. Life was not good for them and it was not going to get any better and so they decided to make a choice to deny the winners something that they valued – Remain. There is not a doubt in my mind that if these people had not been abandoned but had been able to share in the success of the country, then they too would have chosen Remain. You saw the same with the Trump vote in 2016 in the US. And this is only the first installment.

Rory , December 27, 2019 at 1:43 pm

I think the insight in your last paragraph, more than any other single factor, explains Donald Trump's electoral success in 2016 and identifies who his "base" really are.

upstater , December 27, 2019 at 10:16 am

The court system is perhaps the best example of how Fair Play has been degraded in the US.

For 20+ years we ran a small mom-and-pop consulting business for large companies, all Fortune-500. We did highly technical work with such efficiency and economies of scale providing industry standings and granular decision support, the companies themselves or McKinsey-types could never come close to doing a similar product. At least until an industry association, facilitated by a customer decided to steal misappropriate our intellectual property and produce a knock-off product. This happened even though we offered to collaborate with the industry association and had a "good" contract prohibiting stealing misappropriation.

Let it suffice to say that a mom-and-pop consulting business is at serious disadvantage as soon as you get a lawyer and file a lawsuit in federal court. The defense attorneys were given a blank check by their members and spent high 7 figure sums trying to pulverize us. By the time the thing was winding down, we were paying our attorneys our of our retirement account. I understand that in the UK and EU things are even more stacked against plaintiffs.

While 98% of federal civil cases and tossed out or settled, we ended up with a 3 week trial. The defendants team had 3 partners, an IT person and paralegal from a national firm in court at all times, plus 3 people working locally at rented office space. We had a mid-size regional firm represent us -- it was not cheap.

What strikes us most is the defendants seemed to be on home turf from the get-go with the court. There were YEARS of delays and all sorts of spurious filings and even a counterclaim based on fiction. This is standard procedure. Further, it was a highly technical case and we performed thousands of hours of work to refine the details for the lawyers and jury to understand. The defendants had unlimited resources to obfuscate and confuse, which they did masterfully. The majority of evidentiary ruling were in favor of the defendants. It was a huge upward struggle.

What is even worse is there is zero incentive for defendants not to lie mis-remember facts. Our lead attorney told us in 25 years of litigation practice he had never seen or heard of a sanction, much less prosecution, for perjury. In fact some of these liars were promoted and rewarded for their courtroom performance.

This whole process took 5 years. We "won"; the jury didn't buy the industry's arguments. But our business was destroyed, we've been blacklisted and any residual value a business with 20+ years of stable income was destroyed. The industry group pays their staff handsomely (its just added to your monthly bill) and while a few people were pushed aside, the main perps remain and are well compensated. They plod along with a garbage imitation, but the associations membership executives don't care -- there is no third party assessment of their performance -- they grade their own performance now.

Needless to say, we are tired, disgusted and cynical. But glad we won and that it is over. I would not do it again

Anonymous 2 , December 27, 2019 at 10:36 am

Very sorry to hear your story. That sucks.

It reminds me a bit of the Phone Hacking trial in the UK. Peter Jukes has a good book on it – Beyond Contempt. The mismatch between the resources available to the News International people and those available to the British Government was risible. As a result News International was effectively in control of the proceedings almost from start to finish, though the Crown was able to get Coulson as there was incriminating evidence against him in writing.

Yes there may well have been perjury as well and the police seemed as I recall to have been very slow to get to a farm where there were reports that major bundles of paper were going on to a bonfire. Hugh Grant, when he taped a journalist, was told that 20% of Metropolitan Police officers had been bribed by the press. Wonder if that had anything to do with it?

And yet many Britons still think that the UK is a pretty straight place ..so much more honest than those foreign countries.

Carolinian , December 27, 2019 at 1:40 pm

Maybe they should just keep out Murdoch.

Have recently watched series The Loudest Voice about Fox News. They make Murdoch look like an avuncular figure in order to heighten the villainy of Ailes but of course you don't let the organ grinder off the hook so as to blame the monkey. No Rupert no Fox News and perhaps no current version of the NYT that acts like Fox News.

Off The Street , December 27, 2019 at 3:59 pm

You can watch the thinly-disguised Succession for more of a look at the Murdochesque world.

Adam Eran , December 27, 2019 at 1:26 pm

Thanks for the summary of the courts' action as a millstone around the neck of honest commerce, and my sympathy for your loss.

It's worth remembering this kind of thing has consequences too. Fred Koch patented the basic refining processes to turn crude oil into useful products, then the Rockefellers' refineries essentially stole those processes (used them without paying patent royalties) in their refineries. Koch sued .and *lost*! A few years later it came out that the Rockefellers bribed the judge and Koch re-sued and won but at what cost? And ever after Koch and his offspring came after the government whose courts were so corrupt.

The lament about declining standards is as old as the Pharaohs–read Howard Zinn's People's History of the U.S. which exposes the New World's history of venality–but recent events seem to be sounding the depths of the most profound dishonesty. It's gotten bad enough that political economist Mark Blythe talks about the positive impact a disaster like the Climate catastrophe would have in breaking up this cabal of evil.

Fíréan , December 27, 2019 at 2:16 pm

Your story reminds me of Florida inventor Steve Morton's case against copyright theft being closed down and covered up by then-FBI Director Mueller and then-Attorney General Eric Holder. Definitely a good example of unfairness at the top of the system.

For further information on Morton's case and story a good search engine for "Steve Morton" , " Fincantieri ", " Mueller", " Holder" , "Comey" , ought bring up an outlet covering said situation.

Otherwise, for starters, i offer you a link : https://truepundit.com/mueller-holder-shut-down-fbi-investigation-of-stolen-u-s-stealth-defense-technology-implicating-lockheed-martin-while-comey-was-lockheeds-top-lawyer/

Pleased to read that You "won" Your case.

Robert Gray , December 27, 2019 at 10:27 am

from PK:

> The gradual retreat of the US from the eastern Pacific is pretty much seen as a done deal,
> everyone is frantically scrambling to ensure they are not caught on the hop.

Not sure I understand this. Eastern Pacific? What retreat?

Off The Street , December 27, 2019 at 4:01 pm

PK likely meant western Pacific .
Dragon territory, East Asia, still at war with Oceania.

Wukchumni , December 27, 2019 at 10:34 am

Wall*Street is often described as a casino, but in reality most every house of chance has a security exchange commission of it's own, making sure that there is no cheating, and fair play on both sides of the green felt jungle, and should a dealer in it's employ be caught in an act of larceny, they'll be arrested toot suite.

When Wall*Street was paid off on losing wagers a dozen years ago, fair play lost it's luster and has only become more meaningless in it's absence.

Summer , December 27, 2019 at 10:36 am

Neoliberalism is insidious.
So now, that austerity from the EZ and the like minded hasn't been all that bad?
Absolutely insidious!

Palinurus , December 27, 2019 at 10:40 am

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
speech to Illinois legislature, Jan. 1837.

Jeremy Grimm , December 27, 2019 at 1:00 pm

I find your Lincoln quotes curious. I thought Lincoln that after splitting wood for rail supports Lincoln made his name and money as a lawyer arguing cases for the large rail road corporations. If so, the quote you provided seems much like Eisenhower's speech on the Military Industrial Complex.

ambrit , December 27, 2019 at 1:18 pm

"Lincoln made his name and money as a lawyer "
How better to learn about the 'real' machinations of the ruling elites? What Lincoln did with that 'education' was what made him famous, not the education itself.

Trent , December 27, 2019 at 3:07 pm

Something tells me the A Lincoln we've been taught about prob wasn't the real A Lincoln

Vegetius , December 27, 2019 at 10:42 am

Societal trust is impossible under conditions of imposed Multiculturalism. The sooner progressives figure this out, the better off we will all be.

flora , December 27, 2019 at 11:12 am

The word 'multiculturalism' has a range of meanings, both sociological and political. You need clearly define your meaning of the word. As it is, your assertion is vague, imo.

ambrit , December 27, 2019 at 11:15 am

I imagine that the operative word in his or her comment is "imposed." That implies an 'authority' that can dictate to everyone else. Such a state of affairs would be the opposite of what I grew up imagining "progressivism" was.

flora , December 27, 2019 at 11:24 am

Yes. "Imposed". I mistook the 'who' for the 'what'. Thanks.

Summer , December 27, 2019 at 12:06 pm

What are the conditions imposed?
Because as much of a problem as people have with the idea of "cancel culture" there still is the flip side that people aren't going to continue to let themselves be treated like garbage.

ambrit , December 27, 2019 at 12:55 pm

The ultimate 'problem' in all this is the perennial one of who controls the resources, or, as Marx and Engels put it, the means of production.
People will be "treated like garbage" for as long as 'garbage' is all that is available to them. In an extremely unequal society, as the modern Wast has evolved into, once some threshold of resource 'ownership' is crossed, the only feasible method of redressing the balance seems to be outright revolt and warfare. Except for the example of Cincinnatus in the Roman Republic period, (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus ) who knows of a time when concentrated power ever voluntarily gave up any significant portion of their powers?
Inequality is inherently unfair.

JTMcPhee , December 27, 2019 at 1:47 pm

People do interesting and sometimes beautiful things with garbage:

"Landfill Harmonic: Paraguay's Recycled Orchestra," https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2019/12/landfill-harmonic-paraguay-recycled-orchestra-191225143800657.html

Summer , December 27, 2019 at 4:02 pm

The previously "imposed upon" know all about it

ambrit , December 27, 2019 at 10:49 am

With the site admin's forbearance.
We encountered the 'ground level' fruits of the loss of the ethos of fairness yesterday.
Phyl was told to see the "Pain Management Practice," an independent section of the local medical apparat in order to 'manage' her use of the pain meds she was prescribed for her amputation. So far, so good. The appointment is for two o'clock. Show up at one thirty o'clock to fill out paperwork. Due to a tight schedule and other impediments, we show up at the office at a quarter to two o'clock. The receptionist nurses, who sit at a desk behind an armoured glass partition, tell us that we are late and must reschedule the appointment for two weeks later. At which time, Phyllis begins to argue. This is normal behaviour with her when confronted with 'unfair' conditions. One of the receptionists relents somewhat and goes back into the back room and consults with someone.
She returns and declares; "No exceptions are allowed. You are late and that is that."
Phyl replies: "You can see my problem. Are you going to be rigid?"
Receptionist; "The best I can do for you is two weeks off."
Phyl; "Is there anything sooner?"
Receptionist; "Do you want the appointment or not? We have work to do here!"
Me, sotto voice to Phyl; "We will get nowhere with this bunch. Take the next appointment and we'll see what we can do later."
Phyl; "All right."
As we left the waiting room, one of the two patients sitting there was visibly trying not to laugh. The other patient got up and helped open the large glass door so I could maneuver the wheelchair out into the hallway.
The point of all this, (besides an apologetically admitted venting on my part,) is that this medical establishment has opted for a rigid and formalized rules based imposition of authority in place of any sort of fairness or flexibility in dealing with their clients. (I use the word client in it's original [?] Roman sense.) Speaking with several of our neighbors yesterday I have discovered that this sort of rigidity in scheduling is becoming more common around here.
One of the main features of fairness, at the least in medical situations is the belief that the patients deserve some leeway in their treatment at the hands of 'officials.' This new experience of ours highlights the emerging ethos that the system is paramount now. The patients are now there for the convenience of the providers, and their stockholders. Fairness has now officially been banned.
I was going to make a remark about this system change being an example of late stage capitalism, but just realized that formalism and inflexibility are hallmarks of late stage anything.
'Fairness,' however one defines it is a function of flexibility. 'Fairness' shows the desire and ability to think out complex situations and move to balanced outcomes. All 'actors' in the social situation are considered and dealt with in some semblance of a socially supportive ethos. Communitarian at root, this has been, as is mentioned several times above, replaced by an atomistic and minimalist pseudo philosophy. The foregoing because a strategy of adherence to a rigid and simplistic set of rules in social situations is a rejection of thought and reflection. "I was just following orders." Does that sound familiar?
Alas, I fear that "things" are going to get much worse in the times ahead, for everyone.
Thanks for your indulgence.

Elizabeth , December 27, 2019 at 5:09 pm

Ambrit, I am so sorry you and Phyl have to deal with humans utterly lacking in compassion and human decency. If think if this happened to me, I would argued forcefully – screamed- which would have probably had me removed from the office or banished from the practice. This kind of treatment from people who are dealing with patients who need help just makes my blood boil. Unfortunately, I think this kind of treatment towards others is a side effect of living in an unfair/unjust society. Many people's hearts become bitter and hardened ( like I'm suffering and I don't care if you suffer too). The dark world we live in now is cold hearted and full of tears. My heart goes out to you and Phyl and all others who are suffering because of this.

ambrit , December 27, 2019 at 5:36 pm

Thanks Elizabeth. The Home Health nurse this morning didn't want to believe our tale. She finally suggested that we complain directly to the top level of the Medical Organization that this practice is a part of. I'm going to try that Monday. As a side note, the Physical Therapist this afternoon mentioned that the nurses are stymied because absolutely no pain med scrips are written on Fridays. (I found it hard to credit, but reflection seemed to prove her correct.) This is evidently not just a function of the doctors wanting Fridays off, but a conscious policy on the part of the local medical establishment. [Your only recourse would be to admit yourself in to the Emergency Room I was told. Hmmm . what's the most expensive part of a Hospital practice? You guessed it!]
My favourite aspect of the "visit" to the Pain Management Office was the presence of the armoured glass partition between the Lobby and the receptionist's desk. This assumes that someone in the physical office planning stage anticipated a high potential for violence in that office. {I wonder why?}
I was tempted to let Phyl scream her head off, but remembered the presence of a uniformed 'Security Person' in the building lobby. The two behind the glass partition looked like, and acted like the sort who would love to smack an unruly 'client' down. /Bored and smug would be how I summed up how the two women appeared.\
Luckily, Phyl is already tapering off her drugs usage, so, there is a small cushion with which to maneuver around this unholy edifice of Mammon.

katiebird , December 27, 2019 at 6:02 pm

I wonder if Phyllis's doctor could refer her to another clinic, one a little more compassionate to people in pain? (Couldn't they let you finish the paperwork while you wait in that little room for the always late doctor?)

This story has me enraged for Phyllis and also you. I am so sorry. Two weeks. The audacity. Making her wait even a day! (I am almost crying in frustration. So very sorry)

Anarcissie , December 27, 2019 at 11:57 am

While I definitely agree that ruling classes have deteriorated remarkably over the last few decades, I don't think the old days were very fair either. Fairness is of interest -- in fact, it's crucially important -- in a society composed of people who are more or less equal and autonomous. It's a way to get along without a lot of conflict and risk. In an highly unequal society, like those of the US and the UK, it's much less valuable than access to the levers of power. You don't have to get along with those you can crush or brush aside. As the scene here in the US continues to deteriorate, I expect concepts like fairness and justice to seem more and more quaint to the movers and shakers and fixers, until finally the general system breaks down completely. It's anybody's guess what will succeed that.

JimTan , December 27, 2019 at 12:59 pm

I think this loss of fair play is partly because many have realized that fortunes can be made simply by gaining exceptions to established rules and laws. There have always been exceptions, here and there, but our situation now is there are exceptions to established rules everywhere. Companies can now simply lobby for some exclusive benefit or to ignore some law that everyone else must follow, and then collect a risk free guaranteed profit for essentially doing nothing.

Many large firms use these exceptions in the form of legal protections not available to their competitors to both attain and maintain their competitive advantage. These protections include ignoring existing laws, profiting from illegal businesses where profits exceed fines, and profiting from exclusive U.S. government subsidies not available to competitors. The banking and drug industry are notorious for routinely engaging in illegal practices that generate profits which far exceed the fines that regulators impose when these firms are caught. Preferential government subsidies that benefit a single company in an industry are now also acceptable business strategy as companies like Amazon can obtain confidential agreements with the U.S. Post office to ship packages for at least half of what UPS and FedEx would charge for the same deliveries. A subsidy like this contributes to the many reasons that its competitors are driven into bankruptcy, and probably explains why Amazon's retail business loses money everywhere except in the U.S.

Many small firms, especially tech unicorns in their early days, use these exceptions in the same way. Amazon started as a small company that would sell mail-order books in a way that allowed it to avoid sales tax. Early Uber investors were probably attracted by a belief that government will look the other way while it made cab rides cheaper by ignoring local taxi regulation, then transferring all its business costs to its drivers, and then collecting a substantial fee for each of taxi fare. AirBnB started as a small company whose rent would also ignore local hotel regulations, zoning laws, health laws to prevent public health hazards, and fire safety codes. Small drug companies like Turing Pharmaceuticals can simply acquire patents for drugs with no substitute and then raise prices by 5,456%.

The problem is that too many of these risk free 'rent seeking' opportunities can overwhelm an economy filled with corporations who are all chasing the highest risk adjusted rate of return. When there are too many of these rent seeking opportunities in an economy then its companies will select only these risk-less rent seeking strategies, while abandoning all riskier but socially productive profit strategies like the pursuit of new breakthroughs, product innovations, design quality, superior service, and product reliability. A related negative outcome which you hint at with 'fair play' is most of these rents offer particular exclusions from laws designed to protect society like those prohibiting consumer or investor fraud, prohibiting worker exploitation, ensuring consumer safety, and maintaining financial market stability.

So an economy with systemic rent seeking often incentivizes its corporations to abandon their socially productive profit strategies, and then replace them with risk-less 'rent' strategies where profit comes from ignoring laws that protect our society from fraud, exploitation, and economic disruption.

smoker , December 27, 2019 at 1:05 pm

Thanks for this.

Jeff Bezos was the first thing that popped into my mind. The Technocracy –with no room for humanity, where the masses serve as hosts for 24/7 parasites – the second.

In this neck of the woods,Silicon Valley, the infestation of unfairness reflects itself everywhere, particularly in the homelessness. Cars, the way they're driven, and how they are judged, are also a perfect example. You can see it in very pricey new model cars with dangerously blinding LED lights as the norm (which an insane National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has yet to address after over a decade of complaints); so called demon light headlight adaptations which make the car appear like a predatory night stalker in one's rearview mirror; and disturbing personalized license plates, saw one the other day that said MALWARE. And then there's the judgment by vehicle. After having lived where I am for over a decade, was asked by a new neighbor, in a brand new vehicle, if I needed directions, as if I was lost, when I stopped to speak with another neighbor in my not clunker looking, almost 20 year old car. It cut me to the bone, as words can.

Small businesses are increasingly losing their shirts and being shut down due to amoral commercial property owners; Amazon; Google, Facebook and Apple Campuses ™; and corrupt mayors and city council members' neighborhood planning ™.

The Silicon Valley CalTrain commuter line just had its 16th pedestrian fatality of the year in early December (a thirty two year old female youth therapist), and a hospitalized, attempted 17th fatality, 9 days later; despite ever increasing rail vigilance. Meanwhile the Local News™ keeps alluding to track improvements versus addressing the now tangible despair. It's all gut rending and no surprise that Santa Clara County led California in negative migration between 2018 – 2019. Unfortunately many were left with no means to even leave, and/or couldn't leave their loved ones who needed them..

The age old term walking in another person's shoes – implying looking beyond oneself, treating others fairly, and not taking ones luck in life as an indicator that they're worthier people – seems utterly lost on many who are doing well and wish the millions of 'losers' would disappear from their sight.

Off The Street , December 27, 2019 at 1:48 pm

Who will be the new Wright Patman?
Who will be the new Sal Pecora?
Prior generations provided guidance on how to identify and call out unfairness, and get meaningful results, for the benefit of the citizenry.

Summer , December 27, 2019 at 1:54 pm

Fair play won't be arriving much less "coming back."
Talk to the "algorithm."

Louis Fyne , December 27, 2019 at 1:55 pm

With absolutely 100% respect to the original posters and their points, I'd side w/Vlade and argue that there are some serious rose-tinted glasses being worn.

Yes, (in my opinion) there was an era of "fair play" .but this was a flash-in-the-pan consequence of WWII. As rightfully the bottom 95% earned their just desserts after years of sacrifice for their country and rescuing the elites from the literal existential threat of authoritarianism.

Now we're merely reverting to the time immemorial-style of 'every person for themselves' social ruthlessness. sadly.

JTMcPhee , December 27, 2019 at 5:03 pm

As I recall, the elites were in no danger from authoritarianism in the 1900s. Au contraire, they profited at every turn from the acts of authoritarianism. Prescott Bush and other business leaders (sic) did business with the Nazis and Fascists, and even with the Japanese imperium. These days, platforms and algorithms setvup by the Elites of this time loot and pollute and accelerate the many races to the bottom.

Good thing for that "life force" that when the last Elite human (possibly the last human of any sort) dies, there will be other species already carving out niches of precedence and preference It hurts, a little, to know we won't be missed

Susan the Other , December 27, 2019 at 2:38 pm

This post is a tad deceptive. It sounds like a review of neoliberalism and all that has happened since c. 1980 when in fact it is now The Question. What is fair play/ What is/was fair play and how do we create it going forward. Now that there can be no growth, very little manufacturing and no labor unions as we once knew them. Automation and an elite class of oligarchs and their functionaries are taking over. States/Nations still have their constitutions but they are creating internal conflict as the old ways disappear back into what Varoufakis calls a new feudalism. Like upstart above, however, I have only experienced fair play in the courts, never in economic situations. But then I'm old, b. 1946, and female. So I'm keeping an open mind as best I can, like the above clips from David, Clive, Vlade and PK. One thing to add from the FR24 Debate on good regulation – it was pointed out by one panelist that regulations are stricter in the EU for going into business, but on a "horizontal" basis. Whereas it is easy to go into Bz in the US, all you need are vertical connections. I took this to describe the fact that many corporations are monopolies. But connections are few and far between. And lurking in the wings, as we all know, is climate change. The new discussion about societal collapse has started. Now would be an excellent time to interject the concept of fair play. I am optimistic because there is a basic, rock solid strength in fair play that might serve to make it a survivor.

Oregoncharles , December 27, 2019 at 2:40 pm

I've mentioned before that my father, an investment manager who retired around the time Yves started, made a similar point prospectively. Background: he ran a smallish private firm in Indiana, but it gave him rather wide exposure, including in a large industrial firm, plus direct investments, besides the stock market.. Plus, my mother inherited a (then) good-sized farm that was operated by a tenant.

His comment was that a culture of honesty saved a lot of money, otherwise spent on guarding your interests, watching the watchers, hiring lawyers, etc. His firm shied away from investing in anything with a hint of shadiness.

This is merely confirmatory of Yves' point, but from a different point of view and from before the cultural changes (aka crapification) her post goes over.

And come to think, a younger relative who is a corporate lawyer told us, from her contemporary experience, that handshake agreements are NOT a good idea. They tend to lead to her getting involved, and she ain't cheap, nor are the consequences predictable.

I would add that I think human institutions, like human beings, have a life cycle, so to a great extent the vagaries of, say, Brexit are a result of predictable senescence. Not that you want to experience the down side, as we seem to be doing.

Off The Street , December 27, 2019 at 4:05 pm

Your word is your bond.
Another old-fashioned saying that might yet make a comeback, starting with some undergrad research paper on forgotten sayings of, say, the mid-20th century.

Chris , December 27, 2019 at 2:45 pm

On the opening mention of recruiters and employees ghosting I'd like to add a few thoughts of how different things are in that regard.

We're now all supposed to be part of some social network or another because we need to get our names out there and grow our networks. Those services then turn around and pelt you with emails and phone calls non-stop if you're whatever flavor of the moment they deem desirable. They also don't give you the time of day if they decide you're not. And those services have tried to evolve new tools to prevent you turning them away or ignoring them. Emails with "decision required" and polls and notices that seem to imply if you don't respond they'll kick you off. That's problem since any boss can fire you for any reason at any time. And they definitely mention that you're not being polite or fair by not responding to an email conversation you didn't initiate for a job position you didn't inquire about on a service you didn't ask them to use.

I have a job I like so I was really annoyed that one recruiter on Indeed couldn't take no for an answer and demanded I tell them why I wasn't going to permit them to sell my resume to a potential job opening. I don't understand why we're supposed to be at everyone else's beck and call and they don't have to respond to even polite overtures from us.

So it's more than just fair play seems to be missing in our society right now. It's that whatever echoes of fairness exist are used to abuse the people who believe in them. They steal your time, your attention, your professional connections, anything they can. Then they complain about you not responding. That's another facet of this that I really don't like.

Mikerw0 , December 27, 2019 at 3:52 pm

There is so much one can say on this topic. Unfortunately, I am increasingly pessimistic and of the view that nothing will really change until we suffer a true calamity as was the case in the past.

An oversimplifying example. My father was a combat veteran from the Korean War, having been just a little young to serve in WWII. There was a clear sense of inter-relationship in this generation. They experienced the depths of the depression and the massive loss of life and destruction of WWII. My dad eventually became the COO of one of the most powerful financial services firms in the US. His generation of leaders would never have considered the (1) levels of compensation relative employees as appropriate, (2) becoming predators on their customers, they prized their customer relationships, (3) using the firms balance sheet to gamble at the casino in a heads they win, tails you lose game. It simply wasn't in their DNA. They had suffered too much to jeopardize shared prosperity and general welfare.

When my father took early retirement he had a unique resume and was offered very serious positions of prestige and power, with high levels of compensation. He turned them all down, as did his piers, as they violated an inherent code of ethics and fairness that they didn't need to articulate it was just their from their shared sacrifices earlier in life.

In my experiences on Wall Street, both as a banker and as a CFO of firms, this would be anathema.

My only source of hope is that our daughter's generation, she is 27, sees this for what it is. They fully understand that our society is failing and eschew the loss of fairness on multiple levels. They consciously avoid politics and participation, not out of laziness, but because they see our leaders (both political and business) as fundamentally corrupt. She and her friends have no interest in voting for a neo-liberal (e.g., Biden, Buttagieg, etc.) who is just better behaved than Trump. They are well educated, have gone to excellent schools, and want something more from life than a high paying Wall Street job.

We see so much goodness in them, yet worry that it will take a global war or financial collapse leading to depression to reset our society.

Off The Street , December 27, 2019 at 4:13 pm

Reagan pocketed a huge, at the time, $2,000,000 speaking fee. That provided the imprimatur that cashing in was okey-dokey. Later grifters looked on with amusement pondering the blood, sweat, toil and tears of others that led to their own book and speaking shakedown deals with multiples of that fee in laundered money.

Jeremy Grimm , December 27, 2019 at 5:21 pm

Two assertions in this post caught my eye:
Firms "that adopted nobler objectives did better in financial terms than ones that focused on maximizing shareholder value."

I believe firms that adopted nobler objectives -- may -- have done better over the long-term than firms that focused on maximizing shareholder value but next I wonder about how well the managers did in the short-term [perhaps even the long-term after correcting for the differences in the qualities and abilities of the management] in each type of firm. I suppose mediocre managers did very much better when "focused on maximizing shareholder value". Before engaging the relatively long read of the linked post discussing details of the study which the main post refers to -- I also wonder how the referenced study deals with immoral acts which are not quite clearly immoral -- like outsourcing. Over the long-run outsourcing is bad for a country, bad for the resilience of a firm, and bad for the firm over the long-run before we are dead. However, I believe many of the firms that "adopted nobler objectives" -- and remained steadfast to them -- were driven out of business by price competition.

The second assertion:
"Another aspect of the decline in the importance of fair dealing is the notion of the obligations of power, [w]hat individuals in a position of authority have a duty to."

In regard to this assertion, I immediately recalled Machiavelli's "the Prince". Many of the ideas of noblesse oblige were anchored in the power and authority of the Catholic [Universal] Church. Though in conflict with a God Chosen Monarch -- noblesse oblige operated to attach similar moral authority to the Aristocratic Classes. In my Youth I thought of Machiavelli as completely unmoral. Later when I learned more about his life and actions I realized his "Prince" unveiled the unmoral reality behind the operations of monarchical and aristocratic actions. Neoliberalism has succeeded in stripping all moral coverings from power and through the efforts of an extremely well-funded Thought-Collective and propaganda machine it has divorced thinking about morality from power -- except as a thin fig-leaf. Most significantly it has exalted Power and its co-worker Wealth to positions of 'moral goodness'. Fair dealing in the Neoliberal moral universe is a slogan without content to fool those unaware and/or unwilling to 'see'.

I also feel much of the nostalgia for noblesse oblige and critique of the Neoliberal Age may originate from the residual conflicts and cross-envies between 'Old'-money and 'New'-money. Old-money has already forgotten the immoral origins of its wealth.

Much of this post is related to Brexit -- something I avoided study of or comment upon and still little understand. I excuse myself as someone squeamish about traffic accidents and train wrecks though powerful feelings of sadness overwhelm me.

The heart of this post resides in the ancient question of the tie between morality and its enforcement -- the question for how you would act given a "cloak of invisibility" which is a prop for posing concrete questions about how you might act without the constraints of dealing with any of the moral consequences or implications of your acts. I may be a fool -- but I believe most all of Humankind believes in Justice [and acts Justly] -- the Justice which I believe The Rev Kev equates to 'fairness' -- which is a much weaker word. But I also believe there are a certain number of individuals who do not care about Justice and the Neoliberal Thought Collective has somehow transformed this indifference ['disregard' -- 'disdain for'] Justice into a moral imperative and belittled Justice as a throw-back to benighted times past.

We live in DarkTimes when the very worst among us claim the most and worse still brand themselves as praise-worthy while using their colossally disproportionate Power and Wealth to squelch criticism and amplify their accolades often self-accolades through their wholly owned Media.

[Dec 24, 2019] Christmas in Flyover Land - Kunstler

Notable quotes:
"... It's a Wonderful Life ..."
"... we have sent the factories to distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy ..."
"... Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on the big city sidewalks. ..."
Dec 24, 2019 | kunstler.com

All the people of America, including the flyovers, are responsible for the sad situation we're in: this failure to reestablish a common culture of values most people can subscribe to and use it to rebuild our towns into places worth caring about. Main Street, as it has come to be, is the physical manifestation of that failure. The businesses that used to occupy the storefronts are gone, except for second-hand stores. Nobody in 1952 would have believed this could happen. And yet, there it is: the desolation is stark and heartbreaking.

Even George Bailey's "nightmare" scene in It's a Wonderful Life depicts the supposedly evil Pottersville as a very lively place, only programmed for old-fashioned wickedness: gin mills and streetwalkers. Watch the movie and see for yourself.

Pottersville is way more appealing than 99 percent of America's small towns today, dead as they are.

The dynamics that led to this are not hard to understand. The concentration of retail commerce in a very few gigantic corporations was a swindle that the public fell for.

Enthralled like little children by the dazzle and gigantism of the big boxes, and the free parking, we allowed ourselves to be played.

The excuse was "bargain shopping," which actually meant we have sent the factories to distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy

The "bones" of the village are still standing but the programming for the organism of a community is all gone: gainful employment, social roles in the life of the place, confidence in the future. For a century starting in 1850, there were at least five factories in town. They made textiles and later on, paper products and, in the end, toilet paper, ironically enough. Yes, really.

They also made a lot of the sod-busting steel ploughs that opened up the Midwest, and cotton shirts, and other stuff. The people worked hard for their money, but it was pretty good money by world standards for most of those years.

It allowed them to eat well, sleep in a warm house, and raise children, which is a good start for any society. The village was rich with economic and social niches, and yes, it was hierarchical, but people tended to find the niche appropriate to their abilities and aspirations -- and, believe it or not, it is better to have a place in society than to have no place at all, which is the sad situation for so many today.

Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on the big city sidewalks.

BackRowHeckler December 22, 2019 at 10:50 pm #

It seems there's a major political party exactly working against a common American culture. They jeer at the thought of it. It seems to be the main platform, above all else.

Brh

Log in to Reply
Walter B December 23, 2019 at 3:23 pm #

It is a major party alright BRH, but it is no so much political as it is economic and socially stratified. They are opulent, self consumed and greedy as hell (literally). There can only be so many parasites sucking the lifeblood out of any herd of servant beasts, and they can only suck so long on their hosts before the poor beasts fall over and die. And that is the tipping point, where we lose enough life blood that we can no longer stand upright, but drop to the deck and are consumed. It is the classic Goose that laid the Golden Egg fairy tale being acted out in real life and coming to a neighborhood near you soon. Log in to Reply

sunburstsoldier December 22, 2019 at 11:22 pm #

Beautiful, thoughtful post Jim, yet to be honest it fills me with a sense of anxiety, and this is simply because the catastrophic events you forecast, although for the better in the long run (as they will compel a return to a world made by hand, or the recovery of human scale) will nonetheless bring much suffering to a lot of people ( including my own family). I would personally like to believe there is another way a more sustainable civilization could be attained than on the heels of societal collapse. I do believe the world is full of mystery, and that life itself is a series of unfolding miracles we lack the capacity to comprehend due to our limited perspective. Yet perhaps you are right and some type of collapse is inevitable before a new beginning can be made. If such be the case, as individuals we will be compelled to tap into inner potentials that will needed to meet the approaching apocalypse, potentials which currently lie dormant and undeveloped. Maybe in the process of doing so we will recover our wholeness as well.

[Dec 21, 2019] Trump administration sanction companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

Highly recommended!
Dec 21, 2019 | peakoilbarrel.com

Watcher x Ignored says: 12/13/2019 at 6:27 am

The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around the arrival point.

This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.

Hightrekker x Ignored says: 12/13/2019 at 12:28 pm
So much for the "Free Market".
Hickory x Ignored says: 12/12/2019 at 11:28 pm
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand. But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil. For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.

Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions, socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.

And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.

[Dec 08, 2019] 'Free World'? What exactly does that mean? What does 'Freedom' mean? I 'freely' admit I simply have no idea what people mean when they urgently bleat words like that at me.

Dec 08, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ant. , Dec 5 2019 18:32 utc | 39

In Uncle Sam Land, "freedom" has two meanings. Rich people are free to do as they like. The rest of us are free to live under a bridge and starve.

We do have one right: The Right To Obey.

The whole society is organized around obedience, and the purpose of public education is to make sure every one obeys. Modern schools are more accurately called "day prisons", with all the cameras, metal detectors, armed police, isolation rooms, etc. I wonder how many people realize that "lockdown" is straight out of the criminal prison system, and is now a regular occurrence for little kids.

Ant. , Dec 5 2019 18:32 utc | 39

@33 vk

'Free World'? What exactly does that mean? What does 'Freedom' mean? I 'freely' admit I simply have no idea what people mean when they urgently bleat words like that at me.

To me, freedom applies to an action. You are free to do this, or you are free to do that. Which is, of course, actions that are constrained or allowed by various laws passed by local, state, federal and/or international entities. I would suppose that the amount of freedom you have depends on haw many laws have been passed in your own country to criminalize various activities.

Has anyone done such an analysis, to define which countries have limited their citizens behaviour? Simplistically, which countries have written the most laws?

I'll be willing to bet they are the 'democracies' that are most bellicose about protecting 'freedoms'. Let's face facts, politicians just love to keep passing laws, otherwise they have no reason to exist. I unreasonably think there should be another superior law, that any government should only be able to have so many laws. If they want to have yet another one, take some other law away. Otherwise 'freedoms' are just being chipped away at, constantly.

'Freedom', as a thing unto and onto itself, seems a completely meaningless concept. I keep wondering why politicians aren't asked what they are talking about when they roar about 'freedom' as a general term.

Trailer Trash , Dec 5 2019 19:51 utc | 53
>What does 'Freedom' mean? >

[Dec 07, 2019] While neoliberal talk much about the redistribution of wealth we need to talk more about its creation. And that involves the state.

Notable quotes:
"... "There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies." ..."
"... Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development. ..."
"... Emphasizing to policymakers not only the importance of investment, but also the direction of that investment -- "What are we investing in?" she often asks -- Dr. Mazzucato has influenced the way American politicians speak about the state's potential as an economic engine. In her vision, governments would do what so many traditional economists have long told them to avoid: create and shape new markets, embrace uncertainty and take big risks. ..."
Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , November 28, 2019 at 12:05 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucato.html

November 26, 2019

Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism
Mariana Mazzucato wants liberals to talk less about the redistribution of wealth and more about its creation. Politicians around the world are listening.
By Katy Lederer

Mariana Mazzucato was freezing. Outside, it was a humid late-September day in Manhattan, but inside -- in a Columbia University conference space full of scientists, academics and businesspeople advising the United Nations on sustainability -- the air conditioning was on full blast.

For a room full of experts discussing the world's most urgent social and environmental problems, this was not just uncomfortable but off-message. Whatever their dress -- suit, sari, head scarf -- people looked huddled and hunkered down. At a break, Dr. Mazzucato dispatched an assistant to get the A.C. turned off. How will we change anything, she wondered aloud, "if we don't rebel in the everyday?"

Dr. Mazzucato, an economist based at University College London, is trying to change something fundamental: the way society thinks about economic value. While many of her colleagues have been scolding capitalism lately, she has been reimagining its basic premises. Where does growth come from? What is the source of innovation? How can the state and private sector work together to create the dynamic economies we want? She asks questions about capitalism we long ago stopped asking. Her answers might rise to the most difficult challenges of our time.

In two books of modern political economic theory -- "The Entrepreneurial State" (2013) and "The Value of Everything" (2018) -- Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy -- all of which were funded at crucial stages by public dollars -- she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and innovation. "Personally, I think the left is losing around the world," she said in an interview, "because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth."

Her message has appealed to an array of American politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a presidential contender, has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's thinking into several policy rollouts, including one that would use "federal R & D to create domestic jobs and sustainable investments in the future" and another that would authorize the government to receive a return on its investments in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Mazzucato has also consulted with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and her team on the ways a more active industrial policy might catalyze a Green New Deal.

Even Republicans have found something to like. In May, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida credited Dr. Mazzucato's work several times in "American Investment in the 21st Century," his proposal to jump-start economic growth. "We need to build an economy that can see past the pressure to understand value-creation in narrow and short-run financial terms," he wrote in the introduction, "and instead envision a future worth investing in for the long-term."

Formally, the United Nations event in September was a meeting of the leadership council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, or S.D.S.N. It's a body of about 90 experts who advise on topics like gender equality, poverty and global warming. Most of the attendees had specific technical expertise -- Dr. Mazzucato greeted a contact at one point with, "You're the ocean guy!" -- but she offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how to create a desirable future.

'Investor of first resort'

Originally from Italy -- her family left when she was 5 -- Dr. Mazzucato is the daughter of a Princeton nuclear physicist and a stay-at-home mother who couldn't speak English when she moved to the United States. She got her Ph.D. in 1999 from the New School for Social Research and began working on "The Entrepreneurial State" after the 2008 financial crisis. Governments across Europe began to institute austerity policies in the name of fostering innovation -- a rationale she found not only dubious but economically destructive.

"There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."

Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development.

In important ways, Dr. Mazzucato's work resembles that of a literary critic or rhetorician as much as an economist. She has written of waging what the historian Tony Judt called a "discursive battle," and scrutinizes descriptive terms -- words like "fix" or "spend" as opposed to "create" and "invest" -- that have been used to undermine the state's appeal as a dynamic economic actor. "If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and administrator, and tell it to stop dreaming," she writes, "in the end that is what we get."

As a charismatic figure in a contentious field that does not generate many stars -- she was recently profiled in Wired magazine's United Kingdom edition -- Dr. Mazzucato has her critics. She is a regular guest on nightly news shows in Britain, where she is pitted against proponents of Brexit or skeptics of a market-savvy state.

Alberto Mingardi, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and director general of Istituto Bruno Leoni, a free-market think tank, has repeatedly criticized Dr. Mazzucato for, in his view, cherry-picking her case studies, underestimating economic trade-offs and defining industrial policy too broadly. In January, in an academic piece written with one of his Cato colleagues, Terence Kealey, he called her "the world's greatest exponent today of public prodigality."

Her ideas, though, are finding a receptive audience around the world. In the United Kingdom, Dr. Mazzucato's work has influenced Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, and Theresa May, a former Prime Minister, and she has counseled the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon on designing and putting in place a national investment bank. She also advises government entities in Germany, South Africa and elsewhere. "In getting my hands dirty," she said, "I learn and I bring it back to the theory."

The 'Mission Muse'

During a break at the United Nations gathering, Dr. Mazzucato escaped the air conditioning to confer with two colleagues in Italian on a patio. Tall, with a muscular physique, she wore a brightly colored glass necklace that has become something of a trademark on the economics circuit. Having traveled to five countries in eight days, she was fighting off a cough.

"In theory, I'm the 'Mission Muse,'" she joked, lapsing into English. Her signature reference is to the original mission to the moon -- a state-spurred technological revolution consisting of hundreds of individual feeder projects, many of them collaborations between the public and private sectors. Some were successes, some failures, but the sum of them contributed to economic growth and explosive innovation.

Dr. Mazzucato's platform is more complex -- and for some, controversial -- than simply encouraging government investment, however. She has written that governments and state-backed investment entities should "socialize both the risks and rewards." She has suggested the state obtain a return on public investments through royalties or equity stakes, or by including conditions on reinvestment -- for example, a mandate to limit share buybacks.

Emphasizing to policymakers not only the importance of investment, but also the direction of that investment -- "What are we investing in?" she often asks -- Dr. Mazzucato has influenced the way American politicians speak about the state's potential as an economic engine. In her vision, governments would do what so many traditional economists have long told them to avoid: create and shape new markets, embrace uncertainty and take big risks.

... ... ...

Earlier in the day, she pointed at an announcement on her laptop. She had been nominated for the first Not the Nobel Prize, a commendation intended to promote "fresh economic thinking." "Governments have woken up to the fact the mainstream way of thinking isn't helping them," she said, explaining her appeal to politicians and policymakers. A few days later, she won.

Paine -> Paine ... , December 02, 2019 at 08:47 AM
Socialize corporate net cash flow
joe -> anne... , December 05, 2019 at 08:12 AM
Then she would advocate free banking, like Selgin. Better more efficient banking is a huge and profitable investment for government.

So before the leftwards jump on her idea of investment, start here and explain why suddenly, making finance more efficient for everyone is a bad idea.

Or ask our knee jerkers, before they jump on her ideas with all their delusions, why not invest in dumping the primary dealer system? That is obviously inefficient and generates the ATM costs we pay. Why not remove that with a sound investment f some sort?

Everything is through the eye of the beholder, for lelftwards it is the wonder of central planning, for the libertariaturds it is about efficiency via decentralization.

Then comes meetup, and waddya know, each side brings a 200 page insurance contract they want guaranteed before any efficiency changes are made. The meeting selects business as normal. We will select business as normal, our economists will approve.

Mr. Bill -> anne... , December 05, 2019 at 06:21 PM
" the way society thinks about economic value"

I am thrilled / s at the feeling of fulfillment I, well, feel, that an academic deems the obvious. It definitely, indicates that we are approaching, wokeness !

Economists are beginning to evolve, again, almost, but not quite capturing the curl of the real time world.

Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 05, 2019 at 06:31 PM
" There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."

That is a deep vision that needs to be unpacked. My impression of traditional theory is that it discourages the neoliberal, market deism.

[Dec 07, 2019] The death of free markets under neoliberalism. Monopolization unhinged

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , December 04, 2019 at 06:12 AM

The death of free markets
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/11/29/opinion/death-free-markets/?event=event25 via @BostonGlobe

Shaul Amsterdamski - November 29, 2019

In 2012, when economist Thomas Philippon was looking into some data, something odd caught his attention.

His homeland, France, was undergoing another revolution, although a much different one: a revolution in the country's telecommunication market. A new mobile operator, Free, had entered the market and disrupted it almost overnight. The new operator slashed prices, offering plans that hadn't been seen before in France.

France's three legacy mobile operators were forced to react and drop their own prices. It didn't help. In only three months, Free's market share reached 4 percent. At the end of the following year, its market share tripled. Today, Free controls 15 to 16 percent of the market, making it France's third largest mobile operator. (If you add the six virtual operators to the mix -- meaning companies who lease broadband space -- you'll get a total of 10 different mobile operators in a country with a population one-fifth the size of the United States.)

"Digging deeper into that crystallized everything for me," says Philippon. "It was an oligopoly based on three legacy carriers that lobbied very hard to prevent anybody from getting a fourth (mobile) license. For 10 years they were successful. But then, in 2011, the regulator changed and gave a license [to] Free. It wasn't a technological change or a change in consumers' taste. It was purely a regulatory decision."

For French consumers, this one decision changed everything. Instead of paying $55 for a 1-gigabyte plan, the new prices for much better plans cost half that. And prices continued to drop. Today, a Free 60-gigabyte plan costs only $12.

But Philippon wasn't just interested in what the new competition in the French telecom industry said about French markets. Having lived in the United States since 1999, he compared the French telecom revolution to the American market. The numbers blew his mind. While in France the number of mobile operators was rising, in the US the number was getting smaller (and that number might even decline further, if the planned Sprint-T-Mobile merger goes through).

The result was a huge price gap between the two countries.

"France went from being much more expensive to much cheaper in two years," he says. "The change in price was drastic -- a relative price move of 50 percent. In such a big market with gigantic firms, that's a big change. And it was not driven by technology, it was driven by pro-competition regulation." He immediately adds, just to emphasize the irony: "It happened in France of all places, a country that historically had a political system that made sure there wasn't too much competition. This is not the place where we expected this kind of outcome."

The opposite was very surprising too: The level of competition in the United States, the role model of free-market democracy, was declining.

Philippon, an acclaimed professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of Business, kept pulling that thread. He gathered an overwhelming amount of data on various markets, took a few steps back to look at the big picture, and then identified a pattern. The result is "The Great Reversal," his recent book, in which he explores and explains when, why, and how, as his subtitle puts it, "America Gave Up on Free Markets."

The telecom story is just one of many examples Philippon provides throughout the book of non-competitive US markets, in which most or all of the power is concentrated in the hands of a few big companies. It's a situation that makes it almost impossible for new competitors to enter and lower prices for consumers. The airline market is another example, as is the pharmaceutical industry, the banking system, and the big tech companies such as Google and Facebook, who have no real competition in the markets they operate in.

The book's main argument has a refreshing mix of both right- and left-leaning economic thinking. It goes like this: During the last 20 years, while the European Union has become much more competitive, the United States has become a paradise for monopolies and oligopolies -- with a few players holding most of the market share. As US companies grew bigger, they became politically powerful. They then used their influence over politicians and regulators, and their vast resources, to skew regulation in their favor.

The fight over net neutrality, to name one example, demonstrates it well.

"Guess who lobbied for that? It's a simple guess -- the people who benefited from it, the ISP's [internet service providers]. And they are already charging outrageous prices, twice as high [as] any other developed country," Philippon says.

This growing concentration of power in the hands of a few has affected everything and everyone. It has inflated prices because consumers have fewer options. Wages are stagnant because less competition means firms don't have to fight over workers. Financial investment in new machinery and technology has plummeted because when companies have fewer competitors they lose the incentive to invest and improve. It has driven CEO compensation up, and workers' compensation down. It has caused a spike in inequality, which in turn has ignited social unrest.

If all of this is too much to wrap your head around, Philippon puts a price tag on it: $5,000 per year. That's the price the median American household pays every year for the lost competition. That's the cost of the United States becoming a Monopoly Land.

How did this happen? According to Philippon, it's a story with two threads. The European side of this story happened almost by mistake. The American side, on the contrary, was no coincidence.

When the European Union was formed in the early 1990s, there was a lot of suspicion between the member states, namely France and Germany. (Two World Wars tend to have that effect.) This mistrust birthed pan-European regulators who enjoyed an unprecedented amount of freedom, more powerful than any of the member countries' governments.

"We did that mostly because we didn't really trust each other very much," he says. Now, 20 years later, "it turns out that this system we created is just a lot more resilient towards lobbying and bad influences than we thought."

At the same time in the United States, the exact opposite was happening. Adopting a free-market approach, regulators and legislators chose not to intervene. They didn't block mergers and acquisitions, and let big companies get bigger.

This created a positive feedback loop: As companies grew stronger, the regulators got weaker, and more dependent on the companies they are supposed to regulate. Tens of millions of dollars were channeled into lobbying. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision gave corporate money even more political influence.

At some point, big companies started using regulation itself to prevent new competitors from entering the market.

The result wasn't free markets, but "the opposite -- market capture," says Philippon, referring to a situation in which the regulator is so weak it depends completely on the companies it regulates to design regulation.

Philippon is not the only one who's making these claims. A group of economists from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business holds a similar view. They are called Neo-Brandeisian, after the late Justice Louis Brandeis, who, a century ago, fought to broaden antitrust laws. They believe the big tech companies, for example, managed to rig the system, and fly under current antitrust regulation. They think it is time to break them apart.

But not everyone agrees with Philippon's narrative or his conclusions. Economists like Edward Conard, author of "The Upside of Inequality," thinks Philippon's claim that big companies are evidence of less competition is upside down. According to his criticism, it's exactly the opposite: These companies became big and powerful because they innovate and give a lot of value to consumers. He also argues that the conclusion that Europe is more competitive and innovative than the United States is preposterous, given that the biggest tech companies are American, not European.

Philippon addresses this counterclaim in his book. The United States is one giant market of English speakers. Theoretically, if you have a good idea for a new product and you can finance it, you have more than 300 million potential users on day one. In the EU, on the other hand, there are 28 countries, with residents who speak 24 different languages. It's not as simple.

Philippon, who by the age of 40 was named one of the top 25 promising economists by the International Monetary Fund, also differentiates himself from the Chicago school of thought in one important way: He's not dogmatic, he's pragmatic. Instead of a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, he suggests a more nuanced approach. This is exactly what makes his case both unique and somewhat tricky to grasp. His approach is neither right nor left.

"The idea that free markets and government intervention are opposites, that's bogus. So half of me agrees with the Chicago School and half disagrees," he says.

"But if you think that you can get to a free market without any scrutiny by the government, that's crazy. That's simply untrue empirically. We need to make entry easier to increase competition, that's the objective," he says. "And the way to do so sometimes means more government intervention."

OK, but how do you do that? According to Philippon, each case is different.

"In some cases it will be by more intervention. Like maybe force Facebook to break from WhatsApp. And sometimes it will be by less intervention. Kill a bunch of regulations and requirements for small companies," he says.

The first idea, at least, has caught a lot of public attention during the last year, and has been a talking point of the presidential campaigns of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg was recorded saying that if Warren wins, it will "suck for us." Warren's plan for the big tech companies, for example, includes "reversing mergers," which means uncoupling WhatsApp and Instagram from Facebook. Her plan would also forbid Amazon being both a marketplace and a vendor at the same time.

But can any of these interventions actually happen? And if so, what would they mean for American consumers? Those are more complicated questions.

If big tech companies were broken up, Philippon estimates that the average American consumer won't be affected financially.

"Since people don't pay these companies directly, it won't change the bottom line for the middle class, it won't have a big impact on people's disposable income," he says.

What would have a tremendous impact on Americans' lives and income is to keep on going beyond the big tech companies. "We should go after the big ticket items -- telecom, transport, energy, and healthcare. That's where you want action, but there is much less bipartisan support for that," he says.

Something similar to the French telecom revolution is still far from happening in the United States, but the fact that the 2020 campaign is already pushing competition-promoting ideas back into the public discourse is a reason for cautious optimism, according to Philippon. Nevertheless, he warns, we should not let this mild optimism mislead us.

"Free markets are like a public good: It is in nobody's interest to protect them. Consumers are too dispersed and businesses love monopolies," he says. "So to take free markets for granted, that's just stupid."

(Shaul Amsterdamski is senior economics editor
for Kan, Israel's public broadcasting corporation.)

(Hmmm. Our largest monthly bill is for 'telecom',
from Comcast, for TV, phone & internet service.
There's no competitive offering in our town.)

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , December 04, 2019 at 10:16 AM
"...Our largest monthly bill is for 'telecom',
from Comcast, for TV, phone & internet service..."

[I got the same information from the service tech doing the annual clean and test on my propane fireplace insert yesterday, in reference to his parents though. They were on Verizon Fios for cable. He thought they should dump cable for a web-TV solution and just use cell phones. Their bill was over $400/month. Mine is a little over $200/month for the same service, which in both cases includes land line. In my zip code Verizon does not bundle Fios with mobile. The only difference that I know is that we have neither any premium channels nor DVR boxes and I assume that his parents must have both to run up a bill that high. When we pony up for Fios Gb, then at least for three years our bill will fall below $100/month, then return to a higher monthly yet if we do not take another new contract after that upgrade contract ends. Verizon only makes new contracts when new services are added or upgraded. Customers get next to no benefit for loyalty/retention. We have both Verizon and Comcast available in our area. I have had both in my present home at different times, but hate Comcast for failures on their part to provide tall vehicle clearance to pass down my driveway until forced to do so by the power company whose poles they must use and for a duplicate billing error where they billed me for two separate addresses and put me into collections for the one that I never resided at since I never saw that bill or knew of it prior to the first collections call.]

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 06, 2019 at 11:32 AM
(Bernie to the rescue!)

Bernie Sanders unveils plan to boost broadband
access, break up internet and cable titans
https://cnb.cx/34TzaQw
CNBC - Jacob Pramuk - Dec 6

Bernie Sanders unveiled a plan Friday to expand broadband internet access as part of a push to boost the economy and reduce corporate power over Americans.

In his sprawling "High-Speed Internet for All" proposal, the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate calls to treat internet like a public utility. His campaign argues that the internet should not be a "price gouging profit machine" for companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

Sanders' plan would create $150 billion in grants and aid for local and state governments to build publicly owned broadband networks as part of the Green New Deal infrastructure initiative. The total would mark a massive increase over current funding for broadband development initiatives. The proposal would also break up what the campaign calls "internet service provider and cable monopolies," stop service providers from offering content and end what it calls "anticompetitive mergers."

Sanders and his rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination have pushed to boost high-speed internet access for rural and low-income Americans, saying it has become a necessity to succeed in school and business. The self-proclaimed democratic socialist has unveiled numerous plans to root out corporate influence as he runs near the top of a jammed primary field. ...

im1dc -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 04, 2019 at 05:07 PM
Aa excellent article that brings no new ideas to the debate but updates the debate to today.

One thing economist Thomas Philippon did not mention is that voters must turn out the elected and get new ones who will vote to create more and vigorous competition instead of oligopoly.

That is in my Equality, frequently shared here:

Economics = Politics
and
Politics = Economics

[Dec 07, 2019] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucato.html

Notable quotes:
"... "There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies." ..."
"... Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development. ..."
Dec 07, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

November 26, 2019

Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism
Mariana Mazzucato wants liberals to talk less about the redistribution of wealth and more about its creation. Politicians around the world are listening.
By Katy Lederer

Mariana Mazzucato was freezing. Outside, it was a humid late-September day in Manhattan, but inside -- in a Columbia University conference space full of scientists, academics and businesspeople advising the United Nations on sustainability -- the air conditioning was on full blast.

For a room full of experts discussing the world's most urgent social and environmental problems, this was not just uncomfortable but off-message. Whatever their dress -- suit, sari, head scarf -- people looked huddled and hunkered down. At a break, Dr. Mazzucato dispatched an assistant to get the A.C. turned off. How will we change anything, she wondered aloud, "if we don't rebel in the everyday?"

Dr. Mazzucato, an economist based at University College London, is trying to change something fundamental: the way society thinks about economic value. While many of her colleagues have been scolding capitalism lately, she has been reimagining its basic premises. Where does growth come from? What is the source of innovation? How can the state and private sector work together to create the dynamic economies we want? She asks questions about capitalism we long ago stopped asking. Her answers might rise to the most difficult challenges of our time.

In two books of modern political economic theory -- "The Entrepreneurial State" (2013) and "The Value of Everything" (2018) -- Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy -- all of which were funded at crucial stages by public dollars -- she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and innovation. "Personally, I think the left is losing around the world," she said in an interview, "because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth."

Her message has appealed to an array of American politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a presidential contender, has incorporated Dr. Mazzucato's thinking into several policy rollouts, including one that would use "federal R & D to create domestic jobs and sustainable investments in the future" and another that would authorize the government to receive a return on its investments in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Mazzucato has also consulted with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and her team on the ways a more active industrial policy might catalyze a Green New Deal.

Even Republicans have found something to like. In May, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida credited Dr. Mazzucato's work several times in "American Investment in the 21st Century," his proposal to jump-start economic growth. "We need to build an economy that can see past the pressure to understand value-creation in narrow and short-run financial terms," he wrote in the introduction, "and instead envision a future worth investing in for the long-term."

Formally, the United Nations event in September was a meeting of the leadership council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, or S.D.S.N. It's a body of about 90 experts who advise on topics like gender equality, poverty and global warming. Most of the attendees had specific technical expertise -- Dr. Mazzucato greeted a contact at one point with, "You're the ocean guy!" -- but she offers something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how to create a desirable future.

'Investor of first resort'

Originally from Italy -- her family left when she was 5 -- Dr. Mazzucato is the daughter of a Princeton nuclear physicist and a stay-at-home mother who couldn't speak English when she moved to the United States. She got her Ph.D. in 1999 from the New School for Social Research and began working on "The Entrepreneurial State" after the 2008 financial crisis. Governments across Europe began to institute austerity policies in the name of fostering innovation -- a rationale she found not only dubious but economically destructive.

"There's a whole neoliberal agenda," she said, referencing the received free-market wisdom that cutting public budgets spurs economic growth. "And then the way that traditional theory has fomented it or not contested it -- there's been kind of a strange symbiosis between mainstream economic thinking and stupid policies."

Dr. Mazzucato takes issue with many of the tenets of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most academic departments: its assumption that the forces of supply and demand lead to market equilibrium, its equation of price with value and -- perhaps most of all -- its relegation of the state to the investor of last resort, tasked with fixing market failure. She has originated and popularized the description of the state as an "investor of first resort," envisioning new markets and providing long-term, or "patient," capital at early stages of development.

In important ways, Dr. Mazzucato's work resembles that of a literary critic or rhetorician as much as an economist. She has written of waging what the historian Tony Judt called a "discursive battle," and scrutinizes descriptive terms -- words like "fix" or "spend" as opposed to "create" and "invest" -- that have been used to undermine the state's appeal as a dynamic economic actor. "If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and administrator, and tell it to stop dreaming," she writes, "in the end that is what we get."

As a charismatic figure in a contentious field that does not generate many stars -- she was recently profiled in Wired magazine's United Kingdom edition -- Dr. Mazzucato has her critics. She is a regular guest on nightly news shows in Britain, where she is pitted against proponents of Brexit or skeptics of a market-savvy state.

Alberto Mingardi, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and director general of Istituto Bruno Leoni, a free-market think tank, has repeatedly criticized Dr. Mazzucato for, in his view, cherry-picking her case studies, underestimating economic trade-offs and defining industrial policy too broadly. In January, in an academic piece written with one of his Cato colleagues, Terence Kealey, he called her "the world's greatest exponent today of public prodigality."

Her ideas, though, are finding a receptive audience around the world. In the United Kingdom, Dr. Mazzucato's work has influenced Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, and Theresa May, a former Prime Minister, and she has counseled the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon on designing and putting in place a national investment bank. She also advises government entities in Germany, South Africa and elsewhere. "In getting my hands dirty," she said, "I learn and I bring it back to the theory."

The 'Mission Muse'

During a break at the United Nations gathering, Dr. Mazzucato escaped the air conditioning to confer with two colleagues in Italian on a patio. Tall, with a muscular physique, she wore a brightly colored glass necklace that has become something of a trademark on the economics circuit. Having traveled to five countries in eight days, she was fighting off a cough.

"In theory, I'm the 'Mission Muse,'" she joked, lapsing into English. Her signature reference is to the original mission to the moon -- a state-spurred technological revolution consisting of hundreds of individual feeder projects, many of them collaborations between the public and private sectors. Some were successes, some failures, but the sum of them contributed to economic growth and explosive innovation.

Dr. Mazzucato's platform is more complex -- and for some, controversial -- than simply encouraging government investment, however. She has written that governments and state-backed investment entities should "socialize both the risks and rewards." She has suggested the state obtain a return on public investments through royalties or equity stakes, or by including conditions on reinvestment -- for example, a mandate to limit share buybacks.

Emphasizing to policymakers not