Many years ago now, I wrote a post called “There Was a Class War and the Rich Won.”
Ironically, after the financial meltdown of 07/8, and thanks to Bush, Obama, Bernanke, and Geithner both bailing the rich out and immunizing them from their crimes, that victory has accelerated. This chart, from Harvard, tells the story of the last 30 years.
What this chart doesn’t show is that the those gains went primarily to the top one percent, and in the top one percent to the top 0.1 percent and in the top 0.1 percent to the top .01 percent.
What happened was a vast centralization of wealth, and therefore of power. This power was used to buy the government: the presidency (Obama acted in the interests of the rich in every important way–so has every President since Carter); congress and definitely the courts, both of which have, ruled, time and time again, in favor of capital and for large and larger concentrations of wealth and power, culminating with “Citizens United,” which classified money as speech and sharply limited government’s power to regulate money in elections. This legislation was the crowning glory of the rich’s victory in the class war.
One of the problems with capitalism is that its benefits rest largely on having competitive (free) markets. But the first thing capitalists do when they “win” the markets is take their profits and use them to buy government so that they can end free markets (our markets are nowhere near competitive or free). Free markets, to anyone who has won, are a threat.
You can see this in the march of so-called “intellectual property.” There is no such thing in anything close to a state of nature: Intellectual property is entirely the product of government. Ideas are free, in nature, and can be used by anyone, and one person using an idea doesn’t mean someone else can’t use it. There is no natural property of ideas.
But we have extended intellectual property well beyond the life, even, of creators. Walt Disney is dead, long dead, and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are still the intellectual property of a company.
Competitive markets require that other people be able to compete. They must be able you use your technology, your ideas, etc… to bring down the price of goods. If you want to keep charging a premium, you have to keep coming up with new ideas. But when key technologies and ideas are locked behind patents and copyrights forever, this isn’t possible. (I can’t see any argument for most patents beneficially owned by companies to last more than five years, and even that is questionable. There is an argument for longer copyrights, if they are beneficially owned by individuals, but even in such cases, not long beyond the life of the copyright owner.)
All of this is putting aside other vast barriers to entry and laws and subsidies which benefit incumbents and which push hard towards monopolization.
So we don’t have free markets, and we do have vastly rich rich, and those rich own the government, without question (the events of 2007/2008 proved it).
Capitalism without free markets doesn’t provide most of the benefits of capitalism, and democracy which has been captured by oligarchy doesn’t provide most of the benefits of democracy.
And so both are being discredited, and fascism rises and non-market alternatives become more and more popular. You see it in Corbyn, you see it in the challenge to so-called free trade epitomized by Trump, and you see it in the fact that, for most young Americans, socialism is no longer a four-letter word.
Corbyn’s program includes a vast swathe of straight up de-privatization. It includes rent-controls and a program for the government to just build housing. It isn’t radical from a 60s point of view, but to a neoliberal capitalist, it is terror indeed. And if Corbyn was elected by just those under 40, he’d win in a landslide.
The days of our form of capitalism are nearly over. It is done, and that it is done is concealed by an overhang of older people in the developed world. What will replace it remains to be seen: there are alternatives on the right and left, and the right-wing alternatives are pretty ugly.
But that neoliberal capitalism is nearly done, that is obvious.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Mike Cooper
Renationalisation, not re-privatisation.
I pretty much agree with all of this. The question is, will the old guard move out of the way, or will they use authoritarianism to maintain power?
Chiron
The economic crisis of 2007/8 was supposed to be the end of Neoliberalism but what happened was the opposite, what is called “the Left” has almost no political power to confront the banks or high finance, resigning itself to Indentity politics.
V
What most just don’t get is; you no longer count. For anything.
Your only wealth is SS, medicare, and what few pensions exist with their vast holdings, plundered yes, but not yet empty.
It will all be stolen from you. Little by little until you have nothing. Nothing!
Eat shit and die; you have no value…
Pretty grim huh? When that is understood, you’ll have a place to start.
There is no fix; just change, and change it must; the alternative is the great nothing…
Death!
Fox Blew
I agree, Ian. And I will seize on one of the themes of this post – that being the age demographic. As a 40 year old Canadian, my views are obviously coloured by limited personal experience (from a global perspective). I am somewhat surprised how seldom I meet with so-called pro-capitalist young people (those younger than me.) Most are not academically articulate when it comes to politics or economics, but that suggests a failure of our education system. So I excuse them for not publicly declaring their support of System A, B, or C. However, their concept of society – and therefore politics and economics – is obviously highly suspicious of capitalism. So I have to ask…when the Baby Boomer generation officially leaves the scene, who will take up the flag of capitalism? I don’t see any Alex P. Keatons (a la Family Ties) of any significant number waiting in the wings.
Hugh
I throw up my hands with the progressive Left in the US. For about ten years now, I have written to focus, organize, and reach out. But it never happens. It never starts to happen. There is the cause du jour as with the current repudiation of Trump’s abuse of children of asylum seekers, but it never gels into anything permanent, something that we can build on.
My formulation is that we face two existential threats: climate change and overpopulation. But to address these, we need to deal with the immediate political and economic problems of kleptocracy (government of the thieves by the thieves), massive wealth inequality (the result), and class war (how the rich defend their wealth and their thefts by setting the rest of us against each other).
I agree about patents and copyrights. The original intent was to strike a balance between private and public goods: foster invention and innovation by giving creators a chance to profit from their ideas and then give the rest of society and new inventors free access to these ideas. What has happened instead is a huge and essentially eternal rent extraction machine which stifles creativity and innovation. In the tech world, 5 years is old, 10 years is ancient, and 15 years compatibility issues make it largely unusable. So a 5 year limit makes sense. In pharma, I would give 10 years to a new drug and half that to an in-same-class drug (say like another cephalosporin or SSRI) or a new formulation of an old drug (one taken once a day instead of say three times a day). I would give 15-20 years to art, music, and literature, single or corporate creator. As I like to say, it certainly seems like Taylor Swift has been around forever. But her first album came out in 2006 and would still be under copyright for a few more years under either of these limits. And how many people are there who are rushing out to listen to it? Yet under the current regime, this album would be under copyright for more than a century, long after everyone has forgotten her and her music.
highrpm
what are the major correlates in the top and bottom .1% outliers? as a product engineer long ago, we were tasked w/ yield improvement. we focused on identifying major fail modes in the outliers and fixing those first. as the decades have rolled by since lyndon introduced his great society, the applying the victim/ entitlement tactic in reducing the inequities between the top and bottom outliers has had little effect. the greatly increased inequities of today point fingers at ???
Ed
Re: copyright. The duration went up in the 80’s specifically at the lobbying of the Disney corporation. The original intent was to never extend it much past the creator’s death. But this data point just reinforces your overall point.
Bill H
The problem is not capitalism, it is the people who abuse capitalism to their own end. Guess what. They will abuse any other system to their own end as well so long as the “huddled masses” allow themselves to be distracted by trivia and allow the oligarchy to abuse the system to their own end.
Capitalism is merely one of many economic systems; inherently no better or worse than any of the other systems. It created a prosperous and happy middle class in the 1960s and 1970s in this country. It is now doing the same thing in this nation that socialism did in the USSR, and for the same reason; it has been taken over by those who are corrupting it for their own purpose.
someofparts
“F**k Community College. Let’s Get Drunk and Eat Chicken Fingers”
Since I’ll be dead before anything gets better around here, guess it’s time to find consolation anywhere it is available.
The caption above is the second episode of Trailer Park Boys. Thanks to Canada for Ian and for Bubbles and the boys of Sunnyvale Trailer Park. I couldn’t stand this place without you.
nihil obstet
Actually, copyrights were not originally to reward the creator. The writer was presumably paid for her product. The purpose was to get a printer to print new works. There is not much conceptual difference between a painter and a writer, but the former gets paid once for the painting and the writer gets a rent stream. And of course a bricklayer never gets rent from his work. Intellectual property has always been a means of extending capitalism by commoditizing more things.
Dean Baker has proposed a number of alternatives to copyright and patents.
Willy
In a theoretical, ideal capitalist society, that pie chart would be evenly spaced five ways. (I don’t necessarily believe such, just looking at it from what I’d think would be a capitalists point of view.) Something about the last 27 years has been disastrous for capitalism – something different from the 27 years previous to that.
Leftists need to accept just how successful the strategies employed by the kleptocrats really are, and to be able to counter without stooping to that level. Not an easy task. Too many leftists give up when they repeatedly bash their facts against incorrigible ignorance. They sometimes forget how arrogant stupidity is, and how humble intelligence can be when it knows just how much there is to know. Going about it that way is a fools game.
It might be better to mock the incorrigibly ignorant, while doing what the kleptocrats did in their mob influence/control strategies – target those most amenable. Kleptos were very good at telling average people ‘their facts’ in ways they were most likely to hear them.
John Zimmerman
Agree with the comment that it is not capitalism, it is influence buying. Our political system simply allows the wealthy to buy the political system. There is a study out there (never been able to track it down but seen references to the results) that show there is a zero correlation between the bills passed by Congress and what the little guys want and nearly 100% correlation to what the wealthy want.
Surely there are other countries out there that handle money and politics in a better manner than we do. Does anyone have examples to share and tell us what the results look like?
different clue
@Fox Blew,
What social class are you in? Are you in the Top One? Or the Top Ten? Or the Left-Behind Eighty Nine?
I suspect the children of the One and the Ten are all pro-capitalism because their class has engineered it to work for them. They will support the system whose comfy leather chairs they expect to age into.
If you are in the Left-Behind Eighty Nine, the under-40s you get to talk to are probably also in the Left-Behind Eighty Nine . . . . who get zero upside and eat all the downside from post-New-Deal unrestrained lawless capitalism.
Now . . . if you actually have talked to some youngish Ten Percenters and One Percenters and some of THEM are also tired of capitalism, then we have an interesting development.
By the way, I 0nce tried to craft an acronym series to name the One Percent Of One Percent, the One Percent Of One Percent Of One Percent, etc. I suggested the OPOOP, the OPOOPOOP, etc. I give it away if anyone thinks they can use it.
OPOOP = One Percent Of One Percent.
OPOOPOOP = One Percent Of One Percent Of One Percent.
etc.
Hugh
The first government-regulated copyright law was the 1709 Statute of Anne. As laid out in its preamble:
“Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted”
The Statute of Anne was enacted in reaction to the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 which had given the printing guild, a private entity, the exclusive power to print and decide what was printed. This act had to be renewed every two years but proved so unpopular among authors that it was not renewed in 1694.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Daniel A Lynch
Ian said “What happened was a vast centralization of wealth, and therefore of power. “
Yeah, or visa versa. Which came first, concentration of wealth or concentration of power? The U.S. has never truly been democratic and the EU was deliberately designed not to be democratic. The sad thing is that the “left” has bought into the globalism schtick, as if we could get rid of national borders and national laws and live happily ever after as one big happy family, since that is working so well in the EU.
Re: the role played by capitalism in this. Capitalism produces unequal distribution which, as Ian points out, means unequal power, which means no true democracy.
The various schools of social democracy propose regulating capitalism and doing enough redistribution to tame the worst inequalities. In theory that can be done, and has been done for short periods of time, but begs the question of who will regulate capitalism in a capitalist society where everyone has capitalist values? The social democrats may occasionally win an election or three and pass some reforms, but inevitably the capitalists regain power and then it’s back to the fox regulating the hen house.
The Nordic countries seem to be the exception to the rule, but they haven’t been doing it that long and in recent years have suffered some neoliberal setbacks, so it remains to be seen if the Nordic system will endure. One thing they have going for them is they were one of the last places to industrialize and abandon feudalism. They still retain the the feudal concept of a social contract, where everyone has both a place in society and an obligation to society, a way of thinking that is alien to the U.S..
Anyway, good article, but I’m skeptical that neoliberalism is done. Neoliberalism is working just great for the elites and they’re the only ones who have any political power. Corbyn will never be allowed to hold power, just as Bernie Sanders was not allowed to win the Democratic party primary. Leftist governments in other countries will not be allowed to succeed because the last thing the elites want is some smart-alec socialist country showing the world that another way is possible. My read of history is that crappy political and economic systems can sometimes hang onto power for hundreds of years.
Add climate change, and stir.
Hugh
I would also cite in Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution:
“The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
This is referred to as the Copyright and Patent Clause although it mentions neither.
From the Annotated Constitution (p. 332),
” [Laws such as the Statute of Anne] curtailed the royal prerogative to bestow monopolies to Crown favorites over works and products they did not create and many of which had long been enjoyed by the public. Informed by these precedents and colonial practice, the Framers restricted the power to confer monopolies over the use of intellectual property through the Copyright and Patent Clause. For example, the ‘exclusive Right’ conferred to the writings of authors and the discoveries of inventors must be time limited. Another fundamental limitation inheres in the phrase “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”: To merit copyright protection, a work must exhibit originality, embody some creative expression; to merit patent protection, an invention must be an innovative advancement, ‘push back the frontiers.'”
https://www.congress.gov/content/conan/pdf/GPO-CONAN-2017-9-2.pdf
Currently, copyright limits in the US as per the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, aka the Mickey Mouse Protection Act are life plus 70 years for individuals and 120 years from creation or 95 years from publication whichever ends earlier. A 20 year extension on works produced before 1978 increased the copyright on these also to 95 years. This put a freeze on works created from 1923 on entering the public domain until 2019 and later. Mickey Mouse first appeared in 1928 and will not enter the public domain until 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
As you can see this is nuts. It in no way promotes anything other than rent collection to the detriment of the rest of us.
BTW a trademark has no time limits as long as it is kept active. So Mickey Mouse as trademark can live on forever as long as Disney keeps using it.
Hugh
Should read “120 years from creation or 95 years from publication whichever ends earlier” for works created by corporations.
Herman
I am skeptical that generational change will really do much to usher in the change most people on the Left want. Generations are overrated as an analytical category. Not all Baby Boomers fit the stereotype of the hippie-turned-yuppie and not every Millennial is a socialist or social democrat. In the United States poorer people are generally not politically active and upper-middle class people still represent the most important voting bloc because they are the most likely to go out and vote and participate in other forms of politics. This is the the voting bloc that forms the mass constituency for neoliberalism and this includes most upper-middle class young people.
The rest of the population is being fed a diet of identity politics that seems to be getting more virulent. This is not just a phenomenon among old, racist Baby Boomers but includes many younger people who also define themselves by their race/ethnicity/religion and not by class. The most politically active people seem to be the most obsessed with identity issues and these people form the backbone of the parties now. The Democrats don’t need union members and other class-based organizations now that they have pro-choice activists, LGBT activists. racial activists and other non-class based activists to form the base of the party. Same for the Republicans with their coalition of Christian and white identity voters. The business class just writes the checks, the activists provide the foot soldiers.
Corbyn, Sanders and Trump all represent challenges to the status quo to varying degrees but I am not sure that they are all being propelled by younger people. From what I understand Trump supporters and Brexiters tended to be older, Corbyn and Sanders fans seemed to skew younger. The populist movements on the European continent include older and younger people. Anecdotally I can find many Gen Xers and Millennials who are fine with NAFTA and other free trade agreements while I can find plenty of Boomers who hate them. There are still plenty of younger people who are technocratic Vox Democrats and these are the people who will likely continue to dominate the party since they are more politically active, wealthier, better-educated and have better connections to the halls of power.
Tom W Harris
“Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.” — Country Joe.
I first noticed how far outta wack! wack! the copyright thing had grown when I saw a “withheld – copyright” blurb suppressing a clip from an old movie.
It was a Groucho Marx clip. From 1935.
Jack Parsons
The first image in this article is a chart I send around a lot. It shows that productivity gains stopped going to workers in the late 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States#Causes_of_wealth_inequality
Jib Halyard
At what Gini coefficient would your umbrage cease?
Ramona
We cannot predict from this place and time what will happen. A truly dystopian world seems the most likely.
Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and mid-20th century USA left the structure of capitalism alone. This is the reason for the seesaw.
There are too many humans on the planet but the earth, Gaia, will soon take care of that.
Neoliberalism has few countries/economies left to conquer. Hence the USA must be devoured.
Tom
And as usual people go for the wrong solutions.
Take the outrage over children of illegals being separated from parents. Thanks to the outrage, the children will now be kept in cages with their parents with no room to play, poor access to treatment which ICE is not set up to provide, and won’t be fostered out or placed with Family Members who are legal residents or if they were trafficked, sent back to their relatives or adopted out if they have no living relatives.
Nice job you idiots, you increased the kid’s suffering. Now lets apply that logic to kids whose parents are currently incarcerated in US Jails and Prisons as well. We obviously can’t separate the children from them, so we must lock them in the same cells as their parents. Also we can’t separate children from abusive parents either, though said abusive parent might harm them.
Idiots and hypocrites.
If we want real change, we must realize the US was founded by slave owners, who revolted because the King wasn’t allowing them to continue to commit genocide against Indians or continue to smuggle illegal goods without paying a tax.
We also must realize the US Constitution is outdated and obsolete, and must be scrapped, and the Government completely reorganized to a Unicameral Congress elected by proportional vote of parties, a popularly elected President, with the Judicial Branch remaining the same.
We also must secure the borders, recall our military from abroad, sack 80% of the Officers’ Corps and completely overhaul it to prevent its perversion by the Defense Industry by folding all Military Production Lines and research into the Military itself and banning Private Companies from producing military gear. This will prevent the perverting of military production into an unkillable jobs program that can then justify ever more military spending ad infinitium.
Patent Laws and Copyrights must go. They don’t encourage innovation and are unneeded. First-Mover advantage in getting a new ideal out lasts for 4 years on average before someone else reverse engineers the process.
CheekyMonkey
The wisdom which the handmaidens of Capitalism dispense from Harvard, Aspen, or the New York Times is that markets are the most beautiful thing our species ever created because markets are impartial and therefore are the perfect redistribution mechanism. Harsh but just. And Capitalism by extension should be respected and not tinkered with. Because what is the alternative?
When Capitalism does not work, it is always the fault of the capitalists – never the fault of the beautiful construct.
I see this sentiment expressed even here, in the comments above. It is not the system, it is its implementation.
I would like to propose another thought – like every complex, relatively chaotic system in the universe, Capitalism tries to to reach this steady state. A form of dynamic equilibrium if you will.
This steady state can be summed up as PROFIT WITHOUT RISK.
In other words – Capitalism has a systemic bias to it. But here is the real kicker: it inherits this bias from the free market. Because the free market has the same systemic bias. There is a reason why a monopoly is such a great investment.
We kept the markets from this steady state by the kudgel of government regulation. Once we remove this outside force – steady state, here we come.
Hugh
Free markets have never existed. The only questions have ever been who manages them for whose benefit. If we aren’t managing them, then we are not benefiting from them.
People don’t live in Gini coefficients. They live in societies. What kind of a society do you want to live in?
Stirling Newberry
You should find out who said the original of this:
“One of the problems with capitalism is that its benefits rest largely on having competitive (free) markets. But the first thing capitalists do when they “win” the markets is take their profits and use them to buy government so that they can end free markets (our markets are nowhere near competitive or free). Free markets, to anyone who has won, are a threat”
It sort come like God, but it does have an original someplace.
Jib Halyard
“People don’t live in Gini coefficients. They live in societies. What kind of a society do you want to live in?”
They most certainly do. Not much sense talking about “equality” if you can’t even define it what it means. In other words, you have no idea what it is you want, beyond vague slogans and unicorns.
Willy
Everybody knows that in all true free markets all the cons, cheats, and malignant narcissism will magically disappear, because consumers are all highly rational and could never allow such things. And designated regulators always become cons, cheats, and malignantly narcissist because citizens are highly irrational and always allow such things.
Speaking of disproportionate pie slices, why are things so much worse today than they had been previously? Where did the middle class even come from, and why is it dying?
Cause–effect anyone?
scruff
I think the problem runs deeper than that; I think the bias for “profits without risk” is inherited from the underlying biology. Like so many of the human behaviors that would be socially considered “normal”, that’s a behavioral tendency which works fine in normal evolutionary context but causes problems in our current civilized context. Hunter-gatherers seeking the best food sources (in terms of caloric density) for the least personal risk (and least physical effort) end up perpetuating their society and people, and their health and ecosystems improve and flourish as a result. People in the civilized industrial West who seek the best food sources (in the same terms) for the least personal risk (and least physical effort) end up obese, with obese and yet malnourished children. In the original context the behavior is functional; in this current context the behavior is dysfunctional.
scruff
Doesn’t the “middle class” – in an original Marxist sense at least – denote people who derive their wealth both from selling their labor as well as profiting from some capital ownership? That’s perhaps a sensible approach to dealing with the inherent evil of capitalism, if you assume that you can make everyone in your society “middle class” and allow everyone to both have the safety net of unearned income as well as incentivizing them to work and contribute their best skillset to the development of the society.
As to why it is dying, well… the ideal of making everyone middle class appears to have been unable to overcome the inherent evil of capitalism; the incentives to withdraw from production and parasitize the labor force are deeply rooted in biology (see my comment above), and after a century or more of constant propaganda the social and political forces are aligned to reward precisely the least productive behavior (see this post and every post Ian has written about the financial sector) which will imbalance the economic system we live in.
Willy
IMHO, human systems eventually fail and empires eventually crumble, for the very same reasons – the way all power games are played and who it is they ultimately reward. At the end of any given day the exact wrong personalities, from a cultural and social perspective, will always win for the simple reason that they have more weapons, which will always be fully utilized when they are not veraciously checked and balanced.
Intelligently enforced checks and balances is the only way. But nobody has figured out how to do this, for long.
Part of what makes this difficult, is that such a large percentage of all humans seem to be hardwired for tribal conformity. They’re born far more, wanting to be told what their morals and ethics and loyalties should be, and far less skeptical about the motives of their sanctioned authority who themselves are (usually) born to want to control others.
The wide variety of temperaments which worked well together to advance human interests in prehistoric times don’t work so well today in the face of ever increasing technology and population, which can greatly increase concentrations of power.
someofparts
Whatever the economic future holds, one thing that seems likely is the throttling of our internet. The Europeans are about to put some destructive rules in place, and the end of net neutrality is chugging along over here. I expect our venal oligarchs will make the internet as trifling and useless as television. So, if communities can organize to produce decent change, it may be something that eventually has to be done without online tools.
steeleweed
@nihil obstet
The problem is that IP covers so many quite-different categories that a one-size-fits-all is a recipe for disaster. Copyright on a novel differs from a researched non-fiction work differs from a new medicine differs from a new apple-peeler differs from a new manufacturing process, etc etc etc.
The problem is made worse by flat-out abuse of the system. The drug Modafinil went out-of-patent and thus generic, so Cephalon brought out Armodafinil. Modafinil, like many compounds, consists of two isomers (L-enantiomer & R-enantiomer), one of which is chemically inert in livng systems. Armodafinil is the same compound with the inactive L-enantiomer removed. No improvement, nothing really invented, but being “officially” new can command a higher price.
That’s called gaming the system. It’s abuse and should not be allowed.
Per Dean Baker: “There are other, more efficient ways to finance creative work. The tax deduction for charitable contributions is one obvious model. A modest refundable tax credit could be used to bring newly produced work into the public domain, supporting a vastly larger body of work than is now supported through the copyright system.”
I strongly doubt this would support most writers.
Morris Rosenthal wrote a book – perhaps the definitive book – on laptop repair. He made a respectable income selling it in paper and as eBook and was one of the earliest and most successful marketers of online content – until he got wide pirated. He sued (and won in federal court) but the piracy continued. Someone even scanned in the paperback and was selling it as a PDF. Morris filed a lot of takedown notices under DMCA but as fast as one pirate site was shut down, another popped up. He found he was spending all his day fighting the pirates. The final straw was when a change to Google’s algorithm returned the pirate sites well ahead of his site – Google favored the ‘content farms’ over the original content. He gave up, effectively ceding that book to the pirates and now write SciFi, which evidently doesn’t suffer from such copyright violations.
VietnamVet
The rise of supranational monopolies and the decline of the middle class; rose from the same source. Oligarchs in the nuclear age realized that to survive massed Armies were no longer needed. Four million men invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. In 1949 mass invasions became obsolete. A healthy population is an unneeded expense. Wars between nuclear powers were unthinkable until recently when the third string took over the western democratic governments. The current flood of migrants caused by unrest and the forever wars will become a rip tide when climate change kicks in. Survival will come down to dumb luck, geographical barriers, and if there are any nation-states left that can defend its arable land. Elon Musk or Tim Cook are only as secure as their hired contractors.
nihil obstet
@Steeleweed,
I strongly doubt this would support most writers.
Does the current system support most writers?
We have an economic system based on scarcity, so that the owners of the scarce resources can have power over others. This made sense when there was actual scarcity. Now, however, maintaining the system requires that we create artificial scarcity, and that makes life worse than it can be for most people. Whether Baker’s specific proposal would work for some decent definition of work or not, we need to think about ways that we can all enjoy the abundance rather than ways to restrict access to goods for the profit of the few.
This is especially true when the goods are non-material. A rent stream that requires no material input creates enormous inequality. Control of narratives and information is the basis of power. Gone with the Wind was under copyright when I was born and will still be under copyright when I die, so such alternative narratives as The Wind Done Gone faced lawsuits. Other novels based on the Mitchell characters got the copyright holder’s authorization. I think it would be hard to argue that the novel, movie, and general romanticizing of the plantation culture didn’t support the continuation of Jim Crow laws. The taking over of mass culture by narratives supporting the current power structure mirrors the takeover of the economy by the very rich.
DMC
Since Reagan, its been one round of “Tax Relief” after another with the 1% garnering most, if not all, of the benefits. Without the check to their growth of taxes, you get billionaires. You get enough billionaires, you get what the oligarchs themselves call “the Plutonomy”. The middle class just becomes whoever can serve the Plutonomy. Everybody else is just surplus to requirements in a system that makes Medieval Feudalism look egalitarian by comparison. Of course, the system may break down before it gets to that point. Maintaining that artificial scarcity in the face growing opposition is going to be the “make or break” of the Plutonomy and I’m reasonably sure they know it.
Tom
Well the results are now finalized in Turkey.
Erdogan easily won election as President.
His People’s Alliance (AKP/MHP) will form a coalition government as AKP doesn’t have enough seats to rule alone (295 seats out of 600 with MHP bringing 48 more). The Opposition Nation Alliance bombed, gaining only 190 seats. HDP still remains in Parliament, with 67 seats and a whole new set of MPs who aren’t terrorist supporters or at least keep it to themselves.
Turnout was almost 90%, meaning a super majority of citizens able to vote, voted, which makes this election a legitimate expression of the will of the people.
This is what a healthy democracy looks like with invalids being helped to the polls by ambulances to vote, and the elderly eagerly queuing up, soldiers in rural areas carrying grandpas and grandmas to the polls and guarding voters from PKK attacks while they walk to voting booths with their children.
All polling stations were staffed by volunteers from all parties to ensure the paper ballots were counted correctly and guarding against fraud.
The opposition will remain right honorable, and on some issues can pull MHP into their camp.
Turkey has now fully transitioned to a functional Democracy, shaking off the last vestiges of the Old Republic made by soldiers for the benefit of soldiers.
The Turks came a long way, starting out with a Government that did not work for citizens, and successfully transforming it into one that does work.
Stirling Newberry
“I think the problem runs deeper than that; I think the bias for “profits without risk” is inherited from the underlying biology. ”
No, reread basic reproductive biology again – risk is part of the process of making copies, and is, in fact, accurate in 2 the system.
someofparts
One point strikes me as important. I think our problem is the top 10%, not just the 1%. Sure, the wealthy of our towns, the ones still somewhat visible to regular people, are poor compared to Jeff Bezos. But the 10% courtier class are still doing much better than they have in the past, and they love our criminal economic arrangements. They can be counted on to pretend to be on our side if things get harsh, but they will be waiting for the chance to sell us out. The millionaire next door is our enemy just as much as the billionaire we will never see in person. I would feel more hopeful about our future if it looked like more people were clear on this point.
Herman
@someofparts,
Yes, this is something I tried to point out above. The upper middle-class represents the electoral base for neoliberalism. This is why neoliberalism is so durable despite its failures. The managerial/professional class has outsized influence on politics, They are the most reliable voters and dominate the ranks of activists and party functionaries for both the GOP and the Democrats. They also dominate the media, academia and culture. This group has benefited from neoliberalism less than the very rich but they have benefited enough relative to the working class that they are willing to side with the rich if they feel that the system is being seriously challenged.
someofparts
Herman –
Yes. Thank you. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of dealing with such people very directly. Their ignorance and inhumanity are only exceeded by their blind spots.
They project the bigotries of their class onto Trump voters and imagine everyone else is motivated by venal opportunism as they are. The problem they don’t see is that there are no opportunists in a world stripped of all opportunity. Those who would have been ambitious in an honest economy just become bitter radicals in a corrupt one.
The Trump vote is based on a burning hatred of people like them. That’s why those voters remain loyal even when he does not make their lives better. Nobody was ever going to make their lives, or those of their children, better anyway, but at least with Trump, he might make the lives of neoliberals worse, and that is delightful.
The smug liars of that cohort are really pleased with themselves for sidelining Bernie Sanders. I don’t care enough about them to point out that, entirely because of the political incompetence they wield with such pride, we can probably expect a Trump win in 2020.
scruff
I will read and think on that some more at your suggestion, but it seems to me that the “profits without risk” motive can still be an influence even if it does not affect every aspect of life, and I was specifically drawing a comparison to the non-reproductive aspects such as eating.
highrpm
“profits without risk” is not biomimicry. rather it’s a goal that drives fully automated manufacturing firstly, and later marketing, design and shipping. tesla’s goal of manufacturing the tesla model 3 w/o humans on the ass’ line. the human worker is an imperfect robot. and must be replaced with perfect robots, that fail lots less often. get rid of the trouble makers. and so robots in the factory, and pervasive in society, will ultimately threaten the underclasses. how/ when/ where, who knows?
Willy
Vonnegut assumed in his “Player Piano” (the novel about a fully automated AI world), that some future government would at least be wise enough to keep the mob busy, even if done with ‘employment’ makework. Boy was he ever wrong. Based on results, our recent and current governments have cared little for anything except taking care of their own.
Increasingly, people are acting out their powerlessness frustrations with self-defeating tweets, booing public officials, and by continuously blaming mythical “others” instead of taking the time to honestly figure out the root cause of their angst really is.
nihil obstet
Booing public officials is good feedback.
Willy
Maybe those are the ones who’ve figured out the cause of their angst.
different clue
@someofparts and Herman–
You are exactly correct about the Catfood Clintonite Democrats and their supporters among the ten percent.
The Primary Defeat of Pelosi/Hoyerat- Democrat Crowley in his district by a young Bernista shows that it is possible to remove Catfood Clintonites from office in some cases. Certainly this is an inspiring first-step victory. Perhaps it can inspire and inform further efforts to begin disinfecting and declintaminating the Democratic Party.
If Sanders can somehow rip the Democratic Nomination from the tentacle sucker discs of the Catfood Clintobama/ Pelosi-Hoyerat InnerDem Party Lords, they will conspire with all their Clintonite supporters in the field to defeat Sanders out of spite for his having dared to challenge their Preciousssss ‘The One’ Clinton for the 2016 DemParty nomination.
So I confidently predict that if Sanders gets the DemParty nomination, the Clintonites will re-elect Trump on purpose and with malice aforethought. And I don’t care. I will support and vote for Sanders at every step regardless. Let the Catfood Clintonites be seen for what they are in the broad light of day . . . before God and CSPAN and everyone else.
highrpm
wrt sanders. i hope the guy learned his lesson: not to fold to the party liners. i still do not forget nor do i forgive him for leading me on, to the extent i donated to his campaign, with not an inkling that he’d throw his support to the clintons. he misled me. i took him more seriously than he did himself. especially when hollywood scripted the bird landing on his lectern and, as is usual for a commoner like myself, i believed the stagecrafting as the universe’s blessing on sanders. what shit. the 2016 ride bore good fruit: i learned more about dirty politics and will be more cautious w/ lower expectations next time.
John Poynton
I am with you on much of this, especially on intellectual property rights (imagine if Isaac Newton had protected his laws of gravity and motion!), and on the fact that we do not in fact have free markets, especially when it comes to executive salaries and capital taxation policies.
However Corbyn’s programme does not address these issues and will only add to the madness. We need radically new ideas. One such would be to introduce “Cheapest Competent Candidate” recruitment for senior executives and directors in both the public sector and the quoted company sector; that is to require recruiters to put at least five names on their shortlists and then invite the candidates to bid for the job – just as you would with a contractor. We should also reintroduce shareholder supremacy – in the UK directors can simple ignore shareholders wishes – its goes back to the 1890s and the collapse of the Bank of Glasgow when most shareholders were retired vicars and little old ladies, whereas now they are highly trained asset managers – by establishing shareholder supervisors boards.
Frustration often leads to over-reaction. Revolutionaries only ever manage to destroy the old and then fail to build the new. It requires a more professional approach, which I hope is what UKIP offers!