By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
“You lost. Stop acting like you won”
[White Hot Harlots (lyman alpha blob), via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-14-21]
“The abortion issue has been lost. I cannot fathom any plausible near or medium-term scenario in which the actually existing American left mounts a successful counteroffensive to the Texas bill. Poor women in red states and rural areas effectively do not have access to reproductive healthcare any longer. If they ever regain this right, it will be decades from now. This represents an immense and damning failure of all of America’s liberal institutions. In spite of access to abortion being generally popular–including upwards of 77% of adults wanting Roe to remain more or less in place–the Democratic party, their media apparatuses, and their NGO allies have absolutely shit the bed. They have lost. They have failed. Instead of taking a step back and examining their own tactical and moral failures, instead of owning up to their undeniable cowardice and naivety, instead of realizing that their messaging is at best confusing and at worse supremely alienating, instead of realizing that the other side doesn’t regard this as kayfabe but as a real issue they want to win… the Dems have done nothing. They’ve doubled down on failed strategies. They’ve retreated into their caverns of recrimination and mockery, wallowing in the comfort of blamelessness even as they presently control the executive branch and both houses of congress.”
The actual history of how abortion became a major issue in USA points to the role entrenched wealth manipulated politics by lavishly funding and directing movement conservatism. The “common wisdom” today is that the anti-choice forces were spurred into action when Roe v. Wade was decided. But as a number of scholars have noted, elements of what would later become the religious right actually supported Roe v. Wade at first. Writing in Politico May 27, 2014, Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College notes:
“In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976…. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.”
So, what happened? Balmer explains:
“….it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools….
“Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
“But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
Also see, for example, How AT&T fuels right-wing extremists , under The Dark Side below.
There Is Shadow Inflation Taking Place All Around Us
[Upshot, via The Big Picture 10-13-2021]
Some companies haven’t been raising prices. Instead, they’ve been cutting back customer services and conveniences, but how should that be measured?
America’s Economic Divide In Two Stories
[Heisenberg Report, via Naked Capitalism 10-10-2021]
The graphs alone are very instructive.
GRAPH The top one percent’s share of national wealth eclipsed the entire middle class’s (middle 60 percent) share in 2021.
And remember Citigroup’s 2005 Plutonomy reports, were some 15 years before RAND calculated that the top one percent have soaked the rest of us for over $50 trillion since 1975.
The Cross of Gold – populism, democratic iterations and the politics of money
Adam Tooze [Chartboook, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2021]
The address that Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan delivered at 2 pm on July 9 1896 at the Chicago Convention of the Democratic Party – the “Cross of Gold” speech – is a stunning piece of oratory on the theme of the gold standard and the peril that this rigid monetary system poses to society.
The incident is familiar to anyone with a background in American history. But when I first encountered it, as a European, I was staggered. It struck me as a truly remarkable example of democratic politics engaging with the question of money. It is more than 120 years old, but everyone concerned with monetary politics today should read Bryan’s speech. The full text is here.
Bryan’s oration culminates in these glorious paragraphs:
….”“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.”
….
Bryan and the populist struggle with the gold standard seem particularly topical because we are, at this moment, debating the economics and politics of inflation and monetary policy. If Modern Monetary Theory insists that monetary sovereignty is there for the taking, in America, that is a claim with a deep history. Not that Bryan was an advocate of modern monetary policy, but he refused to subordinate America’s currency choices to the blackmail of monied interests.
Then there is the meta question. Set against the backdrop of recent history the fact that we are debating monetary policy at all can seem shocking. In the era of the 1980s and 1990s, insulating monetary policy from democracy was a key priority. The point, Rudiger Dornbusch, the influential MIT macroeconomist, liked to insist, was to put an end to “democratic money”.
But for money to be unpolitical, is not the natural order of things. It is the effect of a particular politics, a metapolitics of depoliticization. As Stefan Eich shows us in his forthcoming book, the Currency of Politics, the argument over the politics of money goes back to the ancients. The question should not be – “political money, or not?”. “Democratic money, or not?” The question should be – What kind of politics of money? What kind of democratic money?
I am dismayed Tooze does not mention the Peoples Party, which also nominated Bryan as its presidential candidate in 1896, or the crucial role of Mark Hanna in mobilizing and directing corporate support for McKinley’s crushing victory over Bryan. In his important history of this period of USA history, The Populist Moment, the late Lawrence Goodwyn explains how Bryan’s support of “Free Silver” left unaddressed the more fundamental question of creating and using a fiat currency, and who exactly controlled the creation of allocation of money and credit. In the 1892 election, the Peoples Party candidate James B. Weaver won 8.5% of the popular vote and carried four Western states, becoming the first insurgent party since the end of the American Civil War to win electoral votes. Goodwyn explains how the 1896 nomination of Bryan led to the collapse and demise of the Peoples Party and the populist movement. “The third party movement of Populists became, within mainstream politics, the last substantial effort at structural alteration of hierarchical economic forms in modern America,” Goodwyn concluded. (p. 264).
“S2 E12 Populism Saved Us Before. Where is it Now?”
Thomas Frank [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-14-21]
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