Author: Tony Wikrent Page 35 of 51

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 18, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

The Epidemic

NEW From CDC: “Community Profile Report July 8 2021” (PDF), “Rapid Riser” counties

[CDC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-16-21]

Five undervaccinated clusters put the entire United States at risk

[CNN, via The Big Picture 7-12-2021]

Clusters of unvaccinated people, most of them in the southern United States, are vulnerable to surges in Covid-19 cases and could become breeding grounds for even more deadly Covid-19 variants: Starting in Georgia and stretching west to Texas and north to Missouri + include parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

There’s A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States’ Vaccination Rates 

[NPR, via The Big Picture 7-13-2021]

But surveys have shown Trump supporters are the least likely to say they have been vaccinated or plan to be. Remember, Trump got vaccinated before leaving the White House, but that was reported months later. Unlike other public officials who were trying to encourage people to get the shot, Trump did it in private.

Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 7-13-2021]

The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. For nearly every U.S. county, both the willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020.

Strategic Political Economy

Newsmax anchor goes full death cult, suggests vaccines go against evolution and nature

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy

[American Affairs Journal, via The Big Picture 7-5-2021]

Operation Warp Speed was a triumph of public health policy. But it was also a triumph and validation of industrial policy. OWS shows what the U.S. government can still accomplish when it comes to tackling a seemingly unsolvable technological challenge. It demonstrates the strength of the U.S. developmental state, despite forty years of ideological assault.

A nice, timely historical review of one of the apocalyptic horsemen of that forty years of ideological assault. Note the shape-shifting use of political terminology by the horsie set. 

The End of Friedmanomics

The New Republic, June 17, 2021, via Avedon’s Sideshow 6-30-2021]

….All of which makes a contemporary reading of Friedman’s Cape Town lectures a harrowing experience. His first speech was an unremitting diatribe against political democracy—an explicit rejection of, in Friedman’s words, “one person, one vote,” delivered to a nation in which more than half of the population was disenfranchised by race. Voting, Friedman declared, was inescapably corrupt, a distorted “market” in which “special interests” inevitably dictated the course of public life. Most voters were “ill-informed.” Voting was a “highly weighted” process that created the illusion of social cooperation that whitewashed a reality of “coercion and force.” True democracy, Friedman insisted, was to be found not through the franchise, but the free market, where consumers could express their preferences with their unencumbered wallets. South Africa, he warned, should avoid the example of the United States, which since 1929 had allowed political democracy to steadily encroach on the domain of the “economic market,” resulting in “a drastic restriction in economic, personal, and political freedom.”

….That this prescription found political purchase with the American right in the 1960s is not a surprise. Friedman’s opposition to state power during an era of liberal reform offered conservatives an intellectual justification to defend the old order. What remains remarkable is the extent to which the Democratic Party—Friedman’s lifelong political adversary—came to embrace core tenets of Friedmanism. When Friedman passed away in 2006, Larry Summers, who had advised Bill Clinton and would soon do the same for Barack Obama, acknowledged the success of Friedman’s attack on the very legitimacy of public power within his own party. “Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” he declared in The New York Times….

Friedman responded to Brown in 1955 with “The Role of Government in Education,” an essay that called for the ostensibly race-neutral program of privatizing the school system by providing families with education vouchers that could be spent where parents wished. As in his essay on housing nine years before, Friedman appealed to the simple nineteenth-century logic of market competition and equilibrium to make his case. Public schools were a “monopoly” that put private schools at an unfair “disadvantage.” By transitioning from public schools to vouchers, families would enjoy a diversity of education options, and market competition over the quality of education would in time enhance the lot of students everywhere.

It was every bit as neat and tidy as Friedman’s case against rent regulations. But as Leo Casey has detailed for Dissent magazine, Friedman gave away the political game in a lengthy footnote. Though he insisted, “I deplore segregation and racial prejudice,” Friedman nevertheless believed in the right of the private market to develop “exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.”

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over

Yanis Varoufakis [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2021]

Then, after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.

That central banks’ balance sheets, not profits, power the economic system explains what happened on August 12, 2020. Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: “Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us. Time to buy shares!” All over the West, central banks print money that financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their shares (whose prices have decoupled from profits). Meanwhile, digital platforms have replaced markets as the locus of private wealth extraction. For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free the capital stock of large corporations. That is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps.

“Democrats Raise Ethical Concerns Over GOP Donor’s $1 Million Funding of Border Deployment”

[Military.com, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-1-21]

“A billionaire’s $1 million donation to fund a South Dakota National Guard mission to the U.S.-Mexico border has raised questions of whether the military is effectively for hire, and Democrats in the state are investigating the legality of the issue, Military.com has learned. Willis and Reba Johnson’s Foundation, helmed by billionaire Willis Johnson, pledged $1 million to South Dakota to cover the estimated cost of deploying some 50 guardsmen to the border for up to two months, according to a state government email reviewed by Military.com.”

This is exactly why I advocate replacing liberalism with civic republicanism, which is compelling in its clarity and simplicity: the rich are as much a danger to a republic as a standing army.

As James Madison wrote in his notes preparing for the Constitutional Convention: “If the minority happen to include all such as possess the skill and habits of military life, & such as possess the great pecuniary resources, one third only may conquer the remaining two thirds.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 27, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

THE 50-100 PAY GAP: These 20 Harsh Facts About Income and Wealth Inequality Will Shock You

[Capital & Main, via Naked Capitalism 6-22-2021]

Fourteen shocking facts on inequality and working Americans

● Worker hourly compensation increased just 17% from 1979 to 2019, while worker productivity increased more than 72% over the same time period.

● Had the income of the bottom 90% of Americans kept up with GDP growth, they’d have collectively taken home $2.5 trillion more in 2018. Over the 43 years since 1975 combined, the figure is $47 trillion.

● The wealth of the bottom half of families — roughly 64 million families — adds up to only 1% of total U.S. household wealth.

● The median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median Black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family.

● In 2016, 72% of white families owned their home, compared to just 44% of Black families and 45% of Latino families.

● For the average American consumer, the share of their expenditures spent on health doubled from 1980 to 2018.

● Half of U.S. adults with lower incomes skipped necessary medical care such as doctor visits, recommended tests, treatments, follow-up care or prescription medications in the past year because of the high cost.

● Between 2008 and 2018, the number of states in which health insurance premiums and deductibles consumed at least 10% of median income increased from seven to 42.

● The price of education increased 600% more than incomes from 1980 to 2018.

● One in four Americans have no retirement savings — and those who do aren’t saving enough. The median retirement savings account of $120,000 for those approaching retirement (ages 55 to 64) will likely provide less than $1,000 per month over a 15-year retirement span.

● Social Security benefits have lost 30% of their buying power since 2000.

● Nearly 83 million adults — 34 percent of all adults in the country — reported that their household found it somewhat or very difficult to cover usual expenses such as food, rent or mortgage, car payments, medical expenses or student loans in the last seven days, according to survey research in November 2020.

● Nearly half of Black adults reported it was somewhat or very difficult to pay usual household expenses, nearly twice the rate among white adults and Asian adults (28%). A similar share (47%) of Latino adults reported such difficulties.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 6-23-2021]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Lords Of Hell (And Their Slaves)

Ian Welsh

Homelessness, despair and so on are required: without them people will not work at bad jobs. Indeed, without them many people would not work any more than required to feed and house themselves.

Now, understand clearly, rip a hole in your skull, and put this in: there is more food than needed and way more homes than homeless people in all developed countries and more food than needed to feed everyone in the world. We could easily feed and house everyone in the world. It is almost a trivial problem. We simply have to do it.

Industrialization plus modern agriculture produces more than we need, easily. Automation should mean that less and less hours needed working. We should be living in a paradise of free time and choice.

We do not because a small minority has captured power and enslaved the rest of us.

These people are monsters on every possible level, including their depraved indifference to what will happen to their children and grandchildren under environmental collapse and climate change.

We have a surplus, but it is generated in the stupidest ways possible: with planned obsolesence, soil degradation and pollution causing environmental collapse.

Matt Stoller: A Society Designed to Incentivize Criminal Behavior at the Highest Level

Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on China (not paywalled)

Bernie Sanders [Foreign Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 6-18-2021]

The deck: “Don’t Start Another Cold War.”

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Many Americans moved to less pricey housing markets in 2020

[AP, via The Big Picture 6-15-2021]

Many Americans who moved last year relocated to areas where homes were, on average, bigger and less expensive. On average, people who moved to a different city in 2020 ended up in a ZIP code where average home values were nearly $27,000 lower than in their previous ZIP code.

“Biden Could Cancel Student Loan Debt Right Now By Signing an Executive Order” [Teen Vogue, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-16-21]

“When the Department of Education was first given the power to issue student loans, it was also granted the power to “compromise, waive, or release any right” to collect on them, an authority known as “compromise and settlement.” Essentially, the Biden administration can suspend the collection of student debt altogether, and poof!, tens of millions of Americans would be student loan debt-free! It’d be like waving a magic wand, except the wand isn’t magic, it’s a legitimate legal authority vested in the Department of Education by Congress.”

Why Buffalo is a hub for illegal debt collectors who scam thousands across the country

[The Buffalo News, via Naked Capitalism 6-15-2021]

Inflation Is Here: Fast Food Bosses Make $5,460 An Hour

[Investor’s Business Daily), via The Big Picture 6-15-2021]

Chipotle’s CEO Brian Niccol is in a class of his own — and his paycheck shows it. Niccol pulled down more than $38 million in total reported compensation in 2020. That’s more than double what he made the prior year. It’s also $18,286 an hour, if you assume 40-hour weeks for 52 weeks.

ProPublica’s Release of Leaked Tax Return Data for Billionaires: Why Wall Street’s Mega Banks Are Freaking Out

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, June 14, 2021 [Wall Street on Parade]

For Student Debtors, Time’s Running Out

[The American Prospect, 6-17-2021]

In just three months, the student loan payment moratorium is scheduled to come to an end. Borrowers are starting to panic….

Through interviews with nearly a dozen student loan borrowers, it’s clear how much student debt weighs on Americans. Currently, 45 million people owe $1.7 trillion in student debt, and the average monthly payment is $393. Student loans are one of the greatest debts of any type in the country, surpassing national credit card and auto debt. A few borrowers told me that they expect to die with their student loans….

The burden of student debt isn’t equal across borrowers; it disproportionately impacts Black Americans, making it one of the key mechanisms exacerbating systemic economic inequality. On average, Black borrowers owe $25,000 more in student loans than their white counterparts….

The administration does have options. While Biden’s Education Department got off to a slow start on reforming borrower relief programs, student loan advocacy groups cheered when he appointed Richard Cordray, formerly in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as chief of federal student loan programs. Cordray has a record of protecting borrowers, and he could be part of the department’s enabling of more loan forgiveness and fixing current systems, while cracking down on unscrupulous student loan companies that often deny borrowers relief to which they’re entitled.

The administration could also extend the moratorium, or bring it back with a phased restart, only requiring a portion of payments to start. And of course, they could cancel the debt, a legal recourse under the Higher Education Act that doesn’t require additional legislation.

Restoring balance to the economy

How America’s Weirdest Guidebooks Were Funded by the Government

[New York Times, June 15, 2021]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 6-11-21]

There is no competing with China without a competent state, and a state that cannot tax its powerful is not a competent state. https://t.co/lJoeLIYkkN

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) June 10, 2021

.

Vast Majority of Voters Want Higher Taxes on Wealthy, Corporations

[Americans For Tax Fairness, via Daily Poster 6-12-2021]

Nearly 7 in 10 voters support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, according to a new poll from ALG Research, Hart Research, and Americans for Tax Fairness. Moreover, voters become more supportive of President Joe Biden’s economic plans when they are told they will be funded by taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

The Global South has lost $152 trillion through unequal exchange since 1960
Dylan Sullivan [Progress in Political Economy, via Mike Norman Economics, June 7, 2021]

Dependency and world-systems theorists have long argued that “unequal exchange” is a key driver of global inequality. Since wages and natural resource prices are much lower in the global South than the North, poor countries must export many more units of embodied labour and resources than they import in order to achieve a monetary balance of trade. This creates a constant transfer of labour and ecology from the periphery to the core, developing the latter but impoverishing the former.

In a recent paper in New Political Economy that I co-authored with Jason Hickel from the University of London, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, a data analyst based in Karachi, we quantify the value that has been appropriated from the South through unequal exchange since 1960. To do this, we use a method developed by the economist Gernot Köhler. Köhler proposes that we can use purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates constructed by the World Bank to value the South’s exports at the North’s price level. By subtracting the actual market price that the South received for its exports from this figure, we can measure the commodities appropriated by the imperialist states, in terms of the Northern price of those commodities.

Using Köhler’s method, we find that in 2017 the ‘emerging and developing economies,’ as defined by the IMF, lost $2.2 trillion worth of goods to the ‘advanced economies.’ This represents an enormous loss for the South. These resources could have ended extreme poverty 15 times over, but instead they were transferred gratis to the core. This windfall is of enormous benefit to the centres of empire. For instance, in 2017 the US gained $2,634 per person through unequal exchange, while the average Australian citizen received $3,116 from the South. Since 1990, the North’s annual gains from unequal exchange have sat at 5.2% of GDP, considerably higher than the North’s annual growth rate. In other words, if not for imperialist plunder, aggregate income in the North would have been declining for decades. The extraordinary levels of material consumption currently enjoyed in the North are predicated upon exploitation and poverty in the periphery.

Figure 1 shows total value transfer since 1960. All up, the South has lost $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), equivalent to 97% of its 2017 GDP. If this surplus had been available to the South, it could have been reinvested in domestic economic development. If we assume this surplus would have grown at the same rate as Southern GDP, it would now be equivalent to $152 trillion.…

And don’t forget the RAND study that found in USA alone, the one percent have taken over $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent since 1975: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.

Global Investable Assets Reach Record $250 Trillion

[Institutional Investor, via The Big Picture 6-10-2021]

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 6, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Particular Psychology of Destroying a Planet” What kind of thinking goes into engaging in planetary sabotage?

Bill McKibben [The New Yorker]

….in a new book from the British psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe. “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis” states its argument in its subtitle: “Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare.” Weintrobe writes that people’s psyches are divided into caring and uncaring parts, and the conflict between them “is at the heart of great literature down the ages, and all major religions.” The uncaring part wants to put ourselves first; it’s the narcissistic corners of the brain that persuade each of us that we are uniquely important and deserving, and make us want to except ourselves from the rules that society or morality set so that we can have what we want. “Most people’s caring self is strong enough to hold their inner exception in check,” she notes, but, troublingly, “ours is the Golden Age of Exceptionalism.” Neoliberalism—especially the ideas of people such as Ayn Rand, enshrined in public policy by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—“crossed a Rubicon in the 1980s” and neoliberals “have been steadily consolidating their power ever since.” Weintrobe calls leaders who exempt themselves in these ways “exceptions” and says that, as they “drove globalization forwards in the 1980s,” they were captivated by an ideology that whispered, “Cut regulation, cut ties to reality and cut concern.” Donald Trump was the logical end of this way of thinking, a man so self-centered that he interpreted all problems, even a global pandemic, as attempts to undo him. “The self-assured neoliberal imagination has increasingly revealed itself to be not equipped to deal with problems it causes,” she writes.

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

[The Guardian, via The Big Picture 6-3-2021]

When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman….

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Chris Hedges: “Dying for an iPhone”

[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 6-1-2021]

Global capitalists have turned back the clock to the early days of the Industrial Revolution.  The working class is increasingly bereft of rights, blocked from forming unions, paid starvation wages, subject to wage theft, under constant surveillance, fired for minor infractions, exposed to dangerous carcinogens, forced to work overtime, given punishing quotas and abandoned when they are sick and old. Workers have become, here and abroad, disposable cogs to corporate oligarchs, who wallow in obscene personal wealth that dwarfs the worst excesses of the Robber Barons

Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 5-31-2021]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications

[NYT, via Naked Capitalism 5-23-2021]

“1 big thing: The state of the world, according to me”

Dion Rabouin [Axios, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 5-27-21]

I find this very interesting because Rabouin implies that he is conveying the elite consensus he has gathered from his contacts and sources over the past years. The elites are well aware of the socio-economic problems afflicting average people: “Because consumers don’t have cash to spend, many companies struggle to generate real profits.” Then the bottom line: “But it doesn’t seem like there’s much interest in finding an actual solution, just printing more money, adding more debt and putting more Band-Aids on the problem.”

As Ian Welsh explains in CDC Decides To Just Not Count All Covid Cases,

The people making decisions not only don’t care if you die, if you dying will make them richer or more powerful, they’ll go with the decision path that leads to you or mum or your best friend dying or winding up homeless. You aren’t nothing to them, you’re meat. A prey animal.

Welcome to late capitalism.

Rabouin:

This being my last Axios Markets newsletter, I figured I’d break from tradition and tell you what I really think. I’m not anyone important, but I read a lot of reports and I talk to a lot of smart people, so I’ve learned a thing or two.

I believe our country is in trouble. And it’s not about a loss of morality or religion or liberals or conservatives or the current president or the last president. It’s about a fundamental problem we have as a nation — a reckless imbalance of wealth. The people at the top have too much and the people at the bottom don’t have enough.

This is not a philosophical matter of doing what’s “right.” It’s a practical matter of doing what’s necessary to uphold and maintain a consumption-based economy…. We’re living in a world now where the wealthy have so much money they literally don’t know what to do with it…. Those who aren’t asset holders haven’t even benefited from the risk-asset inflation that’s accompanied housing, medical and education price inflation for the past decade because wage inflation hasn’t even come close….

This problem isn’t new. We’ve been lurching toward this imbalance for years as corporations busted unions, moved jobs offshore and muscled out independent small businesses, aided by politicians who rewarded them with tax breaks and no-bid contracts for doing it….

• Retailers can’t raise prices, so it is almost entirely a race to the bottom — nearly half of all new retail store openings announced so far this year are from Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar.
• The obvious exception being luxury brands, which are selling products to the wealthy who have more money than they know what to do with.

New companies today almost universally either lose money, free-ride by offering a service that makes some other service cheaper, or sell something to large corporations or the government.

#BigFacts: Because consumers don’t have cash to spend, many companies struggle to generate real profits.

• However, because interest rates are so low, if a company is big enough it can just keep issuing bonds to keep itself afloat.
• That’s why nearly a quarter of the largest public U.S. companies today are zombies — firms that don’t even make enough money to pay the interest on their debt.

….But it doesn’t seem like there’s much interest in finding an actual solution, just printing more money, adding more debt and putting more Band-Aids on the problem.

“U.S. aluminum tariffs have led to investment, jobs -think tank study”

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 5-25-21]

“U.S. tariffs on aluminum imports imposed by former president Donald Trump and continued by President Joe Biden have led to increased output, employment and capital investment by domestic producers, a new study from a left-leaning think tank showed on Tuesday. The Economic Policy Institute said the 10% aluminum tariffs, imposed in March 2018 under the “Section 232″ national security section of a Cold War-era trade law, have led to $6 billion in 57 downstream aluminum product manufacturing projects that will employ over 4,500 additional workers.”

Of course, the “free trade” ideologues are promoting the Reason Foundation paper that argues only eight percent of the “extra” cost of tariffs are being paid by the Chinese exporters, and the remaining 92 percent are being imposed on American consumers. Any simple review of actual economic history [pdf] shows that tariffs and preferences for domestic manufacturing have been the only means for a country to industrialize. Which is why mainstream neoliberal economists are not taught actual economic history. 

Austerity’s Hidden Purpose

Yanis Varoufakis [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 5-26-2021]

But if austerity is such a bad idea, sapping our economies of energy, why is it so popular among the powerful? …. But suppose for a moment, and for argument’s sake, that everyone agreed that printing another trillion dollars to finance a basic income for the poor would boost neither inflation nor interest rates. The rich and powerful would still oppose it, owing to the debilitating fear that they would end up like Peel in Australia: monied but bereft of the power to compel the less monied…. their most important interest is not to conserve economic potential. It is to preserve the power of the few to compel the many.

Signs of economic immiseration:

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