Author: Tony Wikrent Page 36 of 51

by Tony Wikrent

Predatory Capitalism in the Time of COVID19

‘Government Money That’s Gone Into Vaccine Development Is Being Privatized by a Handful of Companies’

[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 5-16-2021]

It Was The Government That Produced COVID-19 Vaccine Success

[Health Affairs Blog, via Naked Capitalism 5-16-2021]

“Who owns the covid vaccines?”

Cory Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 5-17-2021]

““Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” The true mRNA vaccines theft isn’t entrepreneur-inventors who face robbery by the public sector — rather, those “entrepreneurs” have enjoyed billions in public subsidies, and now insist they owe nothing in return….. Pharma’s claim that it doesn’t owe us anything in return makes no sense, even by the companies’ own logic. They say that markets produce wonders because they reward canny risk-taking with vast fortunes. By that logic, the public — who assumed the majority of the risk in developing vaccines — are the angel investors in this high-tech unicorn, and the pharma companies are the VCs who came in with some late capital to help scale up a sure thing.”

America Is Failing Its Moral Test on Vaccines
New York Times Editorial Board, May 14, 2021, via Naked Capitalism 5-16-2021]

The H.I.V. advocacy group PrEP4All estimates that for $4 billion — less than the country is spending per day on coronavirus response efforts — the federal government could build enough manufacturing capacity to vaccinate the entire planet against the coronavirus. It will cost much more to actually make the needed doses, of course. The nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen estimates that a $25 billion governmentwide initiative would produce around eight billion doses of mRNA vaccine, or enough to vaccinate half the planet. That’s far less than the trillions that could be lost if the economy contracts further as the pandemic persists.

Cashing in on Our Homes: Billionaire Landlords Profit as Millions Face Eviction

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Insider view: the tragedy of the US Deep State

Pepe Escobar [Strategic Culture Foundation, via Mike Norman Economics 5-12-2021]

“Now, Kissinger reflects the Deep State angst on the Russia-Chinese relationship and wants this split up for dear life. This is interestingly covered here by Kissinger. He does not want to tell the truth about balance of power realities. He describes them as “our values”, when the U.S. has no values left but anarchy, looting, and burning down hundreds of cities. Biden hopes to buy all these disenfranchised masses as money printing goes wild.

“So we are back to Kissinger shocked at the new Russian-Chinese alliance. They must be separated.

“Now, I do not agree with the balance of power intriguers in that morality or noble values should govern international relations, and not power. The U.S. has been following balance of power dreams since 1900 and now it faces economic ruin. These ideas do not work.  There is no reason the U.S. cannot be a friend of Russia and China and the differences can be worked out. But you cannot get to first base as balance of power considerations dominate everything. That is the tragedy of our time.”

Tech-Tonic Shift in Sino-Russian Cooperation

[BRICS – Joint Site of Ministries of Foreign Affairs of BRICS Member States, via Mike Norman Economics 5-13-2021]

Russia-China engagement in the military-technical field has ‘strategic importance’ for both parties, with bilateral cooperation on the upswing since 2010. This has gained momentum in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis, with Russia shedding its earlier reluctance to sell latest technology to China, signing deals for supply of Su-35 fighter jets and the S-400 missile defence system. The two sides are also engaged in joint projects, and Russia has agreed to help China develop its ballistic missile early-warning system. In fact, the latter development has been interpreted as a sign of increasing closeness between the two countries, which while not an alliance, does signal deepening engagement.

Mark Blyth – Trailer Age of Economics

We need to break the “folk models” of how people, and especially policy makers, think about economic issues.

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“Economic Warfare: What Can World War One Tell us about 21st Century Conflicts?”

Jonathan Kirshner is a Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College, and the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of International Political Economy Emeritus in the Department of Government, Cornell University. By the late 1920s France had Europe’s most powerful army, much of the world’s gold, and was an active and aggressive practitioner of economic warfare. Within a decade, however, tragically, and even shamefully, France could barely be roused to rise to its own self-defense. The stark difference between 1930 and 1940 is attributable to a radical polarization of French politics and an embrace of “the age of unreason” that paralyzed the country’s foreign policy practice. Kirshner explains how the shocking six week military collapse in autumn 1939 was prefigured by the destruction of French democracy in the six years before the German invasion. After the 1936 political collapse, the French upper classes openly opposed new Socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum with the slogan, “Better Hitler than Blum.” The United States today appears on a similar course of decline.

Capitalism versus Democracy: Sam Seder interviews Prof. Timothy Kuhner

Georgia State University Law Professor Timothy K. Kuhner author of  Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution explains the history of campaign funding scandals, economic power and political exclusion, the choice between Milton Friedman and John Rawls in Buckley Valeo, why the right wing majority on the Supreme Court treats Thomas Paine the same as the Koch brothers, the function of the Supreme Court has been to protect private capital, restricting the scope of campaign finance regulation, bizarre free market ideology has run amok and campaign finance reform and overturning American oligarchy.

Predatory Finance

Financial Speculation Is About More Than GameStop Day Traders

David Dayen, May 4, 2021 [The American Prospect]

The real speculation is happening at the top of the market, through skyrocketing merger transactions and increases in the power of the biggest companies…. There is currently a frenzy of M&A activity, and while the SPAC craze did make this worse by increasing prices for private companies, deal making has continued even as SPACs tailed off. The first four months of 2021 saw $1.77 trillion in global transactions, higher than any other year in history. “It’s the busiest I’ve ever known it,” said one industry veteran to the Financial Times. Deals have surged among tech startups too, which in recent years has been a prelude to more mergers as those founders pursue an exit strategy. The Biden administration has provided little resistance to merger activity, which gives budding monopolists the signal that they will have no problems building their empire. In particular, private equity is thundering, with $1.6 trillion in spare capital to play with. Mega-deals of over $10 billion are rising, and major sales, like Apollo Global Management’s purchase of AOL and Yahoo from Verizon, have consummated in recent days.

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Strategic Political Economy

“The Free Market is Dead: What Will Replace It?”

[Chris Hughes, Time, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-27-21]

Significant because it’s Time, of all places. 

But corporate America’s newfound support for more public investment is not a temporary phenomenon. We are witnessing the most profound realignment in American political economy in nearly forty years. President Ronald Reagan summed up the conventional wisdom that reigned from the mid-1970s onward in the United States: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Economists, policymakers, and everyday Americans alike generally accepted that markets, unfettered and free, are the best way to create economic growth…. That ideology began to crack after the Great Recession, and in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, it has collapsed. The rise of ethno-nationalism on the right and democratic socialism on the left testify to the growing disillusionment with the conventional wisdom of how government and economics are supposed to work. It’s not just the fringes questioning free market orthodoxy in a time of disease. Cross-partisan supermajorities of Americans want some of the biggest companies of America to be broken up, significantly higher minimum wages, a wealth tax on billionaires, and believe significantly more public investment is required to create economic growth. We have had regulations, public investment, and macroeconomic management to varying degrees throughout American history. What makes this moment different is that Americans across parties, class, and educational background are using a new framework to think about how we create prosperity.”

“What’s behind the growth slump? Takeaways from census data”

[Associated Press, via The Big Picture 4-28-2021]

“The U.S. population grew to 331 million, a 7.4% growth rate from the last time the Census Bureau counted every person in the country, in 2010. Those may sound like big numbers, but it’s actually the second slowest rate of population growth the census has ever recorded, just behind the 7.3% growth in the 1930s. That decade’s slowed growth was rooted in the Great Depression. Our past decade’s sluggish rate had similar beginnings in the long shadow of the Great Recession. The drawn-out recovery saw many young adults struggling to enter the job market, delaying marriage and starting a family. That dealt a blow to the nation’s birthrate. Then the pandemic hit last year and made matters worse. But while U.S. population growth recovered after the Great Depression, demographers are not optimistic it will pick up anytime soon. Most forecast even slower population growth in the decades to come. Americans are getting older — the median age in the U.S. is 38, up one year from 37 in 2010. Immigration had been dropping even before the pandemic effectively shut it down. And many Republicans have largely turned against the idea of immigration, legal or illegal, a new political barrier to the country adding more population quickly. ‘Unlike the Great Depression, it’s part of a process where we’re likely to keep having slow growth,’ said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. That has potentially grim consequences for the nation’s future.”

“…we’re likely to keep having slow growth…” Why? Just because population growth slows down? What most people do not realize is that a transition to an economy free of fossil fuel dependencies — if done in time to meet the challenges of climate change — will require some of the fastest economic growth in recorded human history. What do you think it’s going to look like as we replace the 1.5 billion motor vehicles in the world with electric vehicles? Do you want to do that over 30 or 10 years, or over the next ten? Or sooner? In fact, the faster the growth, the faster will we be changing the economy to meet the challenge of climate change. Frey is obviously stuck in a old paradigm of economic thinking. A huge challenge is going to be to managing world-wide economic growth rates of ten to fifteen percent for about 15 or 20 years, then transitioning to near zero-growth rates after the world’s economy and transportation systems have been rebuilt on a carbon free basis. 

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 5-1-2021]

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Plato, Aristophanes and Aristotle on Money-Lust, 399-380 BC
Michael Hudson, April 23, 2021 [Naked Capitalism]

Delphi’s warning that lust for monetary silver (philarguria) was the only thing that could destroy Sparta was echoed by Plato, Socrates and other philosophers accusing wealth addiction of leading to greedy and hubristic behavior that impoverished society at large. Creditors were singled out for reducing debtors to bondage and taking their land.

Near the outset of Plato’s Republic (1 at 331c-d, written c. 380 BC), Socrates (who was put to death nearly twenty years earlier, in 399) discusses the morality of repaying debts in circumstances where this would lead to anti-social consequences. Cephalus, a businessman living in the commercial Piraeus district, states the typical ethic that it is fair to pay back what one has borrowed. Socrates asks if it would be just to return weapons to a man who has become a lunatic. If a madman is intent on murder, Socrates asks, will not returning his weapon to him enable him to commit unjust acts? In view of the likely adverse social consequences, paying back such a creditor would be the wrong thing to do. It all depends on what creditors will do with their returns, and how their actions affect society. Book 8 of the Republic elaborates upon this discussion, describing how wealth leads its owners to act in ways detrimental to society.

Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

Cornel West and Jeremy Tate, April 19, 2021 [Washington Post]

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

‘Divisive’: How Corporate Media Dismiss Ideas Unpopular With Elites

[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 4-19-2021]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Capitalism as a Suicide Cult

[CounterPunch, via Naked Capitalism 4-24-20]

…the problems causing such widespread social misery are systemic, means that the solutions need to be so as well. To understand why, the difference between socialism and social welfare liberalism is that socialism requires a redistribution of power— from corporate executives and capitalist owners, to workers. A transfer of power, if not ownership, is what the New Deal accomplished. Conversely, welfare state liberalism subsidizes capitalism. One third of the recipients of food stamps (SNAP) who work, work at Walmart. Seventy percent work. SNAP is a subsidy of low wage employers, not its recipients.

The transfer of power of the New Deal was accomplished 1) through reforms that constrained business in its ability to rob people and crash the economy, and 2) through building public institutions that redistributed power from oligarchs and executives to workers. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separated investment from commercial banking, thereby leaving investment banks to speculate with their own money. This effectively ended the financial mania that cascaded into the forced sales of bank ‘assets’ in the early years of the Great Depression. As readers know, Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999. The result: a world-historical residential real estate bubble and the Great Recession.

“Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA” (PDF)Jiwon Choi, Ilyana Kuziemko, Ebonya Washington, Gavin Wright [National Bureau of Economic Research, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-22-21]

From the Abstract: “We show that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to Mexican import competition via the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) suffer large employment losses (relative to the bottom quartile of counties, counties in the top quartile of NAFTA exposure see 5-8 log-point declines in employment by 2000). Despite large employment losses, we can reject even modest population declines. Trade-adjustment-aid relief rises, but covers a tiny share of the job losses we document, and Disability Insurance in fact displays a much larger response. Exposed counties (many in the upper South) begin the period more Democratic in terms of votes in House elections, but as NAFTA is debated in 1992-1994 they shift in the Republican direction and by 2000 vote majority-Republican in House elections. We show with a variety of microdata, including 1992-1994 respondent-level panel data, that opposition to free trade predicts shifts towards Republican party identification.” • Bill Clinton, good job.

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Michael Hudson: America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism
Michael Hudson, April 15, 2021 [Naked Capitalism]

US West prepares for possible 1st water shortage declaration

[Associated Press, via Mike Norman Economics, April 17, 2021]

The Pandemic

India’s health system has collapsed
[Hindustani Times, via Mike Norman Economics, April 16, 2021]

The Biden Transition and the Fight for Real Hope and Change This Time

Shifting Balance of Power?
Barry Ritholtz, April 16, 2021 [The Big Picture]

A massive shift is occurring in the labor market today, one that has been misinterpreted by economists of all stripes…. fear of the virus is a valid reason keeping people from low paying jobs requiring interaction with potentially deadly, infectious members of the public. “Who the hell wants to risk their lives for $8 an hour before taxes?”

….I suspect it is something broader, more than merely the economic recovery being impacted by Covid. Maybe more of a significant change, perhaps even a secular reversal of the longstanding power dynamic between capital and labor.

“Investors lament being frozen out of Biden infrastructure plan” [Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-13-21] “President Joe Biden’s ‘American jobs plan’, unveiled last month, calls for $2tn of investment in highways, electrical grids and other basic infrastructure. At the same time, the White House put forward corporate tax reforms that it said would generate enough money to pay for the investment spree within 15 years. That has disappointed some investors and asset managers who once expected public-private partnerships would be a lucrative financing opportunity.”

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by Tony Wikrent

The Biden Transition and the Fight for Real Hope and Change This Time

Podcast: Are We Winning A New Political Era? (Exclusive for Subscribers) Discussion with Anand Giridharadas

David Sirota [Daily Poster April 5, 2021]

Grassroots pressure has forced Joe Biden to discard parts of his past record — and may finally be ending the Reagan Era.

Beginning at 21:20:

Having a debate about new bills, not being consumed by deficit anxiety… is a profound cultural turning point [that] augers en entirely different era…. We have to be mindful of how cultures change [and] hat it looks like when what you’ve been fighting for begins to bloom….

Four Ways of Looking at the Radicalism of Joe Biden

Ezra Klein [New York Times, April 8, 2021, via The American Prospect 4-9-2021]

Most discussions of the renewed ambitions of the Democratic Party focus on ideological trends on the left. The real starting point, however, is the institutional collapse of the right…. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here, but so too was then-Speaker John Boehner’s inability to sell his members on the budget bargain he’d negotiated with President Barack Obama, followed by his refusal to allow so much as a vote in the House on the 2013 immigration bill. And it’s impossible to overstate the damage that Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of Merrick Garland, followed by his swift action to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did to the belief among Senate Democrats that McConnell was in any way, in any context, a good-faith actor. They gave up on him completely.
The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills….
The backdrop for this administration is the failures of the past generation of economic advice. Fifteen years of financial crises, yawning inequality and repeated debt panics that never showed up in interest rates have taken the shine off economic expertise. But the core of this story is climate. “Many mainstream economists, even in the 1980s, recognized that the market wouldn’t cover everyone’s needs so you’d need some modest amount of public support to correct for that moderate market failure,” Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, said. “But they never envisioned the climate crisis. This is not a failure of the market at the margins. This is the market incentivizing destruction.”
…. Even beyond climate, political risks weigh more heavily on the Biden administration than they did on past administrations. This is another lesson learned from the Obama years. The Obama team had real policy successes: They prevented another Great Depression, they re-regulated the financial sector, they expanded health insurance to more than 20 million people. But Democrats lost the House in 2010, effectively ending Obama’s legislative agenda, and then they lost the Senate in 2014, and then Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, and then Democrats lost the Supreme Court for a generation.…
Even when Biden was running as the moderate in the Democratic primary, his agenda had moved well to the left of anything he’d supported before. But then he did something unusual: Rather than swinging to the center in the general election, he went further left. And the same happened after winning the election. He’s moved away from work requirements and complex targeting in policy design. He’s emphasizing the irresponsibility of allowing social and economic problems to fester, as opposed to the irresponsibility of spending money on social and economic problems. His administration is defined by the fear that the government isn’t doing enough, not that it’s doing too much.

Biden Can Go Bigger and Not ‘Pay for It’ the Old Way

Stephanie Kelton [New York Times, April 7, 2021]

Last week, President Biden introduced a $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan in a speech, calling it “a once-in-a-generation investment in America.” And on Wednesday, he and the Treasury Department outlined many of the package’s details, including how to “pay for” it. A close look at those so-called pay-fors, however, shows Democrats are thinking about fiscal responsibility the wrong way. They could be on the verge of sparking some unpleasant short-term overheating of the economy, in which price increases accelerate and the purchasing power of our dollars falls somewhat. If the final legislation were to grow much larger — toward the $10 trillion level many progressives in Congress are pushing — it could send such inflation soaring….

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Biden Stimulus: If You Think Inflation is the Problem, Just Wait

[YouTube, March 1, 2021]

Very informative part is Blyth’s reply beginning at 4:06.

So essentially what we’re doing is a 2 trillion dollar experiment in different theories of inflation. Why does that matter? The progressive side of the Democrats think of the world in this way: the fundamental problem [is that] wages for 60% of Americans haven’t moved almost since the 1970s.  And up to the 50th percentile of the income distribution Americans earn $20 an hour or less. You can’t run this country with that degree of working poverty.  That’s what’s behind the anger; that’s what’s behind the populism. We need to spend a lot of money to make the economy run hot. We don’t need to worry about inflation because interest rates are low for a lot of reasons and there’s been no inflation for 40 years. We can boost wages—and if we do, we stabilize the situation, and a lot of the bad shit we’ve been dealing with for the past several years will not come back.

On the other hand you have the deficit hawks, the Republicans, the centrist economists saying, no no , you’ll have terrible inflation. They’re essentially saying things are okay, and the reason you have populism is: yeah, there’s been some people who have been left behind, but there’s a lot of racism there, and this is a cultural struggle. Really the economy is doing fine and this is far too much stimulus.

Now what you see there are basically people using economic arguments to bolster their priors. So if you think populism and the ills of the US is about low wages, you will say inflation is not a problem. If you don’t think that then you don’t say that it is a problem. I doubt that it’s really about people worried about inflation. But I worry because I buy the argument that wages matter. And I worry that if we don’t try this in this moment you’re not going to get wage growth—and if you don’t get consistent wage growth over the next couple years the Democrats are dead when it comes around to the mid terms.

The minimum wage would be $44 per hour if it had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses

[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 3-30-21]

Four Numbers That Show the Cost of Slavery on Black Wealth Today

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 3-28-2021]

At the end of the Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman promised some 4 million freed slaves land that they would own, live, and work on to build an economic future for themselves — also known as 40 acres and a mule. “Genuine freedom required some kind of economic base,” says Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, on episode 2 of The Pay Check podcast. “And in an agricultural society that meant owning land.”

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