Author: Tony Wikrent Page 40 of 51

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy –  October 11, 2020
by Tony Wikrent

Dear Readers — I had no choice but to abandon Blogger this past week. The workaround to the miserable new version of Blogger, suggested by a reader two weeks ago, simply would no longer work. So, sorry that this post comes a good bit later in the day than past posts.  

VOTE!

See something? Report voter suppression and obstacles to voting.

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-8-20]

Strategic Political Economy

“Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti of The Holy Father Francis On Fraternity And Social Friendship”

[The Vatican, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-7-20]

From the section “Re-envisaging the social role of property”:

119. In the first Christian centuries, a number of thinkers developed a universal vision in their reflections on the common destination of created goods.[91] This led them to realize that if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it. Saint John Chrysostom summarizes it in this way: “Not to share our wealth with the poor is to rob them and take away their livelihood. The riches we possess are not our own, but theirs as well”.[92] In the words of Saint Gregory the Great, “When we provide the needy with their basic needs, we are giving them what belongs to them, not to us”.[93]

120. Once more, I would like to echo a statement of Saint John Paul II whose forcefulness has perhaps been insufficiently recognized: “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone”.[94] For my part, I would observe that “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property”.[95] The principle of the common use of created goods is the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order”;[96] it is a natural and inherent right that takes priority over others.[97] All other rights having to do with the goods necessary for the integral fulfilment of persons, including that of private property or any other type of property, should – in the words of Saint Paul VI – “in no way hinder [this right], but should actively facilitate its implementation”.[98] The right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods. This has concrete consequences that ought to be reflected in the workings of society. Yet it often happens that secondary rights displace primary and overriding rights, in practice making them irrelevant.

The Socialist Moment, and How to Extend It

Harold Meyerson, October 9, 2020 [American Prospect]

Sanders has always made it plain that socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was his hero, but in Judis’s telling, the key to Sanders’s zeitgeist-changing success was his move away from the socialist insularity that Debs espoused. While nominally remaining a political independent, Sanders won election to Congress on a social democratic platform of greater regulation of capital, greater power for workers, an expansion of social welfare and economic rights, and a pledge that he’d caucus with the Democrats. When he began running for president in 2015, Sanders made clear his model of socialism was the Scandinavian mixed economy. But as Judis recounts, after Columbia University historian Eric Foner sent him an open letter that emphasized a more American pedigree for socialist initiatives, Sanders took the hint. As I recounted in the Prospect, in Sanders’s two speeches that he billed as his definition of socialism—one given at Georgetown University in 2015, the second at George Washington University in 2019—he cited Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King as his forebears in the struggle for socialist reforms.

Yanis Varoufakis: How Progressives Could Still Win the 21st Century
[Naked Capitalism, October 8, 2020]

NC’s Yves Smith introduces Varoufakis’s article by excerpting from Richard Kline’s 2012 essay, Progressively Losing:

In my considered view, ‘progressives’ lose because they do not have it as a goal to win. Their principal concern is to criticize the moral failings of others in society, particularly the moral failings of those in power.

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

The Pandemic

Donald Trump Personally to Blame for 37 Percent of the World’s COVID-19 Misinformation, Study Finds

by Tony Wikrent

After Democrats spent the weekend signaling surrender on the Supreme Court vacancy and suggesting they have no appetite to fight over the judiciary or threaten to expand the court, Trump on Wednesday declared that he may not agree to a peaceful transfer of power, and he openly admitted that he is trying to rush through a judicial nominee so that the court can give him a second term. He suggested that he will “get rid of the ballots” and “there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

‘Everyone sees the train wreck coming’: Trump reveals his November endgame
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 9-25-20]

by Tony Wikrent

If this is the last Wrap for a while, this is the reason:
“Google, nobody asked for a new Blogger interface” 
[TenFourFox Development, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 9-17-20]  

“I’m writing this post in what Google is euphemistically referring to as an improvement. I don’t understand this. I managed to ignore New Blogger for a few weeks but Google’s ability to fark stuff up has the same air of inevitability as rotting corpses…. 

When I copy and paste an entire post, such as from RealEconomics (where I write it using Blogger) to IanWelsh or into email for distribution ALL THE LINKS ARE DESTROYED ! ! ! !  They still appear as links, but the URLs all go to the Blogger page I am writing on. HOW DID THIS MAJOR PROBLEM GET THROUGH QUALITY CONTROL? Is there any Quality Control? This is beyond crappification. This renders the new Blogger useless! 

Strategic Political Economy

Frederick Soddy’s Debt Dynamics
[Economics from the Top Down, via Naked Capitalism 9-13-20]

In the field of ecological economics, Frederick Soddy looms large. Born in 1877, Soddy became a chemist and eventually won a Nobel prize for work on radioactive decay. Then he turned his attention to economics. Between 1921 and 1934, Soddy wrote four books that looked at how money relates to the physical economy. For his ground-breaking work, Soddy was rewarded with deafening silence….

Like a good natural scientist, Soddy insisted that human society is constrained by the laws of physics. Humans survive, he noted, by consuming natural resources. Exhaust these resources and we’re done for.

Think of humans (and our economy), says Soddy, like a machine. We transform energy into physical work. Like all machines, we’re bound by the laws of thermodynamics, which say that you can’t get something for nothing. Energy output requires energy input. That means humans are forever dependent on natural resources.

Now comes the problem. Our biophysical stock of resources — what Soddy called ‘wealth’ — is bound by the laws of thermodynamics. But money — which Soddy called ‘virtual wealth’ — is bound only by the laws of mathematics. Money can grow forever. Natural resource extraction cannot. This mismatch, Soddy claimed, is the root of most economic problems.

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Some graphs and comments for LABOR DAY
Tony Wikrent September 7, 2020 [Real Economics]

For Labor Day today, David Sirota wrote:

if we hope to ever rebuild an economy that works for everyone, we’re going to need many more workers in unions and a much stronger labor movement.

and posted this graph:

Sirota continued:

This graph comes from the Economic Policy Institute — it shows the relationship between union density and the percentage of national income going to the richest 10 percent of Americans. As you can see, the larger the share of the American workforce that’s unionized, the lower the share of national income goes to the super-rich — and vice versa.

I would like to reinforce Sirota’s point by adding a graph from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, page 24.

Clearly, there are four shifts that occur:

• Around 1928, when income inequality stops rising;
• Around 1940, when income inequality begins to be overcome;
• Around 1945, when this improvement ends and income inequality remains about the same for the next three decades; and
• Around 1980, when income inequality suddenly begins to worsen.

The first shift Piketty has explained: the stock market crash of October 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, which destroyed much of the wealth of the top one percent. (In the financial crisis of 2008-2009, by contrast, the Bush and Obama administrations, and the Federal Reserve, pulled out all the stops to prevent the squillionaires from losing, by pouring $29 trillion in the banking and financial systems. Result: unlike the years after the 1929 crash, in the years after the 2009 crash, income inequality continued to worsen.)

The next three shifts I think are even more interesting, if we plot onto Piketty’s graph three events from the AFL-CIO’s Labor History Timeline:

• 1937 Auto Workers win sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan;
• 1947 Taft-Hartley Act restricts union members’ activities;
• 1981 President Ronald Reagan breaks air traffic controllers’ strike.

The 1937 strike forced General Motors to accept the UAW as the organized representative of its wage employees, and set the pattern for labor relations until 1980.

The Taft–Hartley Act — the official name is the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 — was vetoed by President Harry S. Truman. But the Republicans had gained control of both the House and the Senate in the elections of 1946, and passed the bill over Truman’s veto. The Act prohibited unions from engaging in wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, and closed shops. Monetary donations by federal political campaigns to unions were made illegal. Taft–Hartley also allowed states to pass right-to-work laws banning union shops, and required union officers to submit signed affidavits to the federal government swearing that they were not communists and did not support the Communist Party.

Side note: Republican Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio would go on to lose the Republican nomination  for President in 1952 to General Dwight Eisenhower. Taft’s defeat led to a group of reactionary extremists like Kansas oil tycoon Fred C. Koch, and William Buckley, son of a Texas oil baron, to begin building the modern conservative and libertarian movements. [1]

Reagan’s election as President in 1980 also marks a dramatic shift for the worse in dozens of economic indicators and statistics, such as debt ratios; capital spending as a percent of GDP; government funding of science and technology; production and exports of capital goods; and all the imaginable measures of financialization. Contrary to the fantasies of the Republicans and right wing, Reagan’s election in 1980 clearly marks the decline of the United States as a world power.

Most people can pretty well figure out the causal relationships. If they’re not indoctrinated with conservatism or neoliberlism, that is. (The hostility to organized labor runs deep in these ideologies. In a Mont Pelerin Society Tract dated 1949, Friedrich von Hayek, funded by the Foundation for Economic Freedom among others, wrote, “the question of how the powers of the trade-unions can be appropriately delimited by law as well as in fact is one of the most important of all the questions which we must give our attention.”[1]  Corey Robin has revealed how von Hayek and his collaborator, Ludwig von Mises, both shared and were shaped by, Friedrich Nietzsche’s contempt for Europe’s workers, and enchantment with European aristocrats, in whose image they molded the mythical hero of the capitalist “entrepreneur.”)

If we want to actually fix the problem of income inequality, we have to give back to organized labor the power it had, but which was stripped away by the Republicans’ 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. So far, there are no leading Democrats calling for the Act’s repeal. That has to change.

[1] Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for America (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 153 ff.

[2] Yves Steiner, “The Neoliberals Confront the Trade Unions,” in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, editors, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, 2009), page 182.

by Tony Wikrent

RIP David Graeber

David Graeber, Caustic Critic of Inequality, Is Dead at 59
[New York Times 9-4-20]

Anthropologist David Graeber, the man behind ‘We are the 99%’ slogan, dead at 59

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Articles of impeachment drawn up against Gov. Mike DeWine over coronavirus orders
[Cleveland.com, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-20]
A key principle of republicanism is public virtue: if your self-interests conflicts with the general welfare, you have a duty to not oppose the general welfare. Clearly, the principle of republicanism is dead in this country, hence, it is no longer a republic. Some of the most discomfiting passages from the speeches and writings of the foundering era of USA dealt with the issue of a people becoming unfit to govern themselves.

Another key principle of republicanism is that citizens must not be dependent on anyone else if they are to be able to judge public affairs with sufficient disinterestedness to make the general welfare their major concern. This principle created major problems, however, as it was used to justify restricting the vote on “men of means” only. This created an opening for ruling elites to establish oligarchy, especially in the South. In practice, it meant white supremacy. As Dayen writes below: “The way you control labor is that you don’t pay enough to ever have workers be comfortable.”