Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Tony Wikrent Page 45 of 48

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 22, 2019

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On September 22, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Matt Stoller [Pro-Market, via Naked Capitalism 9-18-19]

Director is the key founder of what is now known as the Chicago School of law and economics, which reshaped the American approach to corporate power and political economy…. Director’s life was dedicated to setting free the power of concentrated capital, eliminating the power of labor, and undoing the New Deal. His success is so profound it is hard to describe, so embedded are we today in the world and rhetoric Director shaped.

Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017) (PDF)

Thomas Piketty [via Naked Capitalism 9-15-19]

…changing political cleavages in FR-US-UK 1948-2017 documenting the shift from class-based political conflict to multiple-elite (intellectual vs business elite) and identity-based political conflict.

Main empirical finding: the rise of multiple-elite politics

  • • In the 1950s-60s, the vote for left-wing (labour-socialist-democratic) parties in France-UK-US used to be associated with lower education & lower income voters: class-based political conflict (→ redistributive policies)
  • • It has gradually become associated since 1970s-80s with higher education voters, giving rise since 1990s-2000s to a multiple-elite party system: high- education elites vote left, while high-ncome/high-wealth elites vote right. I.e. intellectual elite (Brahmin left) vs business elite (Merchant right).

Keynes Was Really a Conservative
Bruce Bartlett [via Naked Capitalism 9-16-19]

Peter Drucker, a conservative admirer of Keynes, viewed him as not merely conservative, but ultraconservative. “He had two basic motivations,” Drucker explained in a 1991 interview with Forbes. “One was to destroy the labor unions and the other was to maintain the free market. Keynes despised the American Keynesians. His whole idea was to have an impotent government that would do nothing but, through tax and spending policies, maintain the equilibrium of the free market. Keynes was the real father of neoconservatism, far more than [economist F.A.] Hayek!”

….Keynes completely understood the central role of profit in the capitalist system. This is one reason why he was so strongly opposed to deflation and why, at the end of the day, his cure for unemployment was to restore profits to employers. He also appreciated the importance of entrepreneurship: “If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters … enterprise will fade and die.” And he knew that the general business environment was critical for growth; hence business confidence was an important economic factor. As Keynes acknowledged, “Economic prosperity is … dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average businessman.”

….Indeed, the whole point of The General Theory was about preserving what was good and necessary in capitalism, as well as protecting it against authoritarian attacks, by separating microeconomics, the economics of prices and the firm, from macroeconomics, the economics of the economy as a whole. In order to preserve economic freedom in the former, which Keynes thought was critical for efficiency, increased government intervention in the latter was unavoidable. While pure free marketers lament this development, the alternative, as Keynes saw it, was the complete destruction of capitalism and its replacement by some form of socialism.

We have yet to see an incisive critique of Keynes based on understanding he was a shameless oligarch with no regard for republicanism, if not outright antipathy to republicanism. Bartlett’s jab at the greatly idealized Keynes would be much more powerful if Bartlett understood the tensions and contradictions inherent between republicanism and capitalism.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 15, 2019

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On September 15, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

The Oligarch Threat
Tamsin Shaw, August 27, 2019 [New York Review of Books]

The bigger picture… was the way in which the Cambridge Analytica story opened a window onto a new constellation of international billionaires, corrupt politicians, and war profiteers who were apparently amassing enormous power. That story isn’t only about technology, data, and psychographic profiling; it’s also, at root, a story about the consequences of entrenched economic inequality, the privatization of essential public assets and government functions, including even national security, and the challenge to conventional foreign policy posed by the bargains being struck between international kleptocrats….

In both Britain and America, there exists a class of billionaires who seek to become oligarchs and a corresponding class of government officials who want to become billionaires. Since 2008, when the financial markets’ development of complex and ill-regulated derivatives led to a credit crisis and crash that erased huge sums from the fortunes of the global ultra-rich—with Western tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelson, and Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska among the biggest losers—the world’s billionaires have been moving away from a commitment to free markets. Learning from the banking bailouts and the socialization of moral hazard, they have instead embraced an ambition to build lasting monopolies that enjoy both official and unofficial forms of state support.
….
The United States has its own versions of the oligarchs, albeit ones who made their money legally rather than through the criminal enterprises for which many Russians have been indicted by American prosecutors or sanctioned by the federal government. As I’ve previously written, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley managed to establish their extraordinary monopolies—viewed by the state as a form of soft power as well as an essential national security asset in a world of cyber-conflict—only because that entire sector received huge injections of venture-capital funding from the military and intelligence agencies. In this case, too, the astronomical profits are largely untaxed and held off-shore….

This international billionaire class is also establishing and using private intelligence and influence agencies like Cambridge Analytica to help them manipulate national and international politics. It’s well known that the Koch brothers have their own such agency (called i360), but other billionaires have firms whose names we don’t even know. That’s not to say there’s a grand conspiracy of global elites or coordinated centralization of power for mutual advantage. But what these messy conflicting interests do have in common is that they are all working against liberal-democratic institutions. The free-market dream of being liberated from government authority, once an article of faith for the billionaire class, has turned into the oligarchs’ dream of coopting, or even usurping, government authority in pursuit of profit.

….one of the most ambitious of America’s would-be oligarchs, Erik Prince. He is a private military contractor, formerly of Blackwater; his present company, the Frontier Services Group, has backing from the Chinese government and a Hong Kong billionaire named Johnson Ko, the company’s executive director. Prince’s meetings on behalf of the Trump team were arranged by a former Blackwater colleague who is now an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, George Nader. Nader, who is currently in federal custody in Virginia as an accused child sex trafficker, claims that Prince was sent as an emissary for Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to the notorious Seychelles meeting with Dmitriev and Bin Zayed.

  …. Mueller’s main finding, a “sweeping and systematic” campaign of interference by Russia in the 2016 election, has simply reinforced the idea that the United States and Russia are combatants in a fairly traditional form of political warfare. Mueller’s report and testimony had no impact in exposing the multilateral business deals—here involving American, Russian, Saudi, Israeli, Qatari, and Emirati actors—that bypass national interests, official foreign policy, international regulations, electoral laws, and even ordinary market pressures.

[Daily Maverick, via Naked Capitalism 9-12-19]

The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.

According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.

Spontaneous Resistance

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 8, 2019

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On September 8, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent

Economics as Cultural Warfare

A number of articles, stories, and commentaries have begun appearing the past month which indicate a growing understanding the murderous effects of conservative a.k.a. neoliberal economic ideology. Last week, I especially liked the direct, confrontational title of “Why Libertarianism Will Kill Us All”  by Nathan J. Robinson, in Current Affairs. In May, even Bloomberg was forced to acknowledge “Former Boeing Engineers Say Relentless Cost-Cutting Sacrificed Safety” in the 737 Max.

This week the number of articles along these lines merited a new topic subtitle, which I also used to link to an article I posted in March 2019 about the economic ideas of Adam Smith. As the title of a March 2019 article co-authored by Suresh Naidu — author of the post below about Robert Bork –states plainly: Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice. 
 
While I welcome this emerging new clarity about the bloody costs of conservative a.k.a. neoliberal economic ideology, I am troubled that the ideology of republicanism continues to be overlooked as the obvious answer. As I wrote in March 2019 (Liberals and the Left Fail to Notice – and Celebrate – the Intellectual Death of Conservatism), “The actual conception of civic virtue in a republic is by its very nature fundamentally contrary to the basic tenets of capitalism…republicanism will never be in harmony with market capitalism.” Almost all the proposals for reforming the USA economy –including by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — amount to the imposition of state regulation without fundamentally addressing the economic beliefs and ideology of elites. This is why I place such importance on the work of Ian Welsh, and why the Business Roundtable’s recent critique of the theory of shareholder value is an important indicator of elites’ thinking. Will elites actually change their thinking? Or are they merely beginning to formulate a response to the growing resistance to the economic ideology they have promoted for the past three quarters of a century to roll back the New Deal? Is it even possible for a leopard to change its spots? 
 

How Economic Decisions Are Made
Ian Welsh, September 5, 2019 [IanWelsh.com]

….money is a social construction, and price signals are not given by God and nature: they are choices. Political choices. That isn’t to deny some physical reality behind them, but that reality has obviously been elided, when in America, the life spans of some demographic groups are dropping while super-yachts and luxury condos are hot to trot.

All systems have to do only one thing: whatever is required to keep the system in power.
That’s all they have to do. Whether or not human welfare is advanced or not; whether or not we care about animals or nature is irrelevant to the raw calculus of power and staying in power, until it effect staying in power.

If the hoi polloi can be kept from revolting or demanding (remember demands are based on “or else,” they are not requests) well then, the powerful will not do anything that does not increase their power or money. They will only care about human welfare outside of their own group if they feel they must, or if, as happens occasionally, they see their group as being something other than the elite group.

Right now elites don’t care about other humans enough to reshape the money and political systems (the same thing, ultimately) to prioritize human welfare, avoid a great-die-off, or stop climate change. This is clear. It is not arguable, it is a fact, based simply on their actions.

THE SCALE OF WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST: A giant amount of money will be spent trying to convince you to disbelieve obvious truths…
[Current Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 9-6-19]

The Koch version of free-market capitalism, which is the one pushed at the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Economic Education, FreedomWorks, the Hoover Institution, and the Heartland Institute, is a simple creed, one that goes as follows:

I believe that freedom is good and that people should be left to pursue their own ends as they see fit. The market knows best, and government regulation is a misguided attempt to second-guess people’s decisions about their own interest. People and corporations should pursue their self-interest under conditions of freedom, because in a marketplace of voluntary transactions, everyone’s interests will end up being served.

….It’s only when you think for a bit, and work out the implications, that you realize something that sounds perfectly innocuous actually has horrifying implications. What about child labor laws? Oh, well, that’s just the state stepping in to prevent a beneficial transaction between the child and the employer. We’re “taking away opportunity from children,” as libertarian economist Jeffrey Tucker put it in a Foundation for Economics Education article called “Let The Kids Work.” Oh, what about price gouging? Well, you’ll read in the Wall Street Journal that price gouging is Actually Good, because it’s a Mutually Beneficial Transaction between someone in desperate need of a thing and someone willing to part with it.

One of my favorite books for understanding the real nature of free-market capitalism is Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable. Block, a right-wing libertarian, goes through various different categories of unpopular people, and shows how they are actually heroes performing a public service. Slumlords? They provide houses! Blackmailers? They’re merely offering the service of not disclosing information—would you rather they just released the damaging information? Drug dealers? It’s a product—you don’t have to buy it! Ebenezer Scrooge? He was investing his money and building the economy! Block concludes that these people “do not violate anyone’s rights, so they do not violate basic morality.”

For Block, “respecting property rights” and “basic morality” are identical, meaning that I can be as nasty to you as I want so long as I don’t steal your furniture, and still be an upstanding person. Employers can mistreat employees—by sexually harassing them, belittling them, working them to exhaustion, and they haven’t done anything wrong, because it’s a Free Market Transaction that the employee could theoretically walk away from….

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 1, 2019

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On September 1, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent

How meritocracy became oligarchy

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition
[The Atlantic, September 2019 issue]

Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.

Strategic Political Economy

“Boeing’s Crashes Expose Systemic Failings”

[Der Spiegel, via Naked Capitalism 8-26-19]

Lambert Strether notes “This is brutal, a must-read.”

“It is impossible to tell the story of the 737 Max — indeed, the story of Boeing’s entire recent history — without taking a closer look at Airbus. The self-confident Americans underestimated their European competitor’s strength, not wanting to believe that Airbus’s ascent to become the world’s second-largest aircraft manufacturer was the kind of economic miracle that changed the entire game. Founded in 1970, massively subsidized by European governments and heavily promoted by an industry that was deeply invested in its success, Airbus was able to revolutionize the global passenger jet market in the course of just three decades. And then came the wonder of 1999, when Airbus received significantly more orders for its aircraft than did its American rival, despite the fact that Boeing had just merged with erstwhile competitor McDonnel Douglas a few years before….

“And this all comes at a time when the Airbus-Boeing duopoly has been developing cracks. The two may still be the world’s undisputed aerospace leaders, but companies in China, Russia and Japan are in the process of grabbing a bigger piece of the pie. Furthermore, it has become easier to build airplanes because a highly specialized global market of suppliers has developed that can deliver almost any part in the desired quality at the desired moment in time. The times when airplane construction was a calling card of unattainable technological excellence are coming to an end. Things are becoming more difficult, especially for Boeing.”

Outsourcing comes back to bite you in the ass. Every time. USA has “free traded” away the family jewels.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 25, 2019

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On August 25, 2019

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 25, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Give No Heed to the Walking Dead
[The Scholar’s Stage, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19]

The People’s Republic of China is wealthier than any rival America has faced. Its leaders are convinced of the malignance of the United States. Their ambitions are global, their ideology hostile, and their military forces optimized to “fight and win wars” with America and the democratic nations that surround it. The challenge is daunting—and it exists because of us. The Sino-American relationship of 2019 is the acrid fruit of “engagement.”

Engagement is dead. Yet like dead growth lumped to living branch, the men and women who crafted the disaster linger with us. In twitter whispers and podcast chatterings their murmurs grow. Engagement did not fail, we hear. It never was about remaking China in the first place. We never thought the Chinese would come to share our systems, values, or priorities. Engagement was about something else entirely….

Here is Bill Clinton, explaining to the American voters why the People’s Republic deserves a seat at the W.T.O.:
By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say….

The broader problem with the Haas formula (“shape what China does”) is that China’s political behavior cannot be divorced from the economic and political structures that produce it. As China’s newest white paper eagerly reminds us, demanding the PRC reform its SOEs is demanding that it transform the fundamentals of its government, of which those SOEs are a critical part. Asking them to dismantle mercantilist policies and halt IP theft is asking them to abandon the economic model (what Xi would call “the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics”) that their social system (in the Marxist tinged theory of the CPC, China’s social “superstructure”) is built upon. Dialing down the ambitions and capabilities of the PLA would have meant dismantling a keystone of Party ideology, identity, and organization.

The Population Bust: Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It
Foreign Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19] Not paywalled.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 18, 2019

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On August 18, 2019

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 18, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

[TomDispatch, via Naked Capitalism 8-16-19]

How the Supreme Court Is Rebranding Corruption — Ciara Torres-Spelliscy

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy [via Mike Norman Economics 8-8-19]
Summary of “Deregulating Corruption,” (pdf) Harvard Law & Policy Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2019

From its very first term, the Roberts Supreme Court has been rebranding the meaning of the word “corruption” both in campaign finance cases as well as in white-collar crime cases. And in Kelly v. United States (better known as the Bridgegate case), the Supreme Court may do even greater damage to the concept of corruption.

What has the Roberts Supreme Court done to corruption? I discuss this in my recent Harvard Law & Policy Review article, “Deregulating Corruption,” and in my soon to be released book, Political Brands. First, they have narrowed the meaning of the word in a series of election law cases that address the constitutionality of various campaign finance laws. In cases like Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations the First Amendment right to spend an unlimited amount of money on political ads, and McCutcheon v. FEC, which allows the rich to support as many congressional candidates as they want with contributions, the Roberts Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that “corruption” only means quid pro quo exchanges.

This approach to corruption sets the Roberts Supreme Court apart from other Supreme Courts. For over a century, previous Supreme Courts upheld campaign finance laws and other regulations which try to keep graft and political intimidation at bay precisely because as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Yarbrough in 1884, “[i]n a republican government like ours, where political power is reposed in representatives of the entire body of the people, chosen at short intervals by popular elections, the temptations to control these elections by violence and by corruption is a constant source of danger…. no lover of his country can shut his eyes to the fear of future danger from both sources…”

Even the Rehnquist Supreme Court—no bastion of liberals— was more thoughtful about political corruption than the Roberts Court is. For example, in 2003, the Rehnquist Supreme Court ruled in FEC v. Beaumont that there is a “public interest in ‘restrict[ing] the influence of political war chests funneled through the corporate form.’ …; ‘[S]ubstantial aggregations of wealth amassed by the special advantages which go with the corporate form of organization should not be converted into political ‘war chests’ which could be used to incur political debts from legislators.’”

In a twin 2003 decision, McConnell v. FEC, the Rehnquist Court asserted that the “crabbed view of corruption”—which would limit the term to actual quid pro quo corruption—“ignores precedent, common sense, and the realities of political fundraising.” The Roberts Court has rapidly put that capacious concept of political corruption in exile and knocked down nearly every campaign finance law it has been asked to review. (The Supreme Court left in place a ban on foreigners spending in US election and a ban on judges personally asking donors for money, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule.)

But wait, there’s more. The Roberts Supreme Court has also rebranded corruption by changing what counts as white-collar crimes. In Skilling v. US (a case brought by disgraced ex-CEO of Enron Jeff Skilling challenging his 24-year prison sentence for defrauding the company’s shareholders), the Supreme Court agreed with Skilling that he should not have been charged with honest services fraud because his crimes did not involve a bribe or a kickback. This Supreme Court decision led to Skilling getting 10 years shaved off of his original sentence. He was released from jail in 2018 and left his halfway house in 2019. He is now a free man.

Also in the criminal context, the Roberts Supreme Court invalidated the conviction of ex-Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell. McDonnell, who had money troubles while he was Governor of Virginia, accepted money and gifts from a businessman named Jonnie Williams who wanted to sell his tobacco pills (I’m not making any of this up) to Virginia employees. The Governor set up a few meetings for Williams and once touted a bottle of the tobacco pills in a meeting.

In McDonnell v. US, the Supreme Court decided that none of what Governor McDonnell did was “an official act,” and thus he could not be guilty of a quid pro quo exchange with Williams. No one disputed that Williams had given the governor lots of money. What the Supreme Court didn’t buy was that the Governor did enough in return for the largess to constitute a crime.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 12, 2019

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On August 11, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Trump, Tax Cuts and Terrorism
Why has the Republican Party become a systematic enabler of terrorism?
Paul Krugman [New York Times, via DailyKos 8-6-19]

But racism isn’t what drives the Republican establishment…their exploitation of racism has led them inexorably to where they are today: de facto enablers of a wave of white supremacist terrorism.

The central story of U.S. politics since the 1970s is the takeover of the Republican Party by economic radicals, determined to slash taxes for the wealthy while undermining the social safety net.

With the arguable exception of George H.W. Bush, every Republican president since 1980 has pushed through tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the 1 percent while trying to defund and/or privatize key social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

This agenda is, however, unpopular. Most voters believe that the rich should pay more, not less, in taxes, and want spending on social programs to rise, not fall.

So how do Republicans win elections? By appealing to racial animus. This is such an obvious fact of American political life that you have to be willfully blind not to see it….
In effect, then, the Republican Party decided that a few massacres were an acceptable price to pay in return for tax cuts. I wish that were hyperbole, but the continuing refusal of G.O.P. figures to criticize Trump even after El Paso shows that it’s the literal truth.

If You Only Read One Thing Today, Read Paul Krugman: “Trump, Tax Cuts and Terrorism”
xaxnar [DailyKos 8-6-19]

One wonders why John Hickenlooper is still warning of the dangers of extreme leftist socialism. One wonders why Joe Biden still thinks the GOP will come to its senses if Trump is gone. One wonders when Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership will realize we have a bigger problem than just Trump.

If you are prepared to read more than one thing, read Kevin Drum, who spelled this out a year ago at Mother Jones.
Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.

The Myth of Welfare Dependency
Rema Hanna, August 9, 2019 [Project Syndicate, via Mike Norman Economics]

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 4, 2019

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 4, 2019

This post is by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era

[MintPress, via Naked Capitalism 8-1-19]

Starting first with mob-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel and later with Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel’s protege and future mentor to Donald Trump, Epstein’s is just one of the many sexual blackmail operations involving children that are all tied to the same network, which includes elements of organized crime, powerful Washington politicians, lobbyists and “fixers,” and clear links to intelligence as well as the FBI.

Some of the worst memories of my community organizing days in the 1980s involve my trying to convince people that the US’s industrial base was being destroyed by takeovers largely financed with money from organized crime. People just did not want to hear the details. They especially did not want to hear that St. Ronnie’s political career had been promoted by the mob. Amazingly, the people most resistant to these facts were the “organized” leftists in CPUSA and SWP. The communists and socialists almost invariably dismissed the details of these organized crime connections, and wanted only to discuss impersonal theoretical forces like “historical materialism” and “capitalist accumulation.” I came to detest talking to them.
 
For three decades now, I have occasionally referred to this issue of organized crime taking over the US industrial economy, and hypothesized that one major effect has never been studied: Replacing competent industrial management with the criminal mentality and inclinations of the mob-financed corporate raiders. It was Jon Larson at RealEconomics who, about 15 years ago, pointed me to Thorstein Veblen’s (The Theory of the Leisure Class) explanation of how “Leisure Class” predatory elites are “barbarians: who gain power through force and fraud: ‘The traits which characterise the predatory and subsequent stages of culture, and which indicate the types of man best fitted to survive under the régime of status, are (in their primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, and disingenuousness — a free resort to force and fraud.’” Veblen explained how the rise of criminal predators to economic power creates a pecuniary culture.

GND – An Opportunity Too Big to Miss

[Bill Mitchell], via Naked Capitalism 7-30-19]

“At the basis of the [standard neoclassical microeconomics] ‘solution’ is the belief that there is a trade-off between, say, environmental damage and economic growth (production). And the market failure skews that trade-off towards growth at the expense of environmental health. So all that is needed is some intervention (a tax) that will skew the trade-off back to something more preferable. The problem is that the whole idea that there is a trade-off between protecting our environment and economic production is flawed at the most elemental level.

There is no calculus (which underpins this sort of microeconomic reasoning) that can tell us when a biological system will die. The idea that we can have a ‘safe’ level of pollution, regulated via a price system, is groundless and should not form part of a progressive response. Carbon trading schemes (CTS) are neoliberal constructs which start with the presumption that a free market is the best way to organise allocation.”

Lamber Strether adds: ““Worth repeating: Mark Blyth says that ‘Markets cannot internalize their externalities on a planetary scale. They just can’t. It’s impossible.’” “
“Green New Deal: Candidate Scorecards”
[Data for Progress, via Naked Capitalism 7-31-19]

“Using a rubric of 48 essential Green New Deal components, we identify where each candidate: (1) addressed a component with a proposed federal policy or action; (2) acknowledged a component but lacked clear policy details, or; (3) did not include a component.” With handy chart.

Just 10 percent of fossil fuel subsidy cash ‘could pay for green transition’
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 8-2-19]

A Turning Point For US Power Generation
Global Risk Insights, August 03, 2019 [oilprice.com, via Mike Norman Economics]

For the first time in US history, renewable energies briefly generated more electricity than coal in April this year, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. This development is significant for US clean energy champions, environmental advocates, and a coal industry that has anchored US energy for much of the 20th Century. Renewable energy potential merits review of trends and evolving dynamics in a dramatically changing US energy sector.

New innovations and technologies, including large-scale shale extraction, has led to an abundance of domestic oil and gas. The cheap price of natural gas enabled it to surpass coal as America’s primary power source in 2016. Now, renewable energy sources (e.g., wind, solar, hydroelectric, and bioenergy) have shown capable of outperforming coal and are projected to bump it to third place for the long-term.

Natural gas and renewable energies are proving to be more efficient, cleaner and more cost-efficient than coal. Furthermore, the average US coal plant is approximately 40 years old, requiring costly maintenance and repairs. New coal plants are more expensive to build than renewable and natural gas counterparts…. Since 2014, six of the top ten US coal mining companies have at one time declared bankruptcy.

The Failure of Establishment Neoliberal Economics

“Ex-Corporate Lawyer’s Idea: Rein In ‘Sociopaths’ in the Boardroom”
Andrew Ross Sorkin [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 7-31-19]

“A longtime lawyer for the insurance giant American International Group, Mr. Gamble worked alongside Richard Beattie, Simpson Thacher’s chairman at the time, to advise A.I.G. during the financial crisis of 2008 and in the years of litigation that followed…. [Gamble] has concluded that corporate executives — the people who hired him and that his firm sought to protect — ‘are legally obligated to act like sociopaths.’ … “The corporate entity is obligated to care only about itself and to define what is good as what makes it more money,’ he writes in the essay. ‘Pretty close to a textbook case of antisocial personality disorder. And corporate persons are the most powerful people in our world.’… Companies, he suggests, should ‘adopt a binding set of ethical rules, approved by stockholders and addressing the key ethical dimensions of corporate life” … Once the rules are in place, he writes, ‘any shareholder could sue the board of directors for violating the ethical rules — just as any shareholder can today sue the board of directors for violating the maximize rule.’”

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 7-29-19]

“Billionaires are a politically active bunch…. Between 2001 and the end of 2012, 92 percent of the country’s hundred richest billionaires (combined wealth: $2.2 trillion) contributed to a political cause…. Yet they’re also eerily quiet…. As the trio of political scientists write, ‘many or most billionaires appear to favor, and quietly work for, policies that are opposed by large majorities of Americans’.”

Experts Say the DOJ Justification for T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Approval Is a Joke

[Vice, via Naked Capitalism 7-30-19]The Dangerous Austerity Politics of the Washington Post

Dean Baker [FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 7-30-19]

Predatory Finance

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