Strategic Political Economy
The most puzzling critiques have come not from Republicans, but from the center left, broadly speaking. They urge policies to reduce greenhouse gases that are perfectly commensurate with the GND framework … but present them as alternatives to the GND framework. (We’ll look at some examples later.)
The connecting theme, the message, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, is this: move more slowly. Accept piecemeal progress rather than a big thing. Don’t push beyond strict carbon policy into social or economic policy….
The only way Democrats can hope to pass any legislation — not big legislation, any legislation — is by radically shaking up the status quo balance of powers. That would mean getting rid of the filibuster, possibly granting statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, reforming the electoral college and voting laws, and possibly expanding the Supreme Court.
Every piece of that reform agenda is big, risky, and unlikely to succeed, and at the end of it there would still be an enormous struggle over climate legislation (even getting 51 Democratic senators to be bold is a challenge). If you were in Vegas, you’d bet against any of this happening.
But let’s be clear: The alternative is not small, sensible, bipartisan steps, as so many pundits and pols are promising. The alternative is nothing. And on climate change, nothing means disaster. Those who would ask us to resign ourselves to disaster should, at the very least, frankly acknowledge the implications.
Incrementalism only works with willing partners on the other side, and there are none. (Emphasis in original)
We were certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics. Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. He’s all these things not because the technocrats in his administration think they’re the best possible policies, but because [White House adviser] David Axelrod and company say they poll well.
And [Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and company say we’ve got to build bridges to the Republicans. We’ve got to let Republicans amend cap and trade up the wazoo, we’ve got to let Republicans amend the [Affordable Care Act] up the wazoo before it comes up to a final vote, we’ve got to tread very lightly with finance on Dodd-Frank, we have to do a very premature pivot away from recession recovery to “entitlement reform.”
All of these with the idea that you would then collect a broad political coalition behind what is, indeed, Mitt Romney’s health care policy and John McCain’s climate policy and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy.
And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years?
No, they fucking did not. No allegiance to truth on anything other than the belief that John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell are the leaders of the Republican Party, and since they’ve decided on scorched earth, we’re to back them to the hilt. So the politics were completely wrong, and we saw this starting back in the Clinton administration.
Today, there’s literally nobody on the right between those frantically accommodating Donald Trump, on the one hand, and us on the other.
Re: The Green New Deal: First, Shoot the Economists
CounterPunch 3-29-19 [via Jon Larson]
Not content with having acted as apologists for rapidly accumulating environmental crises, economists are now coming out of the woodwork to give their advice on the limitations of any transition program. In the first, the claim is that ‘we’ can’t afford one. In the second, it is that even if we could afford such a program, it would cause inflation. Both assertions proceed from the premise that Western capitalism is a neutral basis from which to proceed….
The affordability argument is a canard: capitalists have already absconded with the “profits” that make a Green New Deal necessary. These profits are either equal to or greater than the cost of cleaning up the environmental mess they created, or the totality of profits is less than their cost in terms of environmental destruction. In the prior, the Green New Deal is affordable. Capitalists have already proven it is by putting its costs in their own pockets. In the latter, three centuries of capitalist production have been a net loser once environmental costs are considered.
Tony Wikrent [Real Economics 3-28-19]
Adam Smith was the voice of the British establishment and the newly minted British commercial oligarchy which vehemently opposed the idea that the United States should attempt to be anything other than producers and suppliers of basic agricultural commodities.
Book review of Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics, by Robert Skidelsky (Yale University Press, 2018)
In the twentieth century, with the gold standard in retreat, Wicksell and Fisher developed the quantity theory of money—more precisely a quantity of money theory of inflation. What really mattered was not the substance of money but control over how much of it there was. Good control would keep prices stable and debts good. Monetarism, the descendant doctrine of Milton Friedman, would triumph at the Federal Reserve with the arrival of Paul Volcker in 1979, even though Volcker was not himself committed to the theory. Chaos and recession ensued, and monetarism was abandoned in the world debt crisis of 1982. Truly nothing changes and very little is learned, over centuries, in economics….
Skidelsky treats these great monetary battles primarily as struggles over ideas. Yet he is aware that behind ideas lie interests, and that the division of economic ideas into binary oppositions reflects the class opposition between creditors and debtors–one dominant and the other oppressed, but each always necessary to the existence of the other. The fact that ideas follow the interests that can pay for them accounts for much of the recurrence of spurious and indefensible ideas in economic thought. Skidelsky, however, is above all a historian of ideas, so this book is cast largely as an account of ideologies and intellectual debates and not of class struggles. There is no doubt, moreover, that some of the most meretricious zealots in the long history of economists’ service to power and wealth were also among the most fiendishly clever…. In the center and on the right, the field is peopled by pompous mediocrities occasionally exposed as such–as in the film Inside Job. They hold their positions only through the interlocking tribalism of American academic life….
But the facts point to an intractable problem: those whose attention cannot be shifted by the collapse of their own worldview are simply beyond reach. This is a problem for the universities, who are stuck with entire departments of stranded intellects, enclosed upon themselves, well-funded by outside sponsors, and a danger to the sound instruction of students and to the future of the world. In the decade since the financial crisis, not one so-called top economics department has hired a single senior professor who had accurately foretold the calamity to come. It should be evident, by this point, that this is not accidental.
The US quest to “contain” China is becoming a lonely one, and for good reasons. Pressuring allies to bar Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from their fifth-generation (5G) networks could set back their telecom architecture by at least a year or two and cost them billions of dollars. Preventing allies from joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is to demand that they ignore their national interests.
It might be for these reasons that four major European leaders – Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission – have defied US President Donald Trump’s warnings on Huawei and the BRI.