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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Kamala Harris’s Wall Street charm offensive begins to pay off

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-04-2024]

“Two finance executives close to Harris said she had reassured them that she could appoint new officials to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission who would take a less aggressive stance than current respective chairs Gary Gensler and Lina Khan.”

Rev. William Barber II demands focus on poverty, proposes debate format to ‘put facts out’

James Powel, October 3, 2024 [USA TODAY, via Common Dreams]

As the nation reviewed the vice presidential debate between Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Tuesday night, Rev. William J. Barber II noticed one group of people missing from the conversation: the poor.

The founder of Repairers of the Breach, The Poor People’s Campaign and the Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale told USA TODAY in an interview Wednesday that the presidential race, and by extension the vice presidential debate, was not revealing solutions for the nearly 38 million people living in poverty in the country….

Progressives Must Act Now to Shape Kamala Harris’s White House

Jeff Hauser, Kenny Stancil October 2, 2024 [American Prospect]

Now is the time for progressives to weigh in on jobs that don’t require Senate confirmation….

…But beyond independent agencies and the Cabinet, there are many influential White House positions for which Senate confirmation is not required. Harris has no excuse for not taking her best swings here. In the same vein, progressives have no excuse for not advocating for the best possible nominees—and preparing to register disapproval if warranted.

As a general principle, Harris should appoint individuals who have a demonstrated commitment to furthering the public interest, rather than entrenching corporate power or seeking personal advancement. This means appointees’ résumés should reflect careers spent advocating for the common good—including experience in federal, state, or local governments as well as other public-sector or nonprofit work—as opposed to careers spent working on behalf of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other nerve centers of corporate America. Moreover, given the need for an all-of-government approach to solving our myriad and overlapping crises, the people Harris names should also have the ability to creatively leverage available power to drive change.

What follows is a brief overview of key jobs and some lessons on what to look for—and look out for.

• White House chief of staff, deputy chiefs of staff, and special assistants: The chief of staff is a Cabinet-level official who exercises a tremendous amount of influence, as both adviser to the president and manager of the Executive Office of the President. The chief of staff’s duties range from selecting and supervising White House personnel to directing policy development and negotiating legislation with congressional leaders, Cabinet secretaries, and advocacy groups.

The night-and-day difference between Ron Klain and Jeff Zients, Biden’s first and second chiefs of staff, underscores the importance of getting this pick right. For two years, Klain worked constructively with the left wing of the Democratic Party—securing significant investments in clean energy and domestic manufacturing along with provisions to lower prescription drug costs and more resources to ensure the top 1 percent pays the taxes it owes—and he empowered progressive regulators to crack down on corporate wrongdoing. Since February 2023, super-rich former management consultant Zients has overseen a comparatively anemic Biden administration. Although losing the House in the 2022 midterms no doubt made the legislative side of Zients’s job tougher, that’s no excuse for failing to (a) tell a compelling story about Biden’s domestic accomplishments (including those that made Zients’s fellow plutocrats sad), and (b) convince voters that the Democratic Party has concrete plans to improve working people’s lives….

• National Economic Council….

• National Security Council….

• White House Counsel….

• Domestic Policy Council….

• Senior Communications Staff: Biden’s comms team has been dreadful, to put it mildly. Most of the electorate is completely unaware of the steps the Biden administration has taken to push the economy in a greener and more equitable direction. Kate Bedingfield and Ben LaBolt, the former and current White House communications director, respectively, deserve a lot of the blame for the disconnect between Biden’s policies and voters’ perceptions. So does Anita Dunn, former senior adviser to the president for communications. These figures decided that the best thing to do when the Biden administration fights corporate power is to not let people know about it. (Or, if it is discussed, do so in the most abstract way possible designed to reduce the chance of a fight that might, God forbid, draw attention.)

Given the popularity of cracking down on corporate crime, that’s exactly the opposite of what should be done. And Biden’s senior comms staff hasn’t only failed to convey the president’s domestic achievements; they’ve also failed to adequately explain the extent to which profiteering corporations have fueled the cost-of-living crisis, allowing Biden to unfairly take heat for inflation. For example, the Biden White House has yet to publicly condemn Scott Sheffield, the Republican mega-donor who colluded with U.S. drillers and OPEC officials to limit the global supply of oil, which ultimately increased gasoline prices and augmented fossil fuel industry profits at the direct expense of working households. (The FTC cited a second public official for similar behavior this week.) What’s more, the White House has remained silent about Sheffield’s price-fixing conspiracy even as the Trump campaign courts Big Oil donors with pledges to repeal Biden’s climate and environmental policy rulemakings. Harris can and must do better.

If Harris wins, her transition team will be making decisions about these jobs in November. Progressives ought to weigh in now!

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America — EXCERPTS

Mehrsa Baradaran (New York, W.W. Norton, 2024)

Introduction

Ideologies that have developed memelike qualities, like race and religion, have been some of the most potent forces shaping human history, especially when they have fused with the law. Racial hierarchy began as ideology to justify plunder and slaughter—those who murdered unjustly, like the Spanish conquistadors or British slave traders, blamed their crimes on their victims’ “inherent” inferiority and a meme was born in the world. Before the wholesale theft of indigenous land, the law justified it. In the early nineteenth century, Chief Justice John Marshall deemed that the indigenous tribes in America could not own or sell their land on account of their inherent “savagery.” The law thereafter demarcated property rights as the exclusive domain of white men, paving the way for manifest destiny, the seizure of 1.5 billion acres of land for private ownership, and the genocide of millions of indigenous people. Marshall built his legal opinion on precedent and theory provided by the British philosopher John Locke, whose theory of property law was popular in Great Britain in the late 1600s at the height of the British slave trade. It was “natural” and just, noted Locke, that “the creator” had endowed only “the industrious and rational” white men with the right to own land and people. It was also expedient. Ideologies persist through replication exactly because they evade detection, and through the process of replication, they evolve. For example, the ideology of patriarchy once reinforced itself through property laws like coverture and primogeniture that prohibited women from owning property. Once an ideology is embedded in legal code, its silent perpetuation is guaranteed.

Patently immoral practices like colonial subjugation, slavery, land theft, Jim Crow, segregation, and forced labor lasted so long that the theories that once justified them—like divine decree—no longer did the job. Instead of addressing the injustices that racist ideologies had created, often, those with the most to lose went looking for new ideologies Ito justify their unfair position at the top: first, Christianity; then Darwinian science; then the pseudo-scientific babble of “human IQ” testing; then, as was the case at the end of the 1960s, economics.

xxx
As John Adams once wrote to Thomas Jefferson (20 June 1815), ‘Power always sincerely, conscientiously… believes itself Right. Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God’s Service, when it is violating all his laws.” 19 Such was the object of the neoliberal revolution in legal theory: to infuse raw power with a soul—and snuff out the discretion that is law’s dynamic living heart.

The law is the most powerful engine through which ideologies can become self-replicating engines. John Locke’s theory of property as the endowed right of white men to use and to produce worked like witchcraft—the natural world, which had sustained societies for thousands of years, could suddenly be taken by force, enclosed, and tilled for the sole profit of one man, with trespassers punished. The conversion of land into one person’s permanent property was not permissible under the indigenous populations who had long occupied it, nor was such a thing permissible anywhere in the world except Europe—and even there, only after the enclosure movements of the 1600s. The brilliant and prolific philosopher Locke happened to be under the patronage of Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the richest men in England (who later became the First Earl of Shaftesbury); he was first hired as Cooper’s personal doctor, but as the earl entered politics to advocate for more property rights, Locke’s star rose alongside his. And property laws were passed in legislatures and handed down over time, carrying memes from men long dead with ideas long denounced.

Law codified land into assets and has been extending the market into new frontiers ever since—from corporate shares and derivatives to NFTs—transforming abstract ideas into tradable assets. A similar alchemy transformed gold into money by smelting an image onto a coin, then transformed gold coins into bank notes emblazoned with the image of a king, queen, or president. Initially, it was gold’s malleability that made it ideal for coinage. But with the rise of empire and Great Britain’s dominance of the global trade in gold, the gold standard became yet another ideology to preserve power. Locke’s theories about gold being the highest source of value on account of its scarcity have been as impossible to dislodge from monetary theories as his ideas about race have been from property laws. But Locke was wrong—gold was not valuable. Then, as now, money’s value derived from the image on the coin. Money is a symbol of people’s trust in the government that issued it. Gold’s scarcity was not the source of its value, but it was one of the causes of hundreds of years of wars in Europe over the scarce metal. While empire based on the gold standard and justified by white supremacy fell to the global horror of World War II, the underlying logic of both lingered. Unaddressed and unexamined, these bad ideas continue to breed distrust in our societies and scarcity in our economies. The greatest villains of our modern times are rarely human beings but the zombie ideas of dead men that continue to shape our societies.

FAR FROM BEING a battle between capitalism and communism, as so many historians have painted the era’s conflict, the global revolutions of the 1960s were the only world wars that involved the entire world. Truly, the world had turned upside down as a globe dominated by a handful of empires became a world with over a hundred independent nations—each demanding equal sovereignty on the world stage. The possibilities were breathtaking and the 1960s saw the first worldwide conversation between and among peoples speaking to one another. Neoliberalism was the successor ideology of empire. Gone were the gunboats, colonial governments, and talk of civilizing savages. Instead, development loans, sovereign debt markets, and transnational corporations became the face of power in the Global South. The guns did not disappear of course, but were traded on global markets from distributors to trade-friendly governments.

After decades of relentless activism by Black Americans across every legal domain, the American South’s chokehold on the law finally broke and the Constitution’s promise of equality was secured for all Americans. The last stages of the civil rights movement forced the quiet oppression of southern law to show its teeth and claws

[TW: I am greatly encouraged that Baradaran identifies John Locke as one of the major causes of bad political economy. As I have noted a number of times, it was Locke’s ideas of private property that made liberalism so insidiously destructive of the founding philosophy of civic republicanism, leading us to our present megacrises.

[Baradaran’s book is an excellent accompaniment to The Lever’s epic and important series on The Master Plan (see below). She discusses some people who The Lever series has not mentioned yet, such as Ayn Rand acolyte and neoliberal enforcer Alan Greenspan, who played a central role in Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, and the development of conservative economics as a cloak for outright racism.]

The Secret Plot To Buy American Democracy (podcast)

[The Lever, September 20, 2024]

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground.

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh talks to David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher about their deep-dive investigation into this 50-year plan in the hit new Lever podcast Master Plan. Then, Arjun sits down with journalist David Daley to discuss his latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.

Daley’s book centers on Chief Justice John Roberts, whose ascent to the high court — and the conservative rulings he’s handed down — were the culmination of decades of work that began with Powell and Horowitz’s memos.

Master Plan, Ep 5: How Corporations Became People (podcast)

Corporations Are People, My Friend (YouTube video)

[The Lever, September 10, 2024]

In Master Plan’s fifth episode, we explore how an unlikely catalyst — Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination — created an opportunity for his Senate replacement to manufacture the first and perhaps most important blow against America’s new campaign finance laws: Buckley v. Valeo. With a supporting cast including James Buckley, John Bolton, Charles Koch, and Robert Bork, this U.S. Supreme Court case was the first to frame the fight against campaign finance regulations as a crusade for free speech and third-party rights.

MASTER PLAN, Ep 6: The Maverick Vs. The Corruption Machine (podcast)

[The Lever, September 17, 2024]

In the 1980s, the U.S. government was anything but clean. After the landmark Supreme Court cases we told you about in Episode 5 turned money into “speech” in the 1970s, cash began flowing into elections unchecked. Big donors also expected big favors.

It wasn’t such a surprise, then, when five U.S. senators got caught in 1989 for allegedly trying to pressure a federal bank regulator to go easy on savings and loan magnate Charles Keating. But what no one expected was that one of the so-called “Keating Five,” a relative newcomer named John McCain, would do far more than apologize for his mistakes; he’d transform into the staunchest campaign finance reformer since Watergate.

McCain would need his unpredictable “maverick” energy for the fights ahead. Because once he set his sights on wrangling the dark money out of politics, he’d find himself butting heads with two powerful members of his own party — a senator who’d been called the “Darth Vader of campaign finance reform,” and a governor-turned-president backed by big donors.

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Sharing Kushner’s tweet in full because it has to be seen in toto to be believed and it’s important to remember he will no doubt once again be the architect of Trump’s ME policy should Trump retake office.

And also because of this observation from Mohammad Alsaafin of AJ+:

It’s darkly funny that every stupid thing Kushner is saying here reflects the actual strategy and position of the Biden administration.

Ok, here’s Kushner’s victory lap:

Jared Kushner@jaredkushner

September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.

I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.

This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.

Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent. President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.”

The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.

Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind.

As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike. Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north.

It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end.

Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong.

There is no going back for Israel.

They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned.

Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated.

Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.

I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives.

But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible.

This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city.

The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together. The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job.

It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight. More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers. And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines.

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

What is the deep state? (YouTube video)

(Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, YouTube, via Thomas Neuburger, God’s Spies, 09-20-2024]

This video segment is taken from a symposium at which Sach and Mearsheimer offered their views on U.S. foreign policy. The whole thing is worth a listen, but I’ve cued this to start at the point where the question, “What is the deep state?” is asked and answered.

Note: The answer relates to foreign policy only, not the broader question of “Does the Establishment State try to influence domestic politics?”

“Sachs: My experience … is that there’s a deeply entrained foreign policy. It has been in place in my interpretation for many decades. But arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992. I got to watch some of it early on because I was an adviser to Gorbachev and I was an adviser to Yeltsin, and so I saw early makings of this though I didn’t fully understand it except in retrospect.

“But that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn’t really matter whether it was Bush Senior, whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush Jr., whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump.

“After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, duh, pretty deep state. That was the end of … they told, you know, he [Bolton] explained this is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs, when Trump didn’t agree we figured out ways to trick him basically.”

….

“MEARSHEIMER: When we talk about the ‘Deep State,’ we’re really talking about the Administrative State. It is very important to understand that starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop — and this is true of all Western countries — a very powerful central state that could ‘run the country.’ And over time, that state has grown in power.

“Since World War Two, the United States has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community — you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.

“That particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. That’s why we talk about tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum with regard to the two parties. You could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions….”

[TW: This is an important glimpse into the thinking of USA ruling elites. But just as important as what was said, is what was not said. There was no discussion of cooperation between nations on solving global problems, in line with what I have identified as a core principle of civic republicanism: one major role of government is to encourage people to do good by increasing humanity’s power over nature. There was no mention whatsoever of climate change, which absolutely will require global cooperation, probably on an unprecedented level. How about an international effort to help Mexico build a second Panama Canal? Or a crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, now considered an insurmountable engineering challenge. Wouldn’t it be much better to focus energies and resources on such projects?

[Increasing humanity’s power over nature: that’s what sewer systems and water distribution systems did — projects which are probably the single largest factor in tripling average human life expectancy in the past three centuries. Sewer systems and water distribution systems are primary examples of increasing humanity’s power over nature. Not just power over flows of water, but power over the spread of bacteria and viruses.

[The “realism” discussed by Sachs and Mearsheimer emphasizes competition — just like neoliberal “free market” economics. The real way to avoid nuclear war is to emphasize the cooperation of the human family in solving the problems we call face. The old paradigms of thought must be banished and replaced. For example, the idea that economics is about how “society allocates scarce resources” (taught in all “classical economics” texts and courses in the West), must be replaced by the understanding of civic republican political economy that the foremost economic task of any society is to overcome scarcity and provide abundance by increasing the power of humanity to understand and prudently control natural resources, then to distribute that abundance equitably to all of humanity. One major international cooperative project that cries out for attention and support is to build sewer systems and water distribution systems throughout the entire world, most especially areas in Africa and South American which do not now have them. There should not be any people anywhere on the globe who are forced to spend large parts of their day filling the basic need of securing enough clean water to drink, bathe, and cook.

[Eight years ago, China proposed an international $50 trillion project to build an electric power grid to bring solar and wind generated electricity from the polar and equatorial regions of the world, to the more populated regions that use the electricity. It is a great strategic mistake to ignore such proposals. ]

Global power shift

China leads world in 57 of 64 critical technologies; up from 3 just 20 years ago 

[Hacker News, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]

ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker 

[ASPI, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]

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