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https://theintercept.com/2020/05/05/capital-21st-century-documentary-thomas-piketty/

jon schwarz

"tHE WAY the elite stays in power, and passes on their privilege to the next generation, is by shaping the way that we think.”

You may have heard this from a million rose emoji Twitter accounts. But it sounds different coming from Gillian Tett at the beginning of a new documentary, “Capital in the 21:{st:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: Century,” just released online. Tett is the chair of the U.S. editorial board of the Financial Times, the salmon-colored international business newspaper read by Deutsche Bank vice presidents from London to Dubai to Singapore. (Every month FT publishes a magazine called “How to Spend It.”)

“Capital in the 21st Century” is based on the bestselling 2013 book by Thomas Piketty, a French economist. The film, directed by Justin Pemberton, undermines that core power of the world’s elites — shaping how we think — in a particularly wise, sneaky way.

There are many other documentaries about the same subject as “Capital in the 21st Century” — i.e., the rise of the 0.1 percent and the fall of everyone else. They’re mostly a barrage of graphs and numbers that make you feel like you drank three Heinekens at lunch and want to take a nap. “Capital” doesn’t do this. Instead it just tells a story, the centurieslong story of capitalism.

That makes it unique in popular culture, particularly since it does so not in a dry monotone but often via clips from movies. The story of capitalism is the central reality of everyone’s life. But it isn’t taught in high school. It’s not on TV. That’s truly bizarre if you think about it, yet, as Tett has explained elsewhere, it’s unlikely that you will. All societies maintain what anthropologists call “social silence” about the society’s most significant subjects. As Tett puts it, what matters most “is notdiscussed because those topics are considered boring, irrelevant, taboo, or just unthinkable."

"Capital in the 21stCentury” understands that the daily facts about capitalism seem boring, irrelevant, etc., to most people because they’re not part of a story. They’re like baseball scores when you don’t know anything about baseball’s rules or teams or history. But understanding the story of capitalism is like understanding all of that about baseball, plus having a team to root for, and realizing that, if your team loses, you’re going to die. This makes the business section much more exciting.

The movie starts by going back to the period 250 years ago when capitalism first gained momentum via the Industrial Revolution. Until then Europe was feudal, with a swarm of kings, dukes, earls, and marquessates holding most of the wealth in the form of land.

But factories generated new, insurgent wealth. Both the American and French revolutions were in part fights between old feudal elites and a new business elite struggling to be born. And while the old and new elites disagreed on who should be in charge, they both agreed that regular people shouldn’t be.

While no one remembers this, even the Communist Manifesto in 1848 acknowledged the accomplishments of the business class. “The bourgeoisie,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, “has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”

The problem was that in the pursuit of profit, capitalism also generated spectacular new forms of exploitation. “Capital in the 21st Century” spends time on examples such as the massive expansion of slavery, the murderous rampages of European colonialism, and “master and servant” laws in the United Kingdom that made it illegal for workers to quit. The movie’s key point about this time is that unbound capitalism made countries richer overall, but there was nothing inherent in it that improved life for regular people. In fact, it was in many ways worse for them than when they were governed by lords and ladies.

Piketty explains that by 1914 in Paris, the top 1 percent owned 70 percent of all wealth, and two-thirds of the population died with nothing. In the face of this raw brutality, all kinds of alternatives, from communism to socialism to Georgism, gained adherents across Europe. Capitalists were petrified. What could they do that wouldn’t require them to share any wealth or power?

“You have this rise in nationalism and competition between European countries,” Piketty says. “Nationalism is often used by elites to make people forget class conflict and instead focus on national identity.”

It can be debated the degree to which berserk nationalism was consciously stoked by Europe’s rulers to distract from their failures. If present-day politics are anything to go by, they likely knew exactly what they were doing. A recent GOP memo for Republican officeholders on how to deal with their coronavirus faceplant told them “don’t defend Trump” — since he’s indefensible — but “attack China.”

In any case, when World War I came, Europe’s leaders thought it was exactly what they needed. A British politician declared England was “at war quite irrespective of party or class.” Germany’s Kaiser was just as happy, proclaiming, “I see no parties anymore, I see only Germans.”

The war was such a catastrophe that it generated exactly what Europe’s elites feared most: a communist revolution. Germany’s cunning plan to send Vladimir Lenin back to Russia in 1917 was history’s greatest own goal, leading directly to the Soviet army occupying Berlin 28 years later.

As “Capital” explains, it was only with the worldwide slaughter of the Second World War that capitalism was willing to make some changes. First of all, the upper class had literally blown up much of its capital, and its power was at a low ebb. Moreover, as Stanford political science professor Francis Fukuyama points out, they were genuinely concerned about losing everything: “The existence of the communist alternative scared the capitalist world into thinking if it didn’t at least address some of the basic inequality issues that they would lose the battle of ideas. … Unless the state tried to do something about jobs, and do enough redistribution to keep people from starving, you wouldn’t have basic social stability.”

This worked. For about 30 years, the film says, societies realized that “capitalism must be harnessed like some wild horse.” This period saw huge increases in wealth for regular workers, and the first widespread middle class in history.

This lasted long enough that many people began to believe this was capitalism’s natural state, and earlier times had been an aberration. But as World War II receded into the distance, capitalism mounted a counterattack with the elections of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. Their message was that the problem of the 20th century hadn’t been the refusal of capitalism to compromise with human beings, but instead the problem was the few compromises capitalism did make.

The wholesale collapse of communism emboldened capitalism further. With hindsight, it now appears that the decades of middle-class capitalism after World War II was the aberration, and since at least the 1990s we’ve been returning to capitalism’s norm.

This is what frightens Piketty: that we’re poised to rerun the 20th century in some hideously mutated form. “There are always politicians tempted to exploit the rising inequality,” he says. “You could see this very clearly in the world before 1914. And I’m very afraid at the beginning of the 21st century, that because we feel we cannot regulate international capitalism, we cannot properly tax billionaires and multinationals, instead we vent our anger” at other targets. The danger of misdirected rage is now even clearer than when the movie was filmed, as Congress and the Trump administration use the novel coronavirus as an excuse for “just shoveling money to rich people” via complicated but extremely lucrative tax breaks.

That’s where the story of “Capital in the 21st Century” ends. “People on the streets are starting to say, enough. Enough of the inequality, and enough of not having a story about how this ever gets better,” says journalist Paul Mason. The movie and Piketty have real but limited suggestions for this kind of story about the future. But they’ve done a huge service to everyone by helping us see how we got to where we are today, which is the first step to figuring out where we want to go next.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

capital in the Twenty-First Century is the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty. It focuses on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the United States since the 18th century. It was initially published in French (as Le Capital au XXIe siècle) in August 2013; an English translation by Arthur Goldhammer followed in April 2014.[1]

The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability. Piketty proposes a global system of progressive wealth taxes to help reduce inequality and avoid the vast majority of wealth coming under the control of a tiny minority.

However, at the end of 2014, Piketty released a paper where he stated that he does not consider the relationship between the rate of return on capital and the rate of economic growth as the only or primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth inequality. He also noted that r > g is not a useful tool for the discussion of rising inequality of labor income.[2]

On May 18, 2014, the English edition reached number one on *The New York Times* Best Seller list for best selling hardcover nonfiction[3] and became the greatest sales success ever of academic publisher Harvard University Press.[4] As of January 2015, the book had sold 1.5 million copies in French, English, German, Chinese, and Spanish.[5]

Thebook has been adapted into a feature documentary film, directed by New Zealand filmmaker Justin Pemberton.[6]

Publication and initial reception[

When initially issued in French in August 2013, Laurent Mauduit characterized it as "a political and theoretical bulldozer".[7][8] As news spread of its thesis in the English-speaking world, Paul Krugman hailed it as a landmark,[9] while former senior World Bank economist Branko Milanović considers it "one of the watershed books in economic thinking".[10] In response to widespread curiosity abroad aroused by reviews of the original French edition published by Seuil in September 2013, it was translated rapidly into English and its publication date was pushed forward to March 2014 by Belknap. It proved an overnight sensation[11] and ousted Michael Lewis’s financial exposé, Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code, from the top of the US best-seller list.[12] Within a year of its publication, Stephanie Kelton spoke of a "Piketty phenomenon",[13] and in Germany three books had been published specifically dealing with Piketty's critique.[14][15][16]

Contents[

The central thesis of the book is that inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism, and can only be reversed through state interventionism.[17] The book thus argues that, unless capitalism is reformed, the very democratic order will be threatened.[17]

Piketty bases his argument on a formula that relates the rate of return on capital (r) to economic growth (g), where r includes profits, dividends, interest, rents and other income from capital and g is measured as growth of society's income or output. He argues that when the rate of growth is low, then wealth tends to accumulate more quickly from r than from labor and tends to accumulate more among the top 10% and 1%, increasing inequality. Thus the fundamental force for divergence and greater wealth inequality can be summed up in the inequality r > g. He analyzes inheritance from the perspective of the same formula.

Income inequality as measured by the income of the top 1% in several countries. Inequality tended to drop in the middle of the century but has increased in the past several decades.

The book argues that there was a trend towards higher inequality which was reversed between 1930 and 1975 due to unique circumstances: the two...world wars, the Great Depression and a debt-fueled recession destroyed much wealth, particularly that owned by the elite.[18] These events prompted governments to undertake steps towards redistributing income, especially in the post-World War II period. The fast, worldwide economic growth of that time began to reduce the importance of inherited wealth in the global economy.[18]

The book argues that the world today is returning towards "patrimonial capitalism", in which much of the economy is dominated by inherited wealth: the power of this economic class is increasing, threatening to create an oligarchy.[19] Piketty cites novels by Honoré de Balzac, Jane Austen and Henry James[18] to describe the rigid class structure based on accumulated capital that existed in England and France in the early 1800s.

Piketty proposes that a progressive annual global wealth tax of up to 2%, combined with a progressive income tax reaching as high as 80%, would reduce inequality,[18] although he says that such a tax "would be politically impossible".[20]

Piketty believes the growth rate will once again fall below the rate of return, and the twentieth century will be an aberration in terms of inequality[21]

Without tax adjustment, Piketty predicts a world of low economic growth and extreme inequality. His data show that over long periods of time, the average return on investment outpaces productivity-based income by a wide margin.[18] He dismisses the idea that bursts of productivity resulting from technological advances can be relied on to return sustained economic growth; we should not expect "a more just and rational order" to arise based on "caprices of technology",[18] and return on investment can increase when technology can be substituted for people.[20]

Reception[

The book's exceptional success was widely attributed to "being about the right subject at the right time", as The Economist put it. Piketty himself recognized there is a common sense that "inequality and wealth in the United States have been widening." The Occupy movement's "We are the 99%" slogan made talk of inequality "the zeitgeist of our age – an age of seemingly permanent crisis and austerity," as Adam Booth put it.[22]

British author Paul Mason dismissed charges of "soft Marxism" as "completely misplaced", noting that Marx described social relations trying to unveil capitalism's inner tendencies, where Piketty solely relies on social categories and historical data. Piketty rather "placed an unexploded bomb within mainstream, classical economics," he concludes.[23]

Other scholars have built upon Piketty's work, such as historian Walter Scheidel, who concurs with Piketty in his own study of inequality (The Great Leveler, 2017) that the gap will continue to widen as the decades pass, but contends that Piketty's solutions are untenable.[24]

Appraisal[

The authorThomas Piketty

Paul Krugman called the book a "magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality"[25] and "the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade."[19] He distinguishes the book from other bestsellers on economics as it constitutes "serious, discourse-changing scholarship".[26] Krugman also wrote:

At a time when the concentration of wealth and income in the hands of a few has resurfaced as a central political issue, Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame. ... Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an extremely important book on all fronts. Piketty has transformed our economic discourse; we’ll never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to.[25]

Steven Pearlstein called it a "triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years", but also added: "Piketty’s analysis of the past is more impressive than his predictions for the future are convincing."[18]

Branko Milanović, a former senior economist at the World Bank, called the book “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.”[27][28]

British historian Andrew Hussey called the book "epic" and "groundbreaking" and argues that it proves "scientifically" that the Occupy movement was correct in its assertion that "capitalism isn't working".[29]

According to Robert Solow, Piketty has made a "new and powerful contribution to an old topic: as long as the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth, the income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income from work".[30]

French historian and political scientist Emmanuel Todd called Capital in the Twenty-First Century a "masterpiece" and "a seminal book on the economic and social evolution of the planet".[31]

The book has been described as “a political and theoretical bulldozer” in the French press.[32]

The Economist wrote: "A modern surge in inequality has new economists wondering, as Marx and Ricardo did, which forces may be stopping the fruits of capitalism from being more widely distributed. Capital in the Twenty-First Century ... is an authoritative guide to the question."[33]

Will Hutton wrote: "Like Friedman, Piketty is a man for the times. For 1970s anxieties about inflation substitute today's concerns about the emergence of the plutocratic rich and their impact on economy and society. ... the current level of rising wealth inequality, set to grow still further, now imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it."[34]

Clive Crook, while being strongly critical of the book, acknowledged that "it's hard to think of another book on economics published in the past several decades that's been praised as lavishly".[35]

In the introduction to the essay collection After Piketty (2017), Piketty is praised for arguing, before Donald Trump's election, that those with property will dominate the twenty-first century political economy and set in motion forces to keep the rate of profit high enough to create plutocracy.[36]

Criticism[

Critique of the normative content[

One strand of critique faults Piketty for placing inequality at the center of analysis without any reflection on why it matters.

According to Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, he merely assumes that inequality matters, but never explains why. He only demonstrates that it exists and how it worsens.[37] Or as his colleague Clive Crook put it: "Aside from its other flaws, Capital in the 21st Century invites readers to believe not just that inequality is important, but that nothing else matters. This book wants you to worry about low growth in the coming decades not because that would mean a slower rise in living standards, but because it might ... worsen inequality."[35]

Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson asserts that Piketty is replacing American philosopher John Rawls as the essential thinker of the left.[38] In addition to questioning common measures of wealth distribution, he also criticizes Piketty for being, unlike Rawls, "much more concerned with the rich than with the poor". Hannes admits that the "rapid rise in the income of the super-rich of the world" is happening, but doesn't view this trend as being a problem so long as the poor do not get poorer.[39]

American right-libertarian George Leef attacked Piketty's work as "an apology for the use of state coercion to take property away from some people who supposedly have too much", which in the words of Frédéric Bastiat he calls "legal plunder". Diverting more resources from the voluntary, "generally efficient" private sector and into the coercive, "generally inefficient" government sector, he says, was a bad trade-off, especially for poorer people.[40]

Methodological critique[

Lawrence Summers criticizes Piketty for underestimating the diminishing returns on capital, which he believes will offset the return on capital and hence set an upper limit to inequality. Summers challenges another of Piketty's assumptions: that returns to wealth are largely reinvested. A declining ratio of saving to wealth would also set upper limits on inequality in society.[41] Of 400 wealthiest Americans in 1982, only one in ten remained on the list in 2012, and an increasing share of wealthiest people have not increased their fortunes. Moreover, top 1% incomes are now mostly salaries, not capital incomes. Most other economists explain the rise of top 1% incomes by globalization and technological change.[42]

James K. Galbraith criticizes Piketty for using "an empirical measure that is unrelated to productive physical capital and whose dollar value depends, in part, on the return on capital. Where does the rate of return come from? Piketty never says". Galbraith also says: "Despite its great ambitions, his book is not the accomplished work of high theory that its title, length and reception (so far) suggest."[43]

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson used the economic histories of Sweden and South Africa to show that social inequality depends much more on institutional factors than Piketty's factors like the difference between rate of return and growth. Cross-country analysis also shows that the top 1%'s share of income does not depend on that difference. The professors write that general laws, which is how they characterize Piketty's postulations, "are unhelpful as a guide to understand the past or predict the future because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions in shaping the evolution of technology and the distribution of resources in a society".[44] Per Krusell and Anthony Smith criticise Piketty's second law as implausible based on empirically supported theories of savings and that the data supports theories opposed to Piketty's.[45]

Paul Romer criticises that while the data and empirical analysis is presented with admirable clarity and precision, the theory is presented in less detail. In his opinion the work was written with the attitude "Empirical work is science; theory is entertainment" and therefore an example for Mathiness.[46]

Lawrence Blume and Steven Durlauf criticized the book in the Journal of Political Economy for being "unpersuasive when it turns from description to analysis... Both of us are very liberal (in the contemporary as opposed to classical sense), and we regard ourselves as egalitarians. We are therefore disturbed that Piketty has undermined the egalitarian case with weak empirical, analytical, and ethical arguments."[47]

Critique of Piketty's basic concepts[

German economist Stefan Homburg criticizes Piketty for equating wealth with capital. Homburg argues that wealth does not only embrace capital goods in the sense of produced means of production, but also land and other natural resources. Homburg argues that observed increases in wealth income ratios reflect rising land prices and not an accumulation of machinery.[48] Joseph E. **Stiglitz**endorses this view,pointing out that "a large fraction of the increase in wealth is an increase in the value of land, not in the amount of capital goods".[49]

This idea is furthered by Matthew Rognlie, then a graduate student at M.I.T., who published a paper in March 2015 with theBrookings Institutionthat argues that Piketty did not take the effects of depreciation into account enough in his analysis of the growing importance of capital. Rognlie also found that "surging house prices are almost entirely responsible for growing returns on capital."[50][51]

Marxist academic David Harvey, while praising the book for demolishing "the widely-held view that free market capitalism spreads the wealth around and that it is the great bulwark for the defense of individual liberties and freedoms," is largely critical of Piketty for, among other things, his "mistaken definition of capital", which Harvey describes as:

... a process, not a thing ... a process of circulation in which money is used to make more money often, but not exclusively through the exploitation of labor power. Piketty defines capital as the stock of all assets held by private individuals, corporations and governments that can be traded in the market no matter whether these assets are being used or not.[52]

Harvey further argues that Piketty's "proposals as to the remedies for the inequalities are naïve if not utopian. And he has certainly not produced a working model for capital of the twenty-first century. For that, we still need Marx or his modern-day equivalent". Harvey also takes Piketty to task for dismissing Marx's Das Kapital without ever having read it.[52]

IMF economist Carlos Góes researched the basic thesis put forth by the book - that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth - and found no empirical support for it; in fact, an opposite trend was identified in 75% of the countries studied in depth.[53][54] Piketty's response[55] noted, however, that Góes used measures of income inequality rather than wealth inequality, and inappropriately took the interest rate on sovereign debt as his index of the rate of return on capital, which makes his results not commensurate with those of Piketty's study.

Critique of the proposed measures[

In a similar vein, philosopher Nicholas Vrousalis faults Piketty's remedies for misconstruing the kind of political "counter-agency" required to remove the inequalities Piketty criticizes and for thinking that they are compatible with capitalism.[56]

Critique of the conventional paradigm[

Norwegian economist and journalist Maria Reinertsen compares the book to the 2014 book Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics,by Ailsa McKay and Margunn Bjørnholt, arguing that, "while Capital in the Twenty-First Century barely touches the boundaries of the discipline in its focus on the rich, Counting on Marilyn Waring challenges most limits of what economists should care about".[57]

Allegation of data errors[

On May 23, 2014, Chris Giles, economics editor of the Financial Times (FT), identified what he claims are "unexplained errors" in Piketty's data, in particular regarding wealth inequality increases since the 1970s.[58] The FT wrote in part:

The data ... contain a series of errors that skew his findings. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

The central theme of Prof Piketty's work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the World War I. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty's original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.[59]

Piketty wrote a response defending his findings and arguing that subsequent studies (he links to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman's March 2014 presentation, *The Distribution of US Wealth, Capital Income and Returns since 1913*) confirm his conclusions about increasing wealth inequality and actually show a greater increase in inequality for the United States than he does in his book.[60] In an interview with Agence France-Presse, he accused the Financial Times of "dishonest criticism" and said that the paper "is being ridiculous because all of its contemporaries recognise that the biggest fortunes have grown faster".[61]

The accusation received wide press coverage.[62][63][64][65] Some sources said the Financial Times has overstated its case. For example, The Economist, a sister publication to the Financial Times, wrote:

Mr Giles's analysis is impressive, and one certainly hopes that further work by Mr Giles, Mr Piketty or others will clarify whether mistakes have been made, how they came to be introduced and what their effects are. Based on the information Mr Giles has provided so far, however, the analysis does not seem to support many of the allegations made by the FT, or the conclusion that the book's argument is wrong.[66]

Scott Winship, a sociologist at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Researchand critic of Piketty, asserts the allegations are not "significant for the fundamental question of whether Piketty's thesis is right or not ... It's hard to think Piketty did something unethical when he put it up there for people like me to delve into his figures and find something that looks sketchy ... Piketty has been as good or better than anyone at both making all his data available and documenting what he does generally".[61]

In addition to Winship, the economists Alan Reynolds, Justin Wolfers, James Hamilton and Gabriel Zucman claim that FT's assertions go too far.[67][68] Paul Krugman noted that "anyone imagining that the whole notion of rising wealth inequality has been refuted is almost surely going to be disappointed".[68] Emmanuel Saez, a colleague of Piketty and one of the economists cited by Giles to discredit him, stated that "Piketty's choice and judgement were quite good" and that his own research supports Piketty's thesis.[69] Piketty released a full point-by-point rebuttal on his website.[70]

A 2017 study in Social Science History by University of California Riverside economic historian Richard Sutch concluded "that Piketty's data for the wealth share of the top 10 percent for the period 1870 to 1970 are unreliable ... Piketty's data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable ... The values Piketty reported for the twentieth century (1910–2010) are based on more solid ground, but have the disadvantage of muting the marked rise of inequality during the Roaring Twenties and the decline associated with the Great Depression."[71]

Awards and honours[

Editions[

See also[

References

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?471546-1/capital-ideology

APRIL 24, 2020

Capital and Ideology

Economist and bestselling author Thomas Pikettyoffered his views on politics and history. This was a virtual event hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/economist-thomas-piketty-coronavirus-pandemic-has-exposed-the-violence-of-social-inequality/

...AMY GOODMAN: Well, it is a great honor to have you with us. Can you talk now about how this pandemic is likely to trigger the sharpest recession in the United States since the Great Depression, perhaps a depression? Can you talk about the long-term effects of the crisis, and perhaps what can be done to ameliorate it?

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}:

THOMAS PIKETTY: Right. So, you know, what I show in my new book, Capital and Ideology, is that this kind of crisis, very often in history, has a potential to change dominant views about what we should do about the economy, how we should organize our societies, the level of inequality.

So, you know, the first visible impact of the crisis is that we see the violence of social inequality. So, you know, people are not equal with respect to lockdowns. They are not equal with respect to joblessness, income loss. So, you know, you can see people who have a very small home or people who have no home, who are homeless, are in a very different situation than people who are locked down in their nice apartment or nice house.

And in terms of income support, you know, when you don’t have any wealth in saving and when you are in a very precarious labor market position, you lose your income resources very fast. And I should say that, you know, the unemployment benefit system in the U.S., in particular, is far too restrictive, and you have lots of workers who actually don’t have access to adequate income support. You have lots of people who don’t have access to housing.

And we’ve seen some of your reports, from just before, that it’s a service issue. You know, we should do more. And the U.S. government and governments around the world should do more about changing their view on what we do with housing, you know, getting urgent solutions for the people who don’t have proper housing, extending income support, making them over and beyond what we’ve been doing in the different countries.

And then we also need to start thinking about a different kind of recovery. We cannot just go business as usual with the same economic sectors again. I think it’s an opportunity to rethink about a different kind of recovery, you know, more green, more social and trying to reach a more equitable and more sustainable development model, because this is something we’ve been discussing for a long time, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. And I think, with the financing of this crisis, we are going to have to change our view about what’s a proper level of inequality in a society.

You know, we see today that all the ideologies against government action, in particular against public health systems and public investment in the hospitals, this discourse today, of course, looks very weak, given the reality of the situation. So, you know, I think this is likely to change. It has already been changed to some extent, but this needs to go much further than what we have done so far....

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/thomas-piketty-sees-only-one-way-defeat-rise-radical-right

In  a new paper, French political economist Thomas Piketty, author of the bestselling 2013 book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," argues that Western political parties on the right and left have both become parties of the "elites."

Yet the 65-page paper from the notoriously punctilious economist — titled"Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict"— is more surprising for the lessons it has for the political left in the Western world. Indeed, the left-populist wing of Western political parties, including the American progressive movement restarted by Bernie Sanders, has reason to celebrate: Piketty's paper aligns with their somewhat counterintuitive strategy that shifting the Democratic Party platform more to the left is actually a winning electoral strategy that can help bring back disenfranchised working-class voters and less educated voters who currently may not vote at all or identify with right-wing populism.

"Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, this paper documents a striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages," Piketty writes in the abstract. He goes on to explain the political changes that have happened since the 1950s and 1960s, when "the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters" — in other words, the Labour Party of the United Kingdom, the Socialist Party of France and the Democratic Party of the United States were considered parties that supported and helped destitute and less-well-educated voters.

Yet over time, those parties, Piketty explains, "gradually become associated with higher education voters," which he describes as creating a system of "multiple-elite" parties where "high-education elites now vote for the 'left,' while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the 'right' (though less and less so)."In other words, both sides of the spectrum became parties of the elite, with no party for less educated folks or the working class.

Piketty argues that this situation "contributes to rising  inequality and lack of democratic response to it," as well as the rise of populists like Trump, Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in Britain. "Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low- education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party," he writes.

If the Democratic Party were wise, it might see Piketty's paper as a chance to improve its electoral strategy. Indeed, the Democrats seem to be locked in a battle for their soul, a fight long-presaged that erupted during the 2016 presidential primary. In one corner sits the Clintonite corporate wing of the party, who believe that the key to Democratic Party strategy is to move to the center in order to pick up moderate conservatives voters who feel left behind by the Republican Party's far-right shift.

This was Clinton's strategy to a T: in her election campaign, she bragged about her connections to Henry Kissinger and her support from billionaire Republicans like former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, while being famously dismissive of social democratic policies like single-payer health care.

In the other corner there are those who argue that the Democratic Party will win more voters if it appeals explicitly to class interests and concerns. As Steve Phillips wrote in a Times op-ed last year:

This "go left" strategy hints at what Piketty calls the "class-based party system" that dominated Western democracies in the 1950s and 1960s. In those decades, "lower class voters from the different dimensions (lower education voters, lower income voters, etc.) tend[ed] to vote for the same party or coalition, while upper and middle class voters from the different dimensions tend[ed] to vote for the other party or coalition."If Democrats had stemmed the defections of white voters to the Libertarian or Green Parties, they would have won Michigan and Wisconsin, and had they also inspired African-Americans in Pennsylvania, Mrs. Clinton would be president.

If progressive whites are defecting because they are uninspired by Democrats, moving further to the right will only deepen their disillusionment.

Similar as the Democratic factions may seem to the right, which seems unable to distinguish a liberal billionaire like Warren Buffett from a "communist," they represent radically different positions, and have different constituencies. The Clintonite coalition tended to rely on pandering to identity groups and a sort of vague multiculturalism that posited that billionaires, corporations and the poor could live in some kind of perfect harmony, even though the former rely on the exploitation of the latter to exist.

Critics like Phillips argue that Clinton and her DNC lackeys failed to grasp that her milquetoast liberalism lacked a comprehensible ideology: There were no scapegoats, and "America was already great," in Clinton's words. Those words appeared tone-deaf to the millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet, who sought a scapegoat and heard a more sensible explanation for their woes from Donald Trump.

Though Sanders came up short in the primaries, he was vindicated in the aftermath of the general election in several ways: First, many of the Rust Belt states that Trump carried — states Hillary Clinton had banked on winning — were won by Sanders in the primary, including Michigan and Wisconsin. Second, post-election studies suggested that had Sanders been the Democratic nominee, he would have defeated Trump by a wide margin. Third, Sanders remains the most popular politician in the United States, despite an ongoing bile-spitting campaign orchestrated by Democratic insiders like Sally Albright (who called Sanders "racist" for proposing free college) or Peter Daou (who blames Sanders for Clinton's loss). Finally, Clinton's victory was aided considerably by a corrupt party apparatus that was already in the bag for Clinton, as former interim DNC chair Donna Brazile has described.Meanwhile, the strategy of Bernie Sanders — mirrored in other left organizing groups in the United States that seek to push the Democratic Party to the left, including Our Revolution and Democratic Socialists of America — is to offer a more serious material analysis of the underpinnings of oppression and suffering in the United States, and to scapegoat income inequality caused by an unjust economic system propped up by the elite. Sanders and his counterparts overseas, particularly U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, offer that aforementioned "strong egalitarian-internationalist platform" that has the potential to "unite low-education, low-income voters from all origins," as Piketty describes.

For Berniecrats, democratic socialists and those even further left, there's much to love in Piketty's paper. His conclusion, one echoed by the Sanders wing of the Democratic party, is essentially that ostensibly "left" parties — e.g. the Democrats in the United States, Labour in the U.K. or the Socialist Party in France — have lost the constituencies they once supported and now appeal to the elite, leaving a vast underclass politically unrepresented and rudderless. Piketty is giving them a rudder, if the parties can seize it.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/radio-host-thom-hartmann-explains-how-we-could-slide-into-straight-fascism-in-the-next-year

...one one thing that causes me to think that we might not — and which is the subject of my new book “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” — is how the United States Supreme Court has basically betrayed our country. The definition of a democracy is where the people vote for what they want and then they get that through the government. That has not been the case since 1981.

Whether it’s the social safety net, protecting the environment, decreasing our military activity abroad, making policing more humane, recognizing civil rights, encouraging voter rights, strengthening the middle class and protecting Social Security and Medicare, none of those things have happened. In fact, the opposite has happened.

How is Trumpism a symptom and not the cause of much bigger social, political, economic and other cultural problems in America? Renewing the country’s democracy to prevent another fascist president is going to require deep systemic change, not just voting Donald Trump out of office.

The thing that concerns me the most is that in the United States we now have corporations and billionaires who have taken over our political system completely.**Social scientists have shown that what the bottom 90% of income earners want in America is literally random noise for America’s policymakers**. By comparison, what the top 10% want is consistently enacted through legislation. This means no more democracy. And then on top of that power dynamic the courts have swung to the far right and are hard corporatist.....

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ref 2014

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-theories-of-american-politics-explained

Who really matters in our democracy — the general public, or wealthy elites? That's the topic of a recent studyby political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. The study's gotten lots of attention over the past year, because the authors conclude, basically, that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter. Or as they put it, "economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence."

But can that be right? Let's walk through the study and explain what it shows.

What does their study measure, exactly?

Gilens and "a small army of research assistants" compiled nearly 2,000 polls and surveys that asked for opinions about a proposed policy change. Since he wanted to separate out the preferences of economic elites and average citizens, he only used surveys that asked about respondents' income. He found 1,779 poll results that fit that description, spanning from 1981 to 2002. Then he took the answers of median-income voters to represent what average voters think, and the answers of respondents at the 90th income percentile to represent what economic elites think.