CAPITALISM

disambiguation, see free mkt neo-liberalism

220 tag caplism

MERRI OK

see extraction

see disaster capitalism

see surveillance capitalism

SEE BAK

aha: covid stress test fail leading to systemic re-analysis, maybe reform?

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AN 11 25

Ronald Reagan Republican and GOP strategist Frank Luntz says the word “capitalism” has become a dirty word that Republicans must avoid if they want to win election in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani.

With communication strategist Luntz, winning elections is primarily about messaging, and the word ”capitalism” is no longer a winning message as billionaire “capitalists” accrue most of the wealth and leave Americans worrying about their rent and food pantries. Just recently, the Top 10 U.S. billionaires’ collective wealth grew by nearly $700 billion and analysts warned government policies are driving inequality to new heights.

“Is it fair that some people's children will be born billionaires without having to work a day in their life, while others will work two or three jobs just to put food on their table and a roof over their heads,” Luntz asked CNN anchor Michale Smerconish. “Second, is it fair that some schools have all the technology, all the resources, and others can't even afford books or chalk?”

“Why do I ask that? Because you can see it. You can visualize it,” said Luntz, who correctly predicted Tuesday’s off-year elections would “go badly” for the Republican Party. “And third, does everyone … who works hard and plays by the rules — shouldn’t they have a genuine shot at the American dream? These are the questions that you ask at the beginning to bring audiences over to you. And without asking those questions, you're cutting people out.”

“[Democratic socialist Sen.] Bernie Sanders is on Line 2 for you because he's finding this pretty convincing,” Smerconish responded, and then asked Luntz if the U.S. would “be properly cast as a democratic socialist nation” by 2050.

“It’s already happening,” said Luntz. “I work with young people all across the country. Under age 30, they prefer socialism to capitalism already. The 30s, they are about dead even. It's only when you get to be older 40 that you become more supportive [of capitalism].”

“We should be calling it ‘economic freedom,’ not capitalism, because capitalism is about CEOs,” Luntz added. “It's about billionaires, and it's about Wall Street. Economic freedom is about Main Street, about the workforce and about the opportunities for the future. And I want to give you one bit of language that whoever wins this wins the entire debate, whether it's capitalism or socialism.”

Whether or not they vote that way, Luntz advised Republicans to sell America as “a place for new ideas, better solutions and where good people thrive if we want to move forward as a country … and no one is left behind.”

“Whoever controls that language wins the debate,” he said.

“I think AOC, Mamdani and Bernie are all going to be clamoring for your services after the first part of our exchange,” said Smerconish — but Luntz jettisoned any notion that he stood behind the policies of the three politicians.

“They won’t get it,” Luntz said.

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has reich used the c word before?

rr an 11 23

as an ever-greater portion of the nation’s total wealth goes to the top, it’s hardly surprising that ever more of that wealth is corrupting American politics.

In the 2020 presidential election cycle, more than $14 billion went to federal candidates, party committees, and Super PACs — double the $7 billion doled out in the 2016 cycle.

Total giving in 2024 is bound to be much higher.

Most of that money is not supporting American democracy. Increasingly, it is supporting Donald Trump and his anti-democracy allies.

There is a certain logic to this.

As more and more wealth accumulates at the top, the moneyed interests fear that democratic majorities will take it away through higher taxes, stricter regulations (on everything from trade to climate change), enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, pro-union initiatives, and price controls.

So they’re sinking ever more of their wealth into anti-democracy candidates.

Donald Trump is going full fascist these days, and gaining the backing of prominent billionaires.

On Veterans Day, Trump pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” whom he accused of doing anything “to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.” (Notably, he read these words from a teleprompter, meaning that they were intentional rather than part of another impromptu Trump rant.)

Days before, Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The New York Times reports that he’s planning to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

Trump has publicly vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “ go after” President Joe Biden and his family, and has told advisers and friends that he wants the Justice Department to investigate officials who have criticized his time in office.

This is, quite simply, full-throated neofascism.

Who’s bankrolling all this? While Trump’s base is making small contributions, the big money is coming from some of the richest people in America.

During the first half of the year, multiple billionaires donated to the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again Inc. Super PAC.

Phil Ruffin (net worth $3.4 billion), the 88-year-old casino and hotel mogul, has given multiple $1 million donations.

Charles Kushner (family net worth $1.8 billion), the real estate mogul and father of Jared, who received a late-term pardon from Trump in December 2020, contributed $1 million in June.

Robert “Woody” Johnson (net worth $3.7 billion), Trump’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom and co-owner of the New York Jets, donated $1 million to the MAGA PAC in April.

And so on.

But Trump is not the only extremist pulling in big dollars. Nikki Haley — who appears moderate only relative to Trump’s blatant neofascism — proclaimed in her campaign launch that President Biden is promoting a “socialist” agenda.

During her two years as U.N. ambassador under Trump, Haley was a strong proponent of his so-called “zero tolerance” policy, under which thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents and guardians. She supported Trump’s decision to pull out of the U.N. Human Rights Council and to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Though she briefly criticized Trump for inciting the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Haley soon defended Trump and called on Democratic lawmakers to “give the man a break” when they impeached him for a second time.

Haley recently told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that while Trump’s floating the idea of executing retired General Mark Milley might be “ irresponsible,” it does not disqualify him from running for the White House again.

Haley’s billionaire supporters include Stanley Druckenmiller, Eric Levine, and Republican megadonor Ken Griffin.

Notably, Haley has also gained the support of JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who’s about as close as anyone in America comes to being a spokesperson for the business establishment. Dimon admires Haley’s recognition of the role that “business and government can play in driving growth by working together.”

The moneyed interests have been placing big bets on other Trumpist Republicans.

Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire tech financier who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” contributed more than $35 million to 16 federal-level Republican candidates in the 2022 campaign cycle, making him the 10th largest individual donor to either party.

Twelve of Thiel’s candidates won, including Ohio’s now Senator J.D. Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “ more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is creating a new fundraising committee that will be soliciting contributions of up to $586,200 a pop.

Elon Musk is not a major financial contributor to Trump nor other anti-democracy candidates, but his power over one of the most influential megaphones in America gives him inordinate clout — which he is using to further the neofascist cause.

Witness Musk’s solicitude of Trump, his endorsement of antisemitic posts, his embrace of Tucker Carlson and white replacement theory, and his avowed skepticism toward democracy.

Democracy is compatible with capitalism only if democracy is in the driver’s seat, so it can rein in capitalism’s excesses.

But if capitalism and its moneyed interests are in charge, those excesses grow to the point where they are able to extinguish democracy and ride roughshod over the common good.

Hence the reason Trump’s neofascism, and the complicity of today’s Republican Party with it, are attracting the backing of some of the richest people in America.

What’s the alternative? A loud pro-democracy movement that fights against concentrated wealth at the top, enormous CEO pay packages, a politically powerful financial sector, and tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations.

And fights for higher taxes on the top (including a wealth tax) to finance Medicare for all, affordable housing, and accessible child care and elder care.

The willingness to make this a fight — to name the moneyed interests backing neofascism, explain why they’re doing this, and mobilize and energize America against their agenda and in favor of democracy — is critical to winning the 2024 election and preserving and rebuilding American democracy.

Biden and the Democrats must take this on, loudly and clearly. (Incidentally, Biden’s age — Happy 81st, Joe! — would be far less of an issue if he showed the grit and guts to do this.)

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/19-vaccines-were-made-possible-by-socialism-and-years-of-public-sector-funding-journalist/

alexh

The coronavirus pandemic has had its deadliest days yet in December 2020, but the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and others offer hope that life might start returning to some degree of normal in 2021. Journalist Leigh Phillips, in an article for the democratic socialist website Jacobin, praises the arrival of the vaccines but expresses strong concerns about the ways in which they will be distributed.

"A jaw-dropping marvel of science, economic planning and selfless, humanist cooperation by thousands of researchers around the globe, the development of this and other vaccines hot on Pfizer's heels has taken a mere nine months since the discovery of the disease, rather than the years or even decades such medical research and development (R&D) normally takes," Phillips explains. "They offer a glimpse of how much more an egalitarian, rationalist world could produce and achieve, freed from the fetters of profit."

Phillips argues that the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna shouldn't be hailed as a "triumph for capitalism," as the companies relied heavily on "years of public-sector funding." The companies, Phillips notes, "relied on state shepherding and bankrolling of the vaccine development process."

Phillips adds that distribution of the vaccines will underscore the harsh inequalities in the U.S. and other countries.

"Before we get out the champagne and toast our genuinely heroic scientists and clinicians," Phillips writes, "we have to recognize that while these vaccines are indeed a light at the end of a very long tunnel, that same tunnel will be yet longer than it needs to be, thanks once again to the irrationality, inefficiency and injustice of capitalism. It will be especially unfair for those in the developing world — and even in many poorer, less populous parts of the developed West, there will be cruelties for those who live outside the metropolitan core, as there already have been throughout 2020 in the United States especially."

Phillips wraps up the article by stressing that the public sector will be crucial in fighting future pandemics.

"Looking beyond the horizon of COVID-19, the threat of future pandemics — and among them will be ones nowhere near as forgiving as this coronavirus — requires, at some point, a serious discussion of how global democracy can be constructed from the bottom up, and how in such a democracy, worldwide economic planning can tame the inefficiencies, irrationalities and injustices of markets," Phillips writes. "Because no one is safe until we are all safe."

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lords of davos admit capitalist sys fail, but just greenwash BS? naomi

reboot of agenda 21, plademic, the memes are mating /remix smoothie

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/

...

The Great Reset is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

So no, the Great Reset is not just another name for the Green New Deal, as many a right-winger with a digital chalkboard and an unhealthy AOC obsession is absurdly claiming. It is, first and foremost, about blocking a real Green New Deal, which most assuredly would not have the support of BP, Mastercard, the Prince of Wales, and all of the other Great Reset partners.

And yet, in recent weeks, a slew of right-wing commentators on Fox News, as well as Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs and prominent opposition politicians in Australia and Canada, have claimed to be confused about this and are suddenly giving oxygen to what was, until recently, amarginal conspiracy. Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro have all been terrifying their huge audiences with claims that green socialism is about to be forced down their throats via Schwab’s Great Reset, which, they explain, is the very same thing as President-elect Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, which is itself a thin cover for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. (Like an early fan of an indie punk band, Glenn Beck has been using his perch at The Blaze to point out that he was ranting about the Great Reset when it was just a gleam in Schwab’s eye.)

Do these people honestly think that Schwab is in cahoots with AOC and using the pandemic to put BP out of business — with the full cooperation of BP? Of course not. But President Donald Trump is on his way out, and the Green New Deal is popular — precisely because it is as far away from Davos as it could be, grounded in a polluter-pays ethos and in programs like a jobs guarantee and universal health care that enjoy broad working-class support. For right-wing politicians and the oil companies that back them, the more climate action can be conflated with an organization known for its traffic jams of private jets and its Bond villain founder, the easier it will be to resist any climate plan at all. That’s why the earliest alarmism about the Great Reset came from the Heartland Institute, ground zero of the climate change denial machine.

[Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party,speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Friday, April 5, 2019. Kenney said he would create a C$1 billion ($750 million) crown corporation to support Indigenous resource projects including pipelines if he's elected to lead Alberta's government this month, according to an emailed statement. Photographer: Todd Korol/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesJason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party, speaks during a news conference in Calgary, Canada, on April 5, 2019. Photo: Todd Korol/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This messaging is gaining traction not because people are suckers but because they are mad — and they have every right to be. Lockdown policies have demanded months of individual sacrifice for the collective good without providing the most basic collective protections to keep families from slipping into starvation and homelessness, or to keep small businesses afloat. Meanwhile, trillions have been spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, and pandemic profiteering is rampant. Is it any wonder that so many find it entirely plausible that the same elites who expect them to swallow all the coronavirus-related sacrifices while they party in the Hamptons and on private islands would also be willing to exaggerate the risks of the disease to get them to the accept more bitter “green” medicine, for the common good? As that first Davos theme made clear, trust between the people and the mountaintop has been broken — and it most certainly has not been rebuilt.

For a glimpse of how all of this fits together, take a look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada, under its truly reprehensible premier, one Jason Kenney. Kenney came to power pledging to serve as a shameless valet for the Alberta oil patch, specifically its extra-fast-planet-cooking tar sands. He promised to ram through all pipelines, no matter the opposition, and create a “war room” to surveil all opponents....

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matt r salon

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/from-pandemics-to-climate-change-the-real-problem-is-capitalism-itself/

Last week President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, engaged in a fierce debate that was noted by millions for the unpleasantness of Trump's repeated interruptions. During those interruptions, Trump frequently denounced Biden as either radically left-wing or a hostage of the radical left. Eight days later, Vice President Mike Pence made similarly insinuations that Biden's running mate (and his potential replacement), Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California, is some kind of socialist.

If only it were so. The truth is that the ailment afflicting America is capitalism, and the difference between the two parties is that the Democrats will only describe some of the symptoms but refuse to provide an honest diagnosis, while the Republicans outright defend the disease.

Most of the major problems with America, and the world, can be traced back to the singular cause of capitalism, an economic system in which a society's means of production are primarily controlled by private individuals hoping to make a profit. It is a system that has devastated our planet to the point where it may sound be largely uninhabitable, created massive income inequality and left us woefully unprepared for crises like the novel coronavirus pandemic.

We can start with the last item on that list, the coronavirus pandemic. Because capitalist systems require perpetual consumption and growth to maintain prosperity, any little hiccup in the ability of most industries to stay profitable causes the whole economy to crash. This is why, despite the economy doing relatively well prior to the mandatory shutdowns in March, whole sectors began to collapse while unemployment skyrocketed once the pandemic forced people to shelter in place.

If America had a universal basic income in place — that is, a monthly amount of money guaranteed to every citizen to keep each one above the poverty line — ordinary people would have had at least been able to stave off desperate poverty during these trying times. The same is true of the eviction epidemic: Although Trump has announced a mostly symbolic eviction moratorium, he has refused to implement the real thing, and as a result millions of Americans face the likelihood of being thrown out of their homes... assuming that has not already happened to them.

Yet on a deeper level, the problem with capitalism is that it is built on the need for private enterprises to make money, no matter what. During a pandemic in which everyone will ultimately require some kind of medical care — for some to treat the disease, for others to be vaccinated once one becomes available — the need for corporate profit clashes with the needs of the general public.

"There is a unique incapacity of the capitalist system — by which I mean, a system of private enterprises owned and operated by shareholders, families, individuals producing for a profit and the ordering about of the majority of people involved in every enterprise or the employees — that system is uniquely incapable of securing public health," Dr. Richard D. Wolff, the professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon earlier this month. "And since public health is a basic demand, a need of human communities, this represents a profound disqualification of capitalism. And to spell it out just briefly: it is not profitable for a private, profit-driven competitive capitalist to produce masks by the millions, or gloves, or ventilators, or hospital beds, or all the rest of them."

Wolff noted that the government is entirely capable of stepping in and filling a void left by the private sector when a given industry deems this to be in its best interest. This is what happens, for example, with the military-industrial complex.

"A government failure cannot be excused on grounds of the government not doing such things or conceiving of such things, because that's not true," Wolff told Salon. "The government does exactly what it failed to do in the maintenance of public health. It does that for the military. It is just as unprofitable for a private capitalist to produce a missile and then store it in some warehouse and monitor it and clean it and replace it and repair it, waiting for God knows however long a time until the next war makes this missile something the government buys."

The problem is that the American health care industry — including doctors, drug and device makers, hospitals and medical insurance companies — do not want to establish any precedent that could lead to socialized medicine. Therefore, even though we have the resources to help everyone during this pandemic, we do not avail ourselves of them.

A similar dynamic is at play when it comes to the issue that most immediately threatens the survival of our species — climate change. 2020 saw some of the worst wildfires in recorded history on the American west coast because humanity has artificially warmed the planet through emission of greenhouse gases. A report by the World Wildlife Foundation identified global warming as the primary culprit for the cataclysmic decline in animal population sizes, with a 68 percent drop being recorded among "mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish" since 1970.If global warming is not brought under control, and soon, we can expect a world in which "a large part of the planet will become unlivable (either too hot or too dry)," Penn State climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann told Salon in 2018.

"More and more of the available land surface will be used for agriculture and farming to feed a growing global population. That means more concentrated human settlement—and probably a lot more conflict," Mann added. His colleague, Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, also predicted at the time that "food and water become major issues with costs and shortages."

If it's so clear what's happening, why doesn't humanity take the steps necessary to fight climate change?

In the words of Ted Morgan, a professor emeritus of political science at Lehigh University: "The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the world's developed capitalist economies, with China and the US leading the way." He added that "each of the capitalist powers is loathe to weaken its competitive position vis à vis the other capitalist economies. In a capitalist world, each economic unit must act to protect what it deems its own interests. The only counterweight comes from the public sector." Yet government authorities are reluctant to aggressively curtail capitalist industries that emit greenhouse gases — from the fossil fuel industry and big agriculture to those that cut down rainforests — because they are "constrained by the fear that pushing public interests too far will cause capital flight, thereby undermining its viability. And, of course, corporations and the wealthy dominate the shaping of public policy — nowhere more than in the US."

That term, "capital flight," is absolutely critical here. Under capitalist systems, companies that do not like potential government regulations often have the right to threaten to close up shop or move their businesses elsewhere, in the process taking away people's jobs and hurting local economies. This is known as a "capital strike**" and it has been used since the Industrial Revolution to do everything from get tax breaks from the state and break up labor movements to killing legislation that business magnates oppose, particularly when they help workers' rights.

Capital strikes are ethically dubious even when permitted for those purposes, but allow them is literally suicidal when an issue like climate change is at stake. Because capitalism encourages businesses to coerce governments into allowing them to destroy the planet, most of humanity is forced to watch helplessly as the Earth literally burns up. And it is not as if there are any eventual winners in systems where capital strikes are allowed: In the end, the 20 firms that contribute to one-third of the planet's carbon emissions will eventually suffer just like the rest of us, since they inhabit the same planet.

Finally there is the issue of systemic poverty. In 2020 we have seen the problem of capitalism in the fact that our supposed economic recovery has been "K-shaped," meaning that the wealthy have disproportionately gotten better while everyone else suffers more than they did before. Yet this severe income inequality long preceded the pandemic: For more than forty years, in fact, businesses have manipulated the government into making sure that the super-rich gain far more than their fair share of our wealth. Indeed, if income had kept pace with overall economic growth in the United States since 1970, the bottom 90 percent of our country would be earning an average of $12,000 more each year.

With income inequality comes not only poverty, but economic injustice. According to the Brookings Institute, as of 2018 American households held over $113 trillion in assets. If that was distributed evenly among the 329 million US citizens, each person would have more than $343,000. Yet as of 2016 the top 20 percent of households held 77 percent of the wealth, while the top one percent owned 29 percent of the wealth. This is the direct result of capitalism for two reasons: First, it allows the wealthy to make sure that the government does not restrain their greed through policies that require a fairer distribution of resources; and second, it continuously empowers the rich compared to everyone else by making sure that they have far more means of influencing policymakers than their significantly disempowered non-wealthy counterparts.

This brings us back to those presidential debates, in which precisely none of these observations were made. On the one side you had the Democratic candidates for president and vice president, Biden and Harris, who sounded like latter-day examples of America's most left-wing president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. To be clear: It is unambiguously good that Biden wants to put America back in the Paris Climate Accord (which would help fight climate change, but not do nearly enough to eliminate it entirely); that he wants to create a Pandemic Testing Board on the scale of Roosevelt's famous War Production Board, with the goal of using science to fight the pandemic (Trump, by contrast, has deliberately ignored science since the pandemic reached our country at the start of the year); that he wants to invest in trillions of dollars in stimulus spending that would create millions of jobs; and that he supports other progressive measures like improving regulations on banks and other powerful industries, providing free public college to lower-income and middle-class individuals, forgiving federal student-loan debt at a minimum of $10,000 per person and requiring businesses to provide paid emergency sick leave.

These are all very good things — and they are certainly a far sight better than Trump and Pence shilling for the status quo. Yet Biden and Harris also went to great pains to emphasize that they are not socialists, that they support capitalism, and that their proposals would only nibble at the edges of the problem rather than obliterate it entirely. Indeed, Biden even bragged in his debate with Trump that he had barely conceded at all to the Democratic Party's anti-capitalist wing — led by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who almost became the party's presidential nominee this year — and he is absolutely right. When Salon spoke with Sanders insiders who had tried to get Biden to move to the left, they all agreed that they won only modest concessions.

This approach is not going to cut it in the future.

"It really has to be an 'all hands on deck' that allows our economies to be completely transformed in order to literally allow human survival," Professor Julia K. Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Leeds, told Salon in June. "That's what's at stake in terms of the gravity of the situation and the rapidity with which the climate crisis is unfolding."

Steinberger says Biden doesn't "fully understand" the magnitude of the crisis. She sounded very much like Bernie Sanders himself, who last year rejected the claim by another Democrat that you could support meaningful change while remaining a capitalist by arguing "I think business as usual and doing it the old-fashioned way is not good enough. What we need is, in fact—I don't want to get people too nervous—we need a political revolution. I am, I believe, the only candidate who's going to say to the ruling class of this country, the corporate elite: Enough, enough with your greed and with your corruption. We need real change in this country."

I think it is best to close this with a personal story. Last year I interviewed Ben Shapiro, one of the most popular conservative commentators in America today, and confronted him about his belief that if there are starving children in America, one possible solution is to take them away from their parents. His reasoning was that, because capitalism provides everyone with an opportunity to support themselves and their families, the parents must be at fault if their children can't afford to eat. When I argued that he was ignoring the problem of systemic poverty under capitalism and lacking compassion for capitalism's victims, he responded:

No, I don't see how that lacks compassion in any way. If you are unable to feed your child, and you cannot find a social fabric to help you take care of that child, your child should not be with you. You're living in the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the world. It is not all that expensive to pay for a child's lunch.

When I pointed out that millions of Americans work full-time and are still unable to support their families. Shapiro cut me off.

"I do not accept your premise that we live in a society where people literally cannot afford to feed their children, [where] their children will starve without a free school lunch."

Shapiro's inability to even comprehend economic realities hints at the root of the problem. While Biden and Harris may not outright detest the poor as Shapiro does, they still share his unwillingness to accept the premise that there could be anything wrong with capitalism as a system.

Unfortunately, to quote President John Adams, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

The state of facts and evidence proves that capitalism is condemning millions upon millions to hopeless poverty, rendering us incapable of effectively coping with manageable problems like a pandemic and literally destroying the planet. Unless that reality becomes part of our mainstream political discourse, humanity is doomed.

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OMG INTERLOCK STORY DOVETAIL, property and wealth are sacred? thus kyle mom standing O

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/mike-pence-is-a-reminder-that-destructive-leaders-are-symptoms-of-an-anti-democratic-status-quo/

norm s

If President Trump dies from the coronavirus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans largely due to his deliberate negligence, the man replacing him will be no less dangerous. While Mike Pence has eluded tough media scrutiny -- in part because he exhibits such a low-key style in contrast to Trump -- the pair has been a good fit for an administration that exemplifies the partnership of religious fundamentalism and corporate power.

The vice president, a former Indiana talk-show host who went on to become a six-term congressman and then governor, has described himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order." But he remains at cross-purposes with the biblical admonition (Matthew 6:24) that "you cannot serve both God and money." Whether Pence has truly served God is a subjective matter, but his massive service to money—big money—is incontrovertible.

Pence ranks high as a Christian soldier marching in lockstep with Trump on all major policy issues, a process that routinely puts business interests ahead of human lives. Whatever his personal piety might be, the results of Pence's fidelity to right-wing agendas have further consolidated a de facto coalition of those seeking ever-lower taxes on wealth and corporations; denial of LGBTQ rights; a ban on abortion and severe restrictions on other reproductive rights; voter suppression and barriers to voting by people of color; obstruction of healthcare for low-income people; and on and on.

Pence embodies the political alliance of very conservative evangelical forces with anti-regulatory forces of corporatism. In the arenas of elections and governance, that coalition is the present-day Republican Party, dedicated to imposing the edicts of religious dogma, rolling back democratic reforms and serving the rich at the expense of everyone else.

"As vice president, Mike Pence is doing everything in his power to control people's bodies," the Planned Parenthood Action Fund declares. Meanwhile, those who are inclined toward racism or outright believers in white supremacy are bolstered. And Wall Street has never had a better friend in Washington.

Pence's most consequential role during 44 months as vice president has been as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Since late February, he has functioned—in effect—as Trump's willing executioner, standing by and blowing smoke while Trump obfuscated and lied as the death toll kept mounting.

"The truth is that we've made great progress over the past four months," Pence proclaimed in a mid-June statement, "and it's a testament to the leadership of President Trump." Pence charged that "the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave' of coronavirus infections"—but "such panic is overblown."

To underscore his full devotion to Lord Trump's downplaying of the virus, the vice president concluded with a blame-the-messenger flourish: "The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success. We've slowed the spread, we've cared for the most vulnerable, we've saved lives, and we've created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That's a cause for celebration, not the media's fear mongering."

Pence's June 16 statement made its way into the Wall Street Journal as a prominent op-ed piece whistling past Covid graveyards. "It was so clearly wrong back then and has turned out to be so clearly wrong since that I hope there's some part of him that's embarrassed," Ashish Jha, the head of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said in late summer. "I had already been seeing data for a good week that things were really heading in the wrong direction." The Washington Post editorial board immediately responded with a denunciation under the headline "Mike Pence Is a Case Study in Irresponsibility."

No one with any discernment would associate Trump with religiosity because he held up a Bible at a photo op. But the other half of the ticket is a very different matter. Days after the November 2016 election, Jeremy Scahill wrote that Trump is "a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors."

Scahill quoted an author of books on far-right fundamentalism, Jeff Sharlet, who said that "when they speak of business, they're speaking not of something separate from God, but they're speaking of what, in Mike Pence's circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained."

What does all this mean for progressives? The case of Mike Pence should be an ongoing urgent reminder that—as toxic and truly evil as Donald Trump is—the current president is a product and poisonous symptom of an inherently unjust and anti-democratic status quo.

Instead of focusing our rage on the persona of one destructive leader, we should remember that corporate domination provides an endless supply of destructive leaders.While they come and go, the system of corporate power remains—and we must replace that system with genuine democracy.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/study-reveals-how-stakeholder-capitalism-fails-to-live-up-to-promises-as-corporations-continue-putting-profits-over-people/

no linx twt

Study reveals how ‘stakeholder capitalism’ fails to live up to promises as corporations continue putting profits over people

Written by Kenny Stancil / Common Dreams September 23, 2020

When the Business Roundtable issued a statement on corporate purpose and promised to “deliver value to all of… our stakeholders” in 2019, some applauded the attention paid to social and environmental concerns by 181 CEOs as a significant improvement from neoliberal economist Milton Friedman’s 1970 dictate that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” which marked the beginning of an era of shareholder primacy.

But a study (pdf) published Tuesday by the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative showed that amid 2020’s disastrous public health, economic, social, and environmental challenges—the coronavirus pandemic, massive unemployment and worsening inequality, persistent police violence and racial injustice, and intensified climate crisis—”stakeholder capitalism” has failed to follow through on its promises to do more to benefit workers and communities, continuing to “put profits ahead of people” instead.

Joshua Bolten, president of the Business Roundtable (BRT), told the New York Times that he thinks corporations “have done exceptionally well” in supporting employees during the unprecedented crisis set in motion by Covid-19.

But Times reporter Peter Goodman painted a different picture. When large technology company Salesforce “celebrated more than $5 billion in quarterly sales… in late August,” its chief executive, Marc Benioff—a self-styled “evangelist for stakeholder capitalism”—declared victory, explained Goodman. “The next day, in the midst of the pandemic, Salesforce informed 1,000 employees that their jobs were no longer needed.”

In March, Arne Sorenson—president and CEO of Marriott International and co-chairman of a BRT task force convened to address Covid-19—”announced that he was furloughing tens of thousands of employees, asserting that his hand had been forced by the swift deterioration of the business,” wrote Goodman. “Less than two weeks later, Marriott paid out $160 million in dividends to shareholders.”

TCP’s study, which was conducted with KKS Advisors and supported by the Ford Foundation, summarized the “conundrum” this way: “The interests of stockholders and other stakeholders will not always align.”

The analysis showed that U.S. companies that signed the BRT statement “performed no better than their nonsignatory counterparts through the 2020 crises.”

Researchers pointed to stock buybacks, political spending, tax evasion, and unchecked pollution as additional examples of practices reflecting the continued prioritization of shareholder interests despite pledges to pursue “inclusive prosperity” for all stakeholders.

In the words of the report’s authors, many companies still “campaign for one world while publicly proclaiming a vision of another.”

The report noted that only a handful of the signatories to the BRT statement even submitted it to their companies for approval, which is why some scholars have argued that the promises made by proponents of “stakeholder capitalism” are a public relations gimmick that will not improve social welfare.

On social media, commentators such as Krystal Ball and Bharat Ramamurti concurred. Ramamurti, the managing director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Corporate Power Program, wrote: “The way to change corporate behavior is with new laws. Press releases won’t cut it.”

According to Goodman, “The study enhances doubts that corporations can be depended upon to moderate their quest for profits to pursue solutions to challenges like climate change, racial injustice, and economic inequality.”

Proponents of a genuinely just and sustainable society like Marjorie Kelly, executive vice president of The Democracy Collaborative, have criticized the BRT statement while arguing that what’s known as the triple-bottom-line approach to business—people, planet, and prosperity—is a step in the right direction.

Kelly cautioned against viewing companies’ simultaneous pursuit of multiple interests as inherently disingenuous, pointing to “national brands as diverse as Ben & Jerry’s, Amalgamated Bank, and King Arthur Baking” that govern themselves according to formal commitments giving “social and environmental benefits equal standing with profit goals.”

One key to differentiating the mission-driven enterprises truly committed to the creation of an equitable and ecological economy from those corporations for whom social responsibility is a marketing ploy is to analyze the gap between rhetoric and practice, Kelly argued.

The study noted: “Given the enormous influence major corporations have over the trajectory of policy and regulation, no analysis of corporate purpose and its alignment with a stakeholder primacy model would be complete without incorporating an evaluation of companies’ lobbying and political spending activities,” which often contradict the information coming from marketing departments.

Fidelity to progressive economic and environmental policies, or lack thereof, provides another clue. In addition to well-known instances of greenwashing and pinkwashing, political scientist Cedric Johnson has called attention to the ‘blackwashing‘ at play when, for example, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos adamantly pledged his support for Black Lives Matter even though “the company fired Chris Smalls, a black Amazon worker who led a walkout at the end of March demanding more protective gear and hazard pay.”

Economists Emily Kawano, former director of the Center for Popular Economics, and Julie Matthaei, co-founder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, argued that profit-maximization is intrinsic to capitalism and the privately owned corporations that characterize it, so even the “stakeholder” variety is incapable of balancing moneymaking with competing objectives like greater equality and sustainability.

According to Kawano, Matthaei, and other proponents of public goods and a cooperative model of social wealth-building, successfully prioritizing human and environmental well-being will require moving toward a non-capitalist economy based around democratic ownership.

Now “would be a great time to push for real reforms,” Chuck Collins, director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program on Inequality, told Common Dreams. “Why shouldn’t Amazon or any of the hundreds of companies that are benefiting from pandemic conditions share their ownership with employees?”

“Any talk of corporations being responsive to a broad spectrum of stakeholders is just that—talk—as long as stakeholders don’t have power,” said Kelly. “And power means ownership.”

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capitalism built on myth/story /schama of spot transaction/barter, not found in real world?

aha: trump is just apotheosis: invis hand me vs we short vs long term: $ = winner, vs losers who deserve poverty, corruption/crony capitalism is natural inevitable outcome

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// metaphor; immune sys digestive sys goes on overdrive?

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction [extraction is just a more extreme form where other has no power]

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

long term means more entities, more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern (even where none exists, eg qanon) thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info ); but fills vacuum need, that previously would have been filled by experts/textbooks/teachers/leaders/pastors?

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aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now vs larger complex system/ long term

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/noam-chomsky-decades-of-the-neoliberal-plague-left-us-unprepared-for-19/

NOAM CHOMSKY We should understand the roots of this pandemic. If we do not understand the roots and extirpate them, there is going to be another and worse one coming. So far we have been kind of lucky. The coronavirus, pandemics, epidemics are very serious, and there are many possibilities. So far, all the ones that have happened in the last ten or 15 years, either the virus has been very deadly but not very contagious, like Ebola, or very contagious but not very deadly, like COVID-19. What happens when the next one comes along that is both very contagious and very deadly? We are in deep trouble. Deep. Much worse than this. Much worse than the so-called “Spanish flu,” which ought to be called the Kansas flu by Trump’s logic. It originated in Kansas the century ago. We may be facing something much worse than that.

There are ways of dealing with it. After the SARS epidemic in 2003, scientists knew that another one is very likely. They warned against it. They presented policies that could be carried out. They weren’t implemented, in part because of deep institutional pathologies. The drug companies who are the obvious candidates for dealing with it can’t, by straight capitalist logic. You don’t spend money to try to prevent a catastrophe ten years from now. What you do is try to make money tomorrow. That is the logic of the system. So the pharmaceutical companies were ruled out by capitalist logic.

The government could step in. The government, in any event, does most of the basic research for vaccines and drugs, almost all of them. So they could have stepped in, create laboratories, and plenty of unlimited resources. But they are blocked by the neoliberal plague. Remember Ronald Reagan—that government is the problem, not the solution, which means we have to take decision-making and action out of the hands of government, which has a flaw; it’s somewhat responsive to the population. We have to shift it to unaccountable, private tyrannies, which are totally unaccountable to the population. That is the meaning of Reagan’s slogan. That is the fundamental principle of neoliberalism. We’ve been suffering—the world has been suffering from it for 40 years, except for the tiny percentage who have become super rich and extremely powerful. Well, that blocks the government.

Nevertheless, there were things that the government could do. When the Obama administration took office, in the first few days, Obama called the presidential scientific advisory board, which had been established by George H.W. Bush, the first Bush, who had some respect for science. Obama called it. He requested that they put together a pandemic reaction program, a way to deal with a pandemic if it comes. They came up with a report a couple weeks later. It was implemented. It was in place until January 2017.

Trump came into office, the first few days, dismantled the whole system. Nothing. That’s part of the general wrecking ball. “We have to destroy everything that Obama did. We have to wreck everything.” Because it is the only way to look like you are doing something. Happening all over. So that went.

There were programs of U.S. scientists working in China with Chinese colleagues to try to detect and identify coronaviruses. Most of them are deep in caves. It’s very dangerous work. Some have been killed, Chinese scientists. But they were finding them and identifying them and testing them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the main center for investigating this. Trump canceled the program.

There were simulations run of a pandemic as late as October 2019 warning of what would happen. No attention. The Trump administration isn’t interested. So when the epidemic finally hit, the United States was singularly unprepared. After that comes a series of grotesque inactions and actions. For a couple of months, Trump refused to admit that it was happening.

Other countries were doing things. In Asia, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, they were reacting. Some of it, South Korea, which was one of the first places hit, never had to go to a lockdown because they dealt with it rationally. They identified the places that were hot spots, controlled them, tested, traced people for contacts. Countries pretty much functioned. Vietnam has reported zero deaths, and apparently that is taken quite seriously by leading U.S. specialists. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which monitors the international situation, records zero deaths from Vietnam, which has a 1,400-mile border with China. South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia are doing quite well. And Europe, they delayed in quite a way, but they did finally act. As you mentioned, the curve has sharply reduced since March for most of Europe. Some of them, like Norway, Germany, doing quite well in this respect. People are traveling through southern Italy almost like normal.

It has gotten so extreme that, as you know, Europe has banned American visitors. The United States is such a pariah state that Americans are not permitted to go to other countries. Other countries won’t allow them in. This is kind of mimicked in a horrible way in Brazil. Bolsonaro just denies that it’s happening. “It’s just a mild flu. Don’t worry about it. Brazilians are strong. We don’t care.” So big meetings of right-wing Bolsonaro supporters dancing in the streets and spreading the virus, and Bolsonaro says fine.

And one of the really world-shaking crimes that is being carried out is the destruction of the Amazon. That affects the whole world, not just Brazil. It’s basically genocide to the indigenous populations. Scientific predictions are that on our current course, the Amazon will shift in about 15 years from being a net sink of carbon dioxide to a net emitter of carbon dioxide, sometimes called the lungs of the Earth. The forest absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide. It will start emitting them instead. A little further down the road, the Amazon, under the current course, will just turn into savanna, no forest anymore. Devastating for Brazil and the other Amazonian countries. Devastating for the world. It’s one of the main oxygen producers of the world.

At every level, we are racing madly towards total catastrophe under the leadership of sociopathic fanatics. It is as if some evil demon decided to take over the human species and drive them to self-destruction. Much of the world is trying to counter it, almost all of the world, but the United States and Brazil are the extreme cases of racing with dedication towards disaster.

Going back to this election, that is the reason why it is the most dangerous, the most significant election in history. Why Trump is, in fact—this may sound outrageous, but it’s true—Trump is the most dangerous figure in human history. The Republican Party today is the most dangerous organization in human history. You can compare Trump to, say, Hitler, the Wannsee declaration in 1942, called for killing all the Jews, tens of millions of Slavs, not destroying humanized society. There has been nothing like this. Nothing.

The Republican Party, we know how they shifted. You go back just a decade or so, John McCain, 2008, was running for president. His program had some pretty weak, but some policies directed to global warming. The Republican Congress was beginning to contemplate global warming, policies to restrict global warming. The Koch brothers, a superrich energy corporation, got wind of this. They had been working for years to prevent it. David Koch, one of the Koch brothers who died recently, launched an incredible campaign to make sure that the Republican Party would turn to denialism. They bribed senators, intimidated others with the threat of running counter-campaigns against them. Huge lobbying campaign. Astroturf campaigns. A massive juggernaut. The party shifted, dropped all of its efforts to deal with climate change. It’s now a party led by denialists.

AMY GOODMAN: As you talk about this denialism and the science denialism, first dealing with the climate crisis and then extending to the pandemic, both threatening life on Earth, with President Trump now holding a daily coronavirus press briefing without the scientists, you have Anthony Fauci throwing out the first ball at the Washington Nationals game, the chief infectious disease scientist, who won’t play ball exactly with the White House, so he is not in the coronavirus briefing. You have Dr. Birx. President Trump says she’s right outside, but she is not a part of this news conference. Do you think reporters who are sitting in the White House briefing room should refuse to be there unless scientists are there and unless President Trump wears a mask?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, I think so, and I think they should do much more. They should be pointing out constantly what I just said: we’re dealing with the most dangerous figure in human history, backed by the most dangerous organization in human history, and give the facts. Not only the pandemic, but the much more serious threat of environmental disaster and the growing, very severe threat of nuclear war.

In my opinion, every newspaper should have on the front page an image of the Doomsday Clock. You know all about this, but every January, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists gathers—the main scientific journal dealing with these issues—gathers scientists, political analysts to try to give an estimate of the security, the state of the world security. Started shortly after the atom bomb, it has been going on for 75 years. The minute hand is moved closer or farther—it oscillates—closer or farther to midnight, depending how dangerous the world situation is. Midnight means we are finished.

Every year that Trump has been in office, the minute hand has moved closer to midnight. Two years ago, it reached the closest it had ever been. This last January, the analysts gave up minutes; they moved to seconds. A hundred seconds to midnight. Since January, Trump has made every one of the issues that they have brought up worse. There were three major issues. One is of course the threat of nuclear war, second the threat of environmental catastrophe, the third the deterioration of democracy. Which does belong, because it is only with a vibrant democracy of informed, engaged public that we can have any hope of escaping from the two existential crises.

Since January, Trump has succeeded in making all three crises worse. I mention the nuclear weapons issue, considerably worse thanks to Trump’s actions. The environmental crisis of course getting worse, as he continues to press for maximization of the use of the most dangerous fossil fuels, cuts back through his EPA representatives and others, cuts back on the efforts to mitigate the crisis through regulatory means. And democracy, it’s pretty obvious; the executive branch has been essentially cleansed of independent voices. Nothing but sycophants of Pompeo variety. “We were sent by God to save Israel.”

The Inspectors General who were imposed by Congress, by the Republican Congress to monitor malfeasance of the executive branches, purged. Trump in fact went out of his way to humiliate the senior Republican senator, Charles Grassley, who had spent much of his career imposing these monitors. The attorney for the Southern District of New York looked into the Trump swamp; fired. Congress, turned by McConnell, used to be called the greatest deliberative body in the world. Now it is a joke. Doesn’t do any deliberation. It does essentially nothing except try to race through as many appointments of young, ultra-right judges as possible so they can pack the judiciary for a generation. The only other thing it does is figure out ways to pour money into the—dollars into the pockets of the rich, like the tax scam. That’s the Senate, the greatest deliberative body. Proposals come from the House for legislation; McConnell just cans them. Don’t look at them. That is not the role of the Senate.

Going back, that’s why they should be putting the Doomsday Clock on the front of every newspaper. Show us what the United States is doing to the world. To itself and the world. That should be in front of everyone’s attention. And there are many other things that should be done. There should be major protests now, everywhere, against the use of military force to occupy American cities and to crush peaceful dissidents. This is intolerable in a functioning democracy. We can’t sit by and let it happen, just let it proceed step by step until we reach real catastrophe.

***

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-sham-of-orthodox-economics-been-exposed-in-the-wake-of-covid-19/

A cornerstone of orthodox economics is the idea that capitalists’ decisions about investing and producing are inherently “efficient.” This means that capitalists select among all alternative courses of action those whose costs are minimal and whose benefits are maximal. Keeping costs to the lowest possible level while producing goods and services that yield the most possible revenue is what maximizes profit, the difference between costs and revenues. Capitalism, we are told, is the best system because it drives all those in charge of production (the owners and top executives of enterprises) to maximize profits and thus economic efficiency. Capitalists get profits, and the rest of us benefit from the efficiency of production within a capitalist system.

COVID-19 exposes the sham of orthodox economics. It was not profitable for capitalists to produce and stockpile adequate quantities of tests, masks, gloves, beds, etc., to be prepared for the virus. Given the costs to produce these commodities, there was no way of knowing how long they would need to be stockpiled before there would be a demand for and purchase of them. Stockpiling costs. So do monitoring stockpiles for deterioration and replacing deteriorated stocks or insuring against deterioration. There was, in short, no way to know (and thus be able to calculate) the costs in the manner fantasized by orthodox economics.

Likewise, there was no way for capitalists to know or calculate the prices they might receive for selling the commodities they might stockpile. If no major disease arrived, revenues might be very small and take a long time to materialize. If a pandemic arrived, high prices might be charged, but when? If a national emergency brought in the government as the single buyer of such commodities (then delivered freely to the people in need), the prices would likely be much lower. If the United States cooperated with other countries on producing and distributing these commodities, and if such cooperation included pricing, that too would impact revenues from selling them. In short, capitalists cannot know or calculate revenues in the manner fantasized by orthodox economics.

Capitalists in general—and U.S. capitalists in particular—calculated that profits would be greater in other investments than those that could have produced the items needed to prepare for and contain COVID-19. The results (negative revenues) of having inadequately prepared and inadequately contained COVID-19 far outdistance whatever it might have cost to make adequate preparations. Efficiency in dealing with the pandemic was not what capitalism achieved: quite the opposite.

Most orthodox economics textbooks—those actually used now in most college and university economics courses—teach the simple-minded cost-benefit or cost-revenue “model” as if it captured capitalists’ decision-making. Profit-maximizing capitalism is thus justified, as “efficient” society gets the most return for the least effort. The magical sleight of hand here requires that students be told that the model captures the essence of what capitalists actually do.

But that is false. The model captures nothing of the irreducibly unknown and unknowable in both costs and revenues. Instead, the model blithely assumes the opposite, that costs and revenues are in general knowable and known. Only then can the textbook claim that capitalism is efficient. And that is the point of the model and of the textbook: to justify and rationalize a capitalism that would otherwise risk the exposure that COVID-19 now performs....see wolff

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-coronavirus-next-victim-could-be-capitalism/

salon

The pandemic has deftly illustrated two lessons that we, as a civilization, must learn in order to survive:

Science does not care about your political ideology.

The economic status quo — namely, free market capitalism — is fatally flawed, in ways that the coronavirus pandemic has brought to light.

The first lesson was evident in President Donald Trump’s initial response to the coronavirus. Despite being warned as early as January that it was an existential threat, he dismissed his advisers’ concerns as “alarmist” and did everything he could to ignore and downplay the problem so that the stock market wouldn’t be negatively impacted. It took him more than ten weeks to declare a state of national emergency and, even then, America’s ability to respond to the pandemic was weakened by the various budget-cutting policies he implemented prior to the pandemic that ignored expert advice and made it more difficult for the Centers for Disease Control to do its job.

a similar point could be made about man-made climate change. Even though the scientific consensus is clear — global climate change is real, caused by humans and poses an existential threat to our planet — Trump continues to deny it solely because fossil fuel companies and other special interest groups don’t want to lose money.

There in an additional factor in both the coronavirus and climate change denialism, of course: A distrust of intellectuals who use pesky, inconvenient facts in disciplines like epidemiology and climatology to make arguments that go against conservative, free market doctrine. After all, a strong centralized government is needed to regulate the economy in ways that will protect the planet from climate change and to save lives as the pandemic worsens. Because right-wingers don’t want to believe that the federal government should have this power, they cannot acknowledge that it is necessary on these occasions — and certainly not when doing so would seemingly concede a point to the left.

Yet scientific realities don’t change simply because right-wing egos would be wounded if the left is proved correct about pandemics and ecological apocalypses. That is why the pandemic reveals that science must always take precedence over ideological whinging when it comes to shaping key policy decisions.

“Ultimately, of course, the science is a key part of any decision, but the science alone does not determine what that decision should be,” Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Salon. “And the politicians are supposed to be the ones who assimilate all of the information and time it and including the science, but also all of the possible consequences in all ways, shapes and forms including health, economics and society. And so on.”

He added, “The problem is I don’t think most politicians actually recognize their role, and it’s much worse in the United States than it is in many other countries. And the reason it’s much worse is because of advocacy, because of money in particular, because of Citizens United and the nasty politics that gets involved with using so-called dark money, television and all sorts of things like that.”

This brings us to the other fundamental truth that has been illustrated by the pandemic — namely, that our free market capitalist system is inherently unsustainable.

Part of that unsustainability is rooted in ecology.

“I think that there are larger lessons and messages here about the sustainability of a global population of nearly 8 billion and growing people on a planet with finite resources,” Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon. “And what COVID-19 has laid bare is the fragility of this massive infrastructure which we’ve created to artificially maintain consumption far beyond the natural carrying capacity of the planet. And continued exploitation of fossil fuels, obviously, is inconsistent with a sustainable human society.” [calling dr ehrlich]

One of the chief problems with free market capitalism — or, for that matter, the global economic system in general — is that it depends on constant consumption in order to sustain itself. If that consumption is disrupted even for a brief period, the entire system grinds to a halt, with people losing their employment and poverty skyrocketing. As the coronavirus pandemic has revealed, this is not always because people needto be poor. It isn’t as if we experienced a famine or the sudden depletion of a vital natural resource. The fundamentals of our economy remain as strong as they ever were; the problem is that, because people are not able to continue consuming, the edifice built on top of that foundation has begun to crumble.

“Going with the structural metaphor concept, there always huge cracks underneath the facades of capitalism, and the huge weight of this pandemic has widened those cracks,” Norman Solomon, co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, told Salon. “For the most part, the people who are the most vulnerable anyway to corporate capitalism, they’re suffering the most, they’re dying the most.”

He added, “The entire political economy is geared to overproduction and over-consumption to maximize corporate profits. And at the same time, the access to consumable goods and services is so unequal. And I think these are coexisting problems. But if you look at it from 30,000 feet — I guess you can’t look at it from 30,000 feet now because nobody is flying — but if you look at it from a macro- view, the extended consumption is insane.”

The pandemic has also highlighted race and class differences in our society. Members of the African American and Latinx communities have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, with African Americans making up almost half of the coronavirus cases in Philadelphia and the African American and Latinx communities making up more than three out of every five coronavirus deaths in New York City. In terms of economic inequality, as the Brookings Institution writes, “people living paycheck to paycheck in service sector jobs are in a very different position to those working in salaried jobs they can do from home. Stark gaps in wealth, health and work have gone from being chronic problems to acute ones.” The authors noted that even amenities that don’t always seem essential, such as a fast internet connection, have become vital for psychological health during the pandemic — and this, too, underscores the income gap.

The one glimmer of hope here is that the pandemic may push Americans toward a more just economic and social system. J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told Salon on Thursday that “we’re already intensely polarized as a country — people’s partisan preferences can influence everything from their shopping habits to dating life — but if the economic situation worsens, it certainly opens the door for radicalization.”

He added, “When the economy suffers, voters tend to be more open to anti-establishment or populist candidates: during the Great Depression, Huey Long with his ‘Every Man a King’ slogan tapped into that sentiment, and was seen as a threat to Franklin Roosevelt.”

Certainly those changes would not come a moment too soon. We may pull through from this crisis, but global warming is just one of many future existential threats that lurk around the corner. Humanity is not going to survive — at least, not in any sense worth looking forward to — if it doesn’t start paying attention to scientific fact and using that knowledge for the betterment of all of us, not just the privileged.

wolff

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-the-neoliberal-agenda-is-a-failure-at-fighting-coronavirus/

blk mkt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-federal-government-and-states-have-fueled-a-chaotic-market-for-masks-ruled-by-oddballs-ganjapreneurs-and-a-shadowy-network-of-investors

quite good

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-visible-hand-what-prominent-social-thinker-john-ruskin-teaches-us-about-having-an-economy-that-demands-we-die-for-it/

lynne p

“There is no wealth but life.”

— John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860)

A chilling experiment is underway in America, with plenty of unwilling human guinea pigs.

Many parts of the country are reopening for business against the warnings of medical experts, flying in the face of grim predictions of sharply rising body counts. Two-thirds of Americans fear that the restart is happening too quickly, and the President himself acknowledges that by easing restrictions, “there’ll be more death.” Yet he presses on, even as his own White House suffers a viral outbreak.

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News screens flash with tallies of death and tallies of wealth: New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has declared that lives must be saved “whatever it costs,” insisting that for Americans the choice “between public health and the economy” is “no contest.” But he did not ask celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who some weeks ago expressed his view that reopening schools could give the country its “mojo back,” and perhaps “only cost us 2-3% in terms of total mortality. (2% sounds conveniently small compared to its equivalent in human lives, 6,560,000. Oz later apologized after public outrage).

Meanwhile Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, offered his own assessment of the trade-off between capitalism and the lives of America’s senior citizens, explaining, “there are more important things than living.”

Since the days of Adam Smith, free market capitalists have held that human beings are rational actors who pursue economic gain for self-interested motives. But here is Patrick, a free marketer if there ever was one, talking about a gift-sacrifice economy model in which people – some people, at least – lay down their lives to keep the economic engines revved.

Patrick’s words reveal an unspoken truth about capitalism. For the system to work smoothly, there have always been requirements of human sacrifice — a certain portion of the population was expected to act not as self-serving homo economicus, but self-sacrificing homo*communis*, focused upon what benefits the collective at their own expense. If these people can’t social distance at the workplace, they are expected to show up anyway. If there isn’t enough safety equipment, they are declared essential workers who must put their lives and that of their families at risk for the greater good.

But for whom and for what is this sacrifice intended? How much dying will be figured into state budgets and gross domestic product (GDP)? When ranked by GDP, the U.S. is the wealthiest economy in the world, but is a country’s wealth something totally separate from, or even contrary to, the health and life the majority of its citizens?

Wealth v. “illth”

To help us navigate these questions, it is useful turn to someone who offered potent challenges to the economic calculus of his day: John Ruskin, the 19^th-century art critic-turned-political economist. He was one of the most outspoken critics of capitalism and prevailing economic ideas of the Victorian era, and his work presciently points to shortcomings that have followed us into the present day.

Ruskin questions the premises on which free market capitalism is based, returning to first principles: what is wealth? What do we value? How should we understand the relationship between people, the economy, and the state?

In his view, economies are, above all, social systems whose true end is to benefit the people, and not, as the Texan politician would have it, the other way around. Anticipating the behavioral economics of our own day, Ruskin rejected the idea advocated by such economists as John Stuart Mill that there could be a deductive science of economics based on the assumption that the human being is “a covetous machine” that when applied to actual situations could take “the social affections,” the non-rational aspects of human behavior, into account. Ruskin recognized that such a system implicitly removed the marketplace from the constraints of religion and morality that are supposed to apply to all human behavior. He compared it to an assumption that humans are essentially a skeleton with flesh, blood and consciousness as add-ons founding “an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul.”

Ruskin defined wealth quite differently from many of his contemporaries, and ours. For him, wealth is anything that supports life and health, from the supplies in your storeroom to the song in your heart: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” (Unto this Last).

By that definition, America is looking increasingly impoverished. And it is not a virus which is stealing our wealth away.

Playing on the root of the word “wealth” from the Old English word “weal,” signifying health, Ruskin proposed that while wealth was anything life-supporting that could be used and enjoyed, it had a dark counterpart that he called “illth” from the Old Norse word for bad – the things that make people ill, their lives stunted and despairing, their environment polluted. Wealth cannot be produced without illth, but great fortunes have been made by extracting the means of wealth without paying the cost of illth. To take a Ruskinian example, a factory that pollutes the water it uses, fouls the air and pays its workers below what a healthy life requires will be more profitable than a business that cleans up after itself and pays a living wage, but its illth becomes a form of national debt expressed in damage to the health of others and the environment. Think of something like a toxic Superfund site.

Economists have a term for Ruskin’s concept of illth, referring to it as “negative externalities,” even though they are not external to the capitalist economic system, but intrinsic to it. The most daunting problems of the current age, environmental disaster and inequality, are fueled by illth.

The Covid-19 crisis has merely amplified trends of rising illth, of despair, sickness, and alienation, which have been on the rise for decades as globalization, money-driven politics, decimated workers’ rights, and privatization have tipped the economic balance far in favor of the very few. If we are to judge a country’s health not by GDP, which rises in the face of a massive oil spill, but according to the criteria of the World Happiness Report (WHR), which measures things like social trust and faith in institutions, America is in bad shape when it comes to the ratio of wealth to illth. Scandinavian countries top the WHR, while the U.S. ranks a dismal 19^th.

According to the Columbia University study of the 2020 WHR report, the key factors that account for the relative happiness of Scandinavian countries — what makes them wealthy in Ruskin’s terms — are precisely those that have been under pressure or cut back in the U.S. since the rise of neoliberalism: “emancipation from market dependency in terms of pensions, income maintenance for the ill or disabled, and unemployment benefits” together with labor market regulation such as a high minimum wage. Of course, no one likes to pay taxes, but Scandinavian “citizens’ satisfaction with public and common goods such as health care, education, and public transportation that progressive taxation helps to fund,” meets with approval at all income levels.

Pandemics are exacerbated by illth. We can see it in communities of color where the coronavirus strikes down those whose resources and access to health care have been limited by discriminatory policies and high contact employment. We can see it in factory farms where broken supply chains have caused farmers to euthanize livestock and plow under crops while people across the country go hungry. Airlines got immediate stimulus aid in the U.S., but there has been no subsidy for the restaurant supply chain that could be diverted for distribution by food banks and favorably located restaurants thus sustaining at least some of our much-vaunted small businesses. No one has to fly, but everyone must eat.

We sense illth accumulating in the comments of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, who, in her eagerness to get the casinos back in business, told an astonished Anderson Cooper on CNN that she would offer up the city’s workers as a “control group” in a reopening experiment. If they weren’t able to social distance, Goodman was unconcerned: “In my opinion, you have to go ahead,” she said. “Every day you get up, it’s a gamble.”

Ruskin saw the capitalists of his day as gamblers heedless of the costs they foisted onto ordinary people: “But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses and gains, far away among the dark streets, are essentially, though invisibly, dependent upon theirs in lighted rooms.” (Unto This Last).

In other words, not only do capitalists gamble with other peoples’ lives; they are oblivious to the fact that there are other ways to arrange society, to deal the cards differently, more fairly.

Witness the post-Covid reality imagined by Governor Cuomo. Instead of focusing on what changes could better support the health and lives of ordinary people, he has called in Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a commission to reimagine New York state with more technology permanently inserted into every dimension of civic life. A better deal for Silicon Valley, to be sure. But what is in the cards for everyone else? When educational platforms and health protocols are mapped by gigantic and unaccountable corporations, who gets lost? Surely the answer is those who can least afford it.

President Trump says that it is time to move on from the coronavirus and get on with economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped by country’s leader, which he called the “Goddess of getting on.” Only Ruskin recognized that she tended to favor “not of everybody’s getting on – but only of somebody’s getting on,” — what he called a “vital, or rather deathful, distinction.” For capitalists, getting on post-Covid means executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory floor without adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the blueprints for our lives.

The issue of worker safety does matter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but not because he fears that some will get sick or die, but for a potential “epidemic of litigation.” In the next pandemic relief legislation, McConnell is looking to solve the problem of worker safety by shielding corporations from lawsuits rather than supporting Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mandated regulations that would both promote safety and sort out what is and is not actionable.

The Visible Hand

Instead of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, Ruskin advocated a Visible Hand of reasoned management, a government which could allocate resources effectively and create stores of what citizens most needed in a crisis. In our day this need not be a literal storehouse but surge capacity. The Obama administration, for example, contracted with Halyard Health to design a machine that could turn out 1.5 million N95 masks per day. They were ready to build the machine in 2018 when the Trump administration cancelled the program.

In Ruskin’s view, the Visible Hand was the guardian of the lives of the citizens, especially the poor, whose health and lives were their essential property. Ruskin actually defined an economy as the wise management of labor, applying labor, carefully preserving what it produces, and wisely distributing those products. A country’s wealth is in the people’s strength and health, not their illness and death.

Ruskin’s concepts of wealth and illth help us understand the centrality of ethics and responsibility to economic activity, and how economies are not an assemblage of atomistic human units but whole systems of people interacting, where the activities of some impact the lives of all. His work indicates the need for a whole systems approach to a crisis in which what happens on the beaches of Georgia impacts a nursing home in North Carolina, and visitors to New York City or New Orleans can carry the infection home. The decisions of one business in a complex international supply chain can impact the fate of millions.

In unregulated capitalism, Ruskin sussed out what Sigmund Freud might have recognized as the death drive. Decisions about the economy, he held, must be informed by the essential biologic basis of life itself: “The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life; and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction” (Unto This Last).

The Covid crisis has exposed contradictions in market and America First ideology. Without federal aid to state and local governments, essential personnel are being laid off even as we declare them heroes. Employer based insurance is failing, but few American politicians are willing to fully embrace single payer insurance. Meat plant workers are declared essential, but still subject to deportation, as if famed Revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale had said, “I only regret that you have but one life to give for my country.”

Ultimately, the most dangerous pestilence that threatens the country is not a packet of RNA called Covid-19 but an economic and political system that does not value true wealth, and promotes the life of the few while condemning the many to literal sickness unto death.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-capitalism-cant-cure-global-pandemics/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-a-basic-economic-principle-could-derail-our-ability-to-combat-the-coronavirus/

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How a basic economic principle could derail our ability to combat the coronavirus

Written by Leigh Osofsky, The Conversation April 7, 2020

by Leigh Osofsky, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A series of recent protests by the workers preparing and delivering our essential foods and other goods highlights a key risk to our ability to combat the coronavirus.

Some employees at an Amazon warehouse and Instacart “shoppers” briefly walked off the job on March 30, citing inadequate health protections and compensation. And Whole Foods workers organized a national “sick out” protest to pressure the grocery chain for hazard pay and more protections.

With most Americans sheltering in place, these workers are among the millions of individuals who face heightened risks as they continue to do their jobs keeping our refrigerators and pantries stocked during the pandemic. But because of an economic theory I study known as “positive externalities,” most of them aren’t being adequately compensated for it.

Creating positive externalities

A positive externality is created when someone’s private behavior leads to broader social benefits. Common examples include when someone buys a hybrid car, gets vaccinated or stops smoking. In each of these examples, someone’s private behavior reduces risks for everyone.

A negative externality, on the other hand, is when private behavior leads to a public harm, such as pollution from a factory.

By delivering food and other supplies, workers at Instacart, Whole Foods and hundreds of other companies are reducing the need for people to congregate and thus lowering the systemic risk of COVID-19 for everyone.

This is an essential public health benefit at a critical time in the pandemic. Without them, it would be much harder to fulfill government stay-in-place orders and slow the spread of COVID-19.

But in general they perform jobs that pay relatively little, and the workers say they lack basic protective gear such as hand sanitizer and masks that would keep them safe.

Paying for an externality

Unfortunately, the free market isn’t very good at dealing with positive externalities like this – or compensating those who bear the cost. As a result, there’s a risk the people creating the public benefit will not provide enough of it.

This is easiest to understand by way of example.

Imagine a “shopper” for Instacart – the app-based food delivery platform – delivers groceries to someone with COVID-19. It begins as a private transaction: The worker gets paid, and the sick customer gets food delivered in a time of need. But there is an additional benefit to the rest of us – the positive externality – from the delivery. Everyone is safer because the sick consumer doesn’t have to go to the grocery store.

Then there is the extra cost. The Instacart worker faces a heightened health risk by spending more time outside of home and delivering groceries to the sick customer. While the customer may pay a higher tip as a measure of her gratitude, it is unlikely to be enough to take into account the value of the broader benefit to society or the concentrated risk that the Instacart worker faces in producing this benefit.

And that means the undercompensated worker may decide it’s in her interest to stop putting herself at risk – and stop delivering food.

Now consider that this is happening countless times and in countless ways across the country as millions of workers keep putting themselves at risk so that others can stay at home.

Who should pay the workers enough to compensate them for their extra risk and ensure we all continue to enjoy this broad public benefit?

Instacart and other companies, of course, are the ones paying these workers, along with fees or tips paid by consumers. The surging demand for these companies’ services suggests they should be able to afford to offer higher wages and provide the kinds of protective gear like masks and hand sanitizer that the workers need.

Some companies are doing that. Target, Amazon and Whole Foods have said they will provide their workers temporary “hazard pay.” And Instacart responded to the protest by providing its gig workers with health and safety kits.

A government response

But a few companies stepping up to compensate their own workers slightly more isn’t enough to compensate the workers for the great benefits they are providing to the public at large.

In economics, widely shared public benefits such as large parks and clean lakes tend to require public – that is government – support. Similarly, the production of a good that is costly but has a large positive externality, like the efforts of all these workers, needs a government response.

Essentially, the government could compensate these workers for the benefits to the public through something like a hazard subsidy and a supply of protective gear, thereby ensuring an ample supply of these workers and the services they provide during this time of crisis.

To be sure, this isn’t a perfect solution. For instance, absent some sort of market forces dictating how much the government subsidizes, the government may pay too much. And there would be questions about which workers are truly essential to creating the public health benefits and should receive the higher pay – should liquor employees be included?

But in a time in which the government is already offering large, unqualified aid packages to the public, such costs are not insurmountable. To get close to the right solution, I believe we first need to recognize how these workers create a large public benefit for us all.

[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]The Conversation

Leigh Osofsky, Professor of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-champions-of-capitalism-are-rushing-into-disaster-and-refusing-to-admit-their-ideology-has-failed/

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The champions of capitalism are rushing into disaster and refusing to admit their ideology has failed

President Donald J. Trump drops-by a meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and airline CEOs discussing the Coronavirus’s possible impact on the travel industry Wednesday, March 4, 2020, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

Written by Richard D. Wolff / Independent Media Institute April 3, 2020

The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks “to get them through the crisis.” Government treasuries borrow vast sums to get the collapsed economy back into what they imagine is “the normal, pre-virus economy.” Capitalism’s leaders are rushing into policy failures because of their ideological blinders.

The problem of policies aimed to return the economy to what it was before the virus hit is this: Global capitalism, by 2019, was itself a major cause of the collapse in 2020. Capitalism’s scars from the crashes of 2000 and 2008-2009 had not healed. Years of low interest rates had enabled corporations and governments to “solve” all their problems by borrowing limitlessly at almost zero interest rate cost. All the new money pumped into economies by central banks had indeed caused the feared inflation, but chiefly in stock markets whose prices consequently spiraled dangerously far away from underlying economic values and realities. Inequalities of income and wealth reached historic highs.

In short, capitalism had built up vulnerabilities to another crash that any number of possible triggers could unleash. The trigger this time was not the dot.com meltdown of 2000 or the sub-prime meltdown of 2008/9; it was a virus. And of course, mainstream ideology requires focusing on the trigger, not the vulnerability. Thus mainstream policies aim to reestablish pre-virus capitalism. Even if they succeed, that will return us to a capitalist system whose accumulated vulnerabilities will soon again collapse from yet another trigger.

In the light of the coronavirus pandemic, I focus criticism on capitalism and the vulnerabilities it has accumulated for several reasons. Viruses are part of nature. They have attacked human beings—sometimes dangerously—in both distant and recent history. In 1918, the Spanish Flu killed nearly 700,000 in the United States and millions elsewhere. Recent viruses include SARS, MERS andEbola. What matters to public health is each society’s preparedness: stockpiled tests, masks, ventilators, hospital beds, trained personnel, etc., to manage dangerous viruses. In the U.S., such objects are produced by private capitalist enterprises whose goal is profit. It was not profitable to produce and stockpile such products, that was not and still is not being done.

Nor did the U.S. government produce or stockpile those medical products. Top U.S. government personnel privilege private capitalism; it is their primary objective to protect and strengthen. The result is that neither private capitalism nor the U.S. government performed the most basic duty of any economic system: to protect and maintain public health and safety. U.S. capitalism’s response to the coronavirus pandemic continues to be what it has been since December 2019: too little, too late. It failed. It is the problem.

The second reason I focus on capitalism is that the responses to today’s economic collapse by Trump, the GOP and most Democrats carefully avoid any criticism of capitalism. They all debate the virus, China, foreigners, other politicians, but never the system they all serve. When Trump and others press people to return to churches and jobs—despite risking their and others’ lives—they place reviving a collapsed capitalism ahead of public health.

The third reason capitalism gets blame here is that alternative systems—those not driven by a profit-first logic—could manage viruses better. While not profitable to produce and stockpile everything needed for a viral pandemic, it is efficient. The wealth already lost in this pandemic far exceeds the cost to have produced and stockpiled the tests and ventilators, the lack of which is contributing so much to today’s disaster. Capitalism often pursues profit at the expense of more urgent social needs and values. In this, capitalism is grossly inefficient. This pandemic is now bringing that truth home to people.

A worker-coop based economy—where workers democratically run enterprises, deciding what, how and where to produce, and what to do with any profits—could, and likely would, put social needs and goals (like proper preparation for pandemics) ahead of profits. Workers are the majority in all capitalist societies; their interests are those of the majority. Employers are always a small minority; theirs are the “special interests” of that minority. Capitalism gives that minority the position, profits and power to determine how the society as a whole lives or dies. That’s why all employees now wonder and worry about how long our jobs, incomes, homes and bank accounts will last—if we still have them. A minority (employers) decides all those questions and excludes the majority (employees) from making those decisions, even though that majority must live with their results.

Of course, the top priority now is to put public health and safety first. To that end, employees across the country are now thinking about refusing to obey orders to work in unsafe job conditions. U.S. capitalism has thus placed a general strike on today’s social agenda. A close second priority is to learn from capitalism’s failure in the face of the pandemic. We must not suffer such a dangerous and unnecessary social breakdown again. Thus system change is now also moving onto today’s social agenda.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His two recent books with Democracy at Work are Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism, both available at democracyatwork.info.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-pulled-back-the-curtain-on-the-flawed-global-economic-system/

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How the pandemic pulled back the curtain on the flawed global economic system

Written by Marshall Auerback, Jan Ritch-Frel April 2, 2020

When the wealthiest country in the world is unable to produce basic medical gear to cope with a rampaging pandemic, it is dealing with a strategic vulnerability by depending on multinational supply chains to produce manufactured goods. Absent sufficient redundancies and physical reserves of resources, “just-in-time” lean supply systems can’t cope with sudden disruptions. The global pandemic of 2020 is a case in point.

This pandemic continues to unfold, but it will serve as the D-Day equivalent of a new predominating economic model for the world, and which in many ways was beginning to take shape before COVID-19. At its core, developed and mixed market economies will factor in the health risk and growing military cost of sustaining international supply chains against investing in high-tech production closer to their markets, and increasingly export their goods to the rest of the world.

Dozens of economies that developed in the past 50 years by enmeshing themselves in the international supply chain on the basis of their labor price advantage will find themselves increasingly cut out of the new process. The contest for global power will increasingly pivot to the extraction and refinement of minerals and component materials that are critical to sustaining the high-tech economy model, away from carbon energy resources. We will be hearing much more about “national stockpiling” and “strategic reserves” beyond oil in the months and years ahead.

Not only has COVID-19 exposed potential health risks and costs involved (as globalized trade routes become vectors of contagion), but the champions of the offshoring phenomenon increasingly resort to myths and misconceptions that are irrelevant to a 21st-century economy. They are as obsolete as spending trillions annually on managing the supply and price of Middle East oil, which American foreign policy figures, including Martin Indyk, are beginning to openly say “isn’t worth it.”

Before we get into the details on thefuture economy, let’s quickly review how the U.S. saw a massive decline in its industrial capacity. Bad ideas and pernicious orthodoxies grew like barnacles over the decades on what was once the world’s leading manufacturer. First was the idea that offshoring is essential to preserving profitability. Often this assertion has been more apparent than real. As far as profitability goes, many companies have made choices to move manufacturing offshore despite continuing domestic profits on home shores. For example,the five North American plants that General Motors (GM) shut down in 2019 were still profitable, but the company, which had received a government bailout in 2009, chose to refocus on the higher-margin operations in China.

Of course, capitalism controlled by bankers and speculators gives free rein to companies to make profits on how they see fit.The consequences are that for decades, Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers have consistently underperformed their German and Japanese counterparts because of their decision to embrace a Wall Street-driven culture that has prioritized short-term quarterly earnings, massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on stock repurchases over productive investment in innovation. And as GM’s 2019 experience illustrates, the resultant profits did not go to spur domestic reinvestment, which in turn creates domestic employment, but abroad to expand China’s manufacturing base. GM is but one example of the hundreds of major corporate actors that have denuded the country’s industrial ecosystem, creating gaps in the U.S. workforce and shortages of vital skilled labor.

There are also multiple examples of companies acquiring smaller innovative companies “solely to discontinue the target’s innovation projects and preempt future competition,” according to researchers Colleen Cunningham, from London Business School, and Florian Ederer and Song Ma, both from Yale. A particularly poignant example of these “killer acquisitions,” given today’s ongoing ventilator shortage, is Covidien’s attempted 2012 purchase of California-based Newport Medical Instruments, a smaller competing medical device company that had secured a contract from the federal government in 2010 to produce up to40,000 mobile ventilators.But as David Dayen of The American Prospect observed, the purported rationale for the acquisition was bogus: It had nothing to do with expanding Covidien’s product base and everything to do with destroying a competitor whose product “could cut into its existing profits.”

For years, the political economist Seymour Melman argued that companies that embraced the soft option of downsizing/offshoring labor would ultimately create grave production weaknesses in the U.S. economy and stifle innovation. Higher domestic wages, by contrast, would induce competent managers to compensate by using and investing in more and better machinery, which in turn would lead to a virtuous cycle of production: higher profits, which can lead to higher wages, leading to better machinery and organization of work.

While American companies may think they are improving their individual competitiveness in the short term by shifting operations to low-cost labor economies, the current pandemic illustrates that they collectively undermined America’s (and their own) competitiveness over the long haul.

Intuitively, Melman’s forecasts make sense. A modern manufacturing “ecosystem” makes it much easier to redeploy and pivot to new priorities when there are shortages in vital areas. China, for example, has a sufficiently deep and robust industrial infrastructure to adjust production lines quickly, even as the U.S. continues to struggle with ventilator shortages. And in Germany, a flagship company likeSiemens, for example, announced that it is “making its Additive Manufacturing (AM) Network along with its 3D printers, available to the global medical community to speed design and production of medical components … to enable faster and less complicated production of spare parts for machines like ventilators.”

The Next Economy

A combination of existing technologies and capacities that are already in business application and on the rise will enable the new era of production and global economic overhaul and develop in motion with Melman’s thinking. These include artificial intelligence computing, automated manufacturing and increasingly universal and portable manufacturing equipment, innovations in energy production and storage, high-speed data transfer, and nanotechnology. Some of these technologies are mature, profitable and business-ready. Others are still in an early phase but will be seen as more economically viable or worthy of state investment and subsidy in light of a growing awareness among policy planners that the consequences of running global supply chains are potentially more expensive.

All of these technologies are revolutionary. Their concomitant rise will create a new economic era dominated by the countries that fully integrate them into their economies:

AI computing has the capacity to introduce game-changing efficiencies in the production process, quality control in terms of production and blueprints for new models of production and consumption. It can handle huge volumes of administration and management of automated systems. This industry is estimated to be growing at an annual rate of over 45 percent.

Automated manufacturing can be expensive and requires skilled labor to maintain, but it can produce goods at precision levels beyond what people can make, as well as at increasing volumes. 3D manufacturing is a universalizing process: one machine capable of producing a dizzying number of products that already competes with some products from global supply chains. Many companies are locating back in deindustrialized New York and other U.S. cities on the back of 3D manufacturing.

Recent major advances in energy production—from solar and wind to geothermal and energy storage—are the holy grail of non-carbon energy sources, permitting solar and wind industries to compete on a 24-hour basis with carbon-based fuels, giving more weight for policy planners to minimize fuel imports and revisit dormant energy alternatives.

High-speed data transfer—enabled through satellites and huge server farms—is necessary for the multi-location management and logistical coordination of the segments of the new supply chain: the means of information transfer and the capacity of one hand to know what the other is doing.

The rise of nanotechnology—the capacity to engage in precision design and manufacture at a molecular scale—presents humanity with a new frontier of materials and products that have capabilities beyond what we currently know in terms of materials, products, medicines and much more. Products ranging from glass to suntan lotion are already vastly enhanced by nanotechnology production. Qualities of human-made materials such as those designed for fireproofing, bulletproofing, insulation and space travel are in the midst of being revolutionized. Medicines can be deployed through nanotechnology at the molecular level, vastly improving their effectiveness.

The collective strength of these technologies will diminish the appeal of finding cheaper labor outside a country’s borders or common market—and the costs they entail. Countries that are advanced along these lines and have access to the minerals required to engage in this form of production will prosper, plugging into their existing consumer market and building up a head of steam that will eventually lead to a new chain of international exports and imports. These trend lines will accelerate the decline of brick-and-mortar retail and service industries.

Export-led economies that grew on the back of a labor price advantage will find themselves in a role reversal of having the option of importing better goods from the markets they once exported to or paying intellectual property (IP) licensing fees to produce them domestically. The geopolitical advantages that went with offering a developing country a labor role in a global supply chain will be replaced with discounts on IP licenses or imports.

The past phases of industrialization saw an ongoing contest among wealthy countries for control of petroleum, minerals and shipping lanes, using all their available powers to obtain them. The historical pattern is that residents of the resource-rich and undeveloped countries suffer far more than prosper in the mineral extraction and export process to wealthy markets. Barring a major shift in attitudes to wealth distribution or successful political resistance to exploitation, the pattern will likely continue, with the wealthy countries’ preoccupations pivoting increasingly from carbon energy resources to the components of the new economy: cobalt, lithium and rare metals. Resources that sustain the present and future economies, like iron, copper and gold, will continue to retain their strategic value.

Much of Europe and Asian countries like China, South Korea and Japan are poised for the transition. Based on their traditions of rigid state-driven capitalism, these nations instinctively grasp how state capacity and direction can help drive further industrial development. It remains to be seen if the U.S. is fully capable of it. That is unlikely, if the prevailing neoliberal ideology persists, limiting the role of the U.S. government to be, at best, a neutral umpire that sustains efficient, rent-free markets able to supervise the delivery of an increasingly narrow set of public goods (as opposed to an active participant in industrial policy).

The U.S., with thousands of advanced research institutions, is certainly capable of the next stage of economic development. It has a developed market and a partial manufacturing base. But it also has a long history of wage-avoidance for its workforces and an utterly dysfunctional political process. You need nation-state competence and highly skilled labor in this new world, as well as a willingness to expand ownership and dividend models to workers and the governments that funded the research for this advanced economy.

The coronavirus pandemic will force the U.S. and other countries to stop making distinctions between low-tech business (supposedly fine to offshore) versus high value-added industry. Not only can production lines be altered to cope with shortages (as China is doing), but there is often a continuum in the industrial ecosystem.

Consider the case of surgical masks. Even though their production is ostensibly a low-tech commodified business, the critical inner filtration layer of a mask, which allows the wearer to breathe while reducing the inflow of possible infectious particles, is a high-end business: Costing “upward of [$4.23 million] apiece, the machine that creates this fabric melts down plastic material and blows it out in strands, like cotton candy, into flat sheets of melt-blown fabric for face masks and other filtration products. A similar line of machines can create a related kind of fabric, called spun-bond fabric, also used in face masks and in medical protection suits worn by health-care workers,” according to a report carried by National Public Radio.

The point is that there is a continuum. One creates the demand for the other. Eliminate one industry and another potentially dies, much like a biological ecosystem. We now know that when forests are cut down, at some point if the surviving forest is too small, the whole ecosystem collapses. The ecosystem has to be large enough to encompass all of the niches that make it work.

If the machine tool industry is allocated in one country, the textile industry in another, the steel industry in another, the whole thing becomes much more delicate and inefficient, depending on a greater range of variables to succeed. Crucially, the speed with which innovations can ricochet around the system decreases significantly. When Japanese auto manufacturers have access to Japanese machine tool makers, they can get at the machine tool advances before GM and Ford. Proximity becomes a competitive advantage.

All of which helps to explain why the distinction between offshoring hardware while retaining software is not only fatuous but damaging to long-term economic welfare.

Offshoring left the U.S. unprepared for COVID-19. It has also occasioned a widespread reassessment of globalization: What was once seen as the heretical refuge of economic nationalists has now become respectable again. Even without this pandemic, the foundations of America’s economic model were failing and becoming rapidly obsolete.

The question is: As the world moves to a post-carbon future, can the U.S. economy take away the primacy of rent-extracting sectors like finance, insurance and real estate; Hollywood films, smartphone apps, or increasingly irrelevant sectors like oil and natural gas exports, and join the leaders of the pack? Or is coronavirus merely the pandemic that presages a more terminal disease?

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator. Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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‘Scariest thing you’ll read all day’: New report sounds alarm over brain-reading tech and ‘neurocapitalism’

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams August 30, 2019

A Vox report that swiftly sparked alarm across the internet Friday outlined how, “in the era of neurocapitalism, your brain needs new rights,” following recent revelations that Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink are developing technologies to read people’s minds.

As Vox‘s Sigal Samuel reported:

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. The researchers say they’ve already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time.

... see musk

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-the-global-toilet-paper-run-brought-the-failings-of-capitalism-front-and-center/

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How the global toilet paper run brought the failings of capitalism front and center

Written by Simon Springer / Common Dreams March 16, 2020

The run on toilet paper has brought the failings of capitalism front and center to the bathroom of every house across Australia, a trend that has now spread to other countries. We are witnessing, in real-time and with stunning consequence, the stone-cold fact that markets are an ineffective mediator of resources, prone to the worst vagaries of herd mentality. Perceived impending shortages of toilet paper owing to the spread of COVID-19 set off widespread panic. We might be inclined to laugh at the implausibility of the whole scenario, but whether the situation is real or imagined is beside the point. The truth, which in this case may appear stranger than fiction, is that markets operate in the sweet spot between scarcity and fear.

Those who stockpiled toilet paper are in no danger of running out, and many undoubtedly have way more rolls than they could ever hope to use in the course of several months. These individuals have successfully avoided catastrophe while stuffing up their fellow citizens in the process. The whole situation is quite literally a stinking mess. What is particularly tragic though, is that this story of scarcity and hoarding is a common one. It is the story of capitalism itself.

Let’s pretend that we are talking about housing rather than toilet paper for a moment. The same principles actually apply. Those who got into the property market early, or have the ability to enter into the housing market at this stage, are the big winners. By early, we are talking several generations ago when land was cheaper and people were far fewer. It was a time when savvy buyers could accumulate vast portfolios. The payoff is that their children and grandchildren had to do very little to maintain the wealth that they inherited, other than continuing to extract value in the form of rent from the properties they owned.

This is Donald Trump’s story, and it is one of extreme privilege and exploitation. His critics are often appalled by his lack of empathy, but Trump appears to have no conception of caring for the poor precisely because he doesn’t have to. In a similar fashion, if you have a good stockpile of toilet paper, you’re likely not so worried about what everyone else in your neighborhood might be doing. You’re just looking out for number one, so you can continue to do your number twos in peace. Much like the run on toilet paper produced winners and losers by creating a situation of scarcity, so too does the housing market have the same effect.

Few can afford housing precisely because there has been a decades-long run on this commodity. The extension of the time scale makes it less obvious as to what is going on, but it is the exact same mechanism at play. Those who got into housing first have nothing to fear. They are not prone to the uncertainties that plague the experiences of those who lost out. Insecurity often comes in the form of inflated prices. While there have been examples of people trying to sell toilet paper at exorbitant prices on eBay, so far the demand has not matches sellers’ exploitative expectations. Housing is another matter, where those who did not get in early must pay inflated prices, subject themselves to an ongoing extraction of their means in the form of rent, or find themselves homeless.

The fact that there are fistfights in grocery stores is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the desperation that a populace can express when placed in a context of crisis. Violence becomes inevitable, which is a terrifying thought when we recognize that housing is a systemic crisis. On the one hand people turning on each other is a reflection of an individualist society, a cultural understanding that only emboldens the wealthy. The poor seldom form solidarities that encourage them to turn on their oppressors by organizing events like rent strikes. They are too busy fighting each other over scraps to make ends meet.

Who does hoarding hurt? The answer should be clear. Whether in housing or in toilet paper, it is poor people and working families living paycheck-to-paycheck who are worst affected. They can’t afford to stock up on commodities like toilet paper because they are continually paying rent so that they can have access to the most basic, and yet most hoarded commodity of all: housing.

The toilet paper apocalypse is already prompting people to reconsider their strategies for managing their bodily needs in ways that do not fall prey to further hoarding, paying huge ransoms, or resorting to violence. There is, for example, a lot of discussion on social media about the benefits of bidets. While responding to a shortage of toilet paper might seem trivial in the grand scheme of capitalism, it has provided us with a small glimpse into what it means to explore other ways of being in the world. In the context of housing, such experimentation comes in the form of cooperatives, intergenerational living arrangements, and even housing squats.

There is a key difference between toilet paper and housing though. Toilet paper shortages are unlikely to be a prolonged phenomenon. The boom will soon bust. Major retailers have already begun placing limits on the amount people can buy. They have intervened in the market, recognizing that any supposed invocation of it being “free” is a dystopian fantasy that is detrimental to the community as a whole. The housing situation, on the other hand, is a protracted affair, and one that leaves many people out in the cold. It is not going to fix itself, and successive governments all around the world have proven that they are unwilling to regulate in ways that are equitable. In the face of such ineffectuality and inequality, the question then becomes: how much shit are people willing to take?

sylvia federici:12/19 kpfa witch hunting

cap'l 1st to make labor a source of wealth, before land (and women make babies)

kpfa fundraiser talk talkies 2/14/20

https://kpfa.org/episode/its-going-down-february-14-2020/

livesstrm works

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Can capitalism solve capitalism’s problems?

Elizabeth Schmidt, The Conversation

As capitalism’s image crumbles, many of the world’s biggest companies are trying to give it new life by showing it can mean more than just making money.

no lnx

Can capitalism solve capitalism’s problems?

Written by Elizabeth Schmidt, The Conversation January 24, 2020

Capitalism is in trouble – at least judging by recent polls.

A majority of American millennials reject the economic system, while 55% of women age 18 to 54 say they prefer socialism. More Democrats now have a positive view of socialism than capitalism. And globally, 56% of respondents to a new survey agree “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world.”

One problem interpreting numbers like these is that there are many definitions of capitalism and socialism. More to the point, people seem to be thinking of a specific form of capitalism that deems the sole purpose of companies is to increase stock prices and enrich investors. Known as shareholder capitalism, it’s been the guiding light of American business for more than four decades. That’s what the survey meant by “as it exists today.”

As a scholar of socially responsible companies, however, I cannot help but notice a shift in corporate behavior in recent years. A new kind of capitalism seems to be emerging, one in which companies value communities, the environment and workers just as much as profits.

The latest evidence: Companies as diverse as alcohol maker AB InBev, airline JetBlue and money manager BlackRock have all in recent weeks made new commitments to pursue more sustainable business practices.

The purpose of business

Nearly 50 years ago, the economist Milton Friedman proclaimed that the sole purpose of a business is “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

Within a decade, Friedman’s claim became accepted wisdom in corporate boardrooms. The era of “shareholder primacy capitalism” had begun.

One result has been remarkable growth in the stock market. But critics argue companies and the “shareholder value theory” are also complicit in exacerbating many economic, social and environmental problems, such as income inequality and climate change.

They also note that putting profits first actually harms shareholders in the long run by encouraging managers to take actions that may eventually reduce earnings.

The rebellion

Many consumers, workers and socially conscious investors have also noticed these shortcomings and increased pressure on corporations to change.

For starters, more Americans no longer find it acceptable for companies to exclusively seek profits. A 2017 poll found that 78% of U.S. consumers want businesses to pursue social justice issues, while 76% said they would refuse to buy a product if the business supported an issue contrary to their beliefs. Almost half the respondents said they had already boycotted a product for that reason.

Workers increasingly expect their employers to share their values. A 2016 study found that most Americans – particularly millennials – consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work. Most would also be willing to take a pay cut in order to work for a “responsible” company – and are demanding their current employers behave that way.

For example, workers at online furniture company Wayfair recently walked out when they learned it had sent beds to detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border. More than 8,100 Amazon employees signed an open letter supporting a shareholder resolution urging the retailer to do more to address climate change.

Finally, investors are becoming more socially aware and putting more of their money behind businesses that behave in sustainable and responsive ways. At the beginning of 2018, portfolio managers held US$11.6 trillion in U.S. assets using environmental, social and governance criteria to guide their investments, up from $2.5 trillion in 2010.

Laurence Fink, founder and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, summed up the growing sentiment when he said in 2018, “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

The corporate response

Presumably realizing how important these constituencies are to their bottom lines, businesses are paying attention.

Shareholder capitalism is this year’s theme at Davos, the global gathering of the world’s elite in the Alps. And last year, the leaders at some of the world’s largest companies said that they are ditching shareholder-first capitalism and instead embracing a corporate purpose that seeks to serve all constituents. The sentiment is hardly isolated.

Dick’s Sporting Goods, Kroger, Walmart and L.L. Bean, for example, responded to growing concerns over mass shootings by restricting the sale of guns. Procter and Gamble, a major sponsor for U.S. Soccer, expressed support for the quest of the women’s team for equal pay and donated $500,000 to help narrow the pay gap with men.

Airlines including American, United and Frontier refused to knowingly fly children separated from their parents at the border following outrage over the Trump administration’s policy. And even though Amazon shareholders rejected the worker-supported shareholder resolution described above, Amazon set stronger goals for reducing its carbon footprint after the resolution was introduced.

These actions have sometimes hurt the bottom line. The decision to restrict gun sales cost Dick’s Sporting Goods $150 million. Delta lost a $50 million tax break in Georgia after severing ties with the NRA.

But these and other companies didn’t back down. The CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods explained that when something is “to the detriment of the public, you have to stand up.”

Companies are also setting tougher social and environmental goals for themselves and then reporting their successes and failures. Tesla, Unilever, Nike and Whole Foods are among nine companies with annual revenues of at least $1 billion that “have sustainability or social good at their core.”

In 2018, 86% of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies reported on their environmental, social and governance performance and achievements, up from less than 20% in 2011.

And companies have found that putting more emphasis on social justice can pay off. Unilever, for example, said in 2017 that its “sustainable living” brands, such as Ben & Jerry’s, Dove and Hellmann’s, are growing much faster than its other brands. Companies with the best scores on their sustainability reports generally perform better financially than those with lower scores.

The end of shareholder capitalism?

Skeptics can be forgiven for believing these corporate “changes” are not real or are simply public relations stunts designed to appeal to a new generation.

Businesses can, of course, say they will be responsible citizens while doing the opposite. Few sustainability reports in the United States are externally audited, and the companies are asking us to take them at their word.

Even if they are well-meaning, intentions are not enough to create systemic change. A 2017 study showed that many companies with climate change goals actually scaled back their ambitions over time as the reality clashed with their lofty goals.

But businesses can’t afford to ignore their customers’ wishes. Nor can they ignore their workers in a tight labor market. And if they disregard socially responsible investors, they risk both losing out on important investments and facing shareholder resolutions that force change.

The shareholder value doctrine is not dead, but we are beginning to see major cracks in its armor. And as long as investors, customers and employees continue to push for more responsible behavior, you should expect to see those cracks grow.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 24, 2019.

Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.

Elizabeth Schmidt, Professor of Practice, Nonprofit Organizations; Social & Environmental Enterprises, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

micro-disaster cap'lism? scary use of AI dB? van jones free mkt evac plan katrina

Uber and Lyft price-gouge customers trying to flee Seattle shooting120 an Nicole Karlis / Salon

richard wolff

he does periodic primers and defense of socialism, here ctr-args *** quite good 1/20

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-january-10-2020/

Three major criticisms of Economic Update are considered: (1) that we don’t praise capitalism for reducing world poverty, (2) that we don’t admit that “socialism has never worked anywhere,” and (3) that no inventor of a new product or technique who starts a business will ever accept that employees in such a business are equal partners with the inventor, originator of the business. Today’s program answers these criticisms, refuting their arguments systematically.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/capitalism-versus-socialism-did-capitalism-really-win

no lnx

Capitalism versus Socialism: Did Capitalism really win?

Written by Walter G. Moss / History News Network January 6, 2020

In a recent op-ed, “I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked,” conservative columnist David Brooks wrote, “We ran that social experiment [between capitalism and socialism] for 100 years and capitalism won.” But did capitalism really win? As I indicated in a chapter (“Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism”) in my An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces, history tells a more complicated story.

As sociologist Max Weber and conservative economist Milton Friedman have told us, the primary purpose of capitalism is earning a profit. Friedman even believed it was business’s main “social responsibility.” Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that capitalism has “no moral or transcendental ethic.”

Nineteenth-century capitalism provided no adequate answers for how to deal with such problems as unsafe working conditions, unfair business practices, pollution, public health, slum housing, or the abuse of child labor. Nor did it deal with the distribution of income and left unanswered if great poverty should exist along with great wealth.

At that time socialism, especially Marxist socialism, arose as the major challenger of capitalism. By 1917, socialism had split into two principal types, the communist variety led by Vladimir Lenin–later formalized in the name Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)–and a revisionist type, more common in western Europe, that advocated democratic, reformist means of obtaining power. The goal of such socialism was primarily greater economic equality through such steps as government ownership of at least the chief means of production. In general, democratic socialists wished to control and regulate the economy in behalf of the entire population. In the German parliamentary election of 1912, the German Social Democratic Party received more votes than any other party.

Marx’s ideas also influenced trade-unionism and other isms that challenged nineteenth-century capitalists. One such was Progressivism, a cross-fertilizing trans-Atlantic movement that was powerful enough in the USA to produce the Progressive Era from 1890 to 1914.

But Progressivism did not attempt to overthrow or replace capitalism, but to constrain and supplement it in order to insure that it served the public good. As Daniel Rodgers indicates in his Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (2000), it was a diverse movement “to limit the socially destructive effects of morally unhindered capitalism, to extract from those [capitalist] markets the tasks they had demonstrably bungled, to counterbalance the markets’ atomizing social effects with a countercalculus of the public weal [well-being].”

After World War I and a dozen years of Republican rule, progressivism returned with the election of Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) in 1932 and his subsequent implementation of the New Deal.

From FDR’s time to our own, the U.S. economy, as our State Department indicated in 2001, has been “mixed:” “The United States is often described as a ‘capitalist’economy,” it “is perhaps better described as a ‘mixed’ economy, with government playing an important role along with private enterprise.”

Following World War II, many western European economies also became mixed as they introduced more welfare-state provisions–social programs assisting the poor, old, sick, and unemployed. Generally, compared to the USA, western Europe gave more assistance to the needy and the government controlled more of the economy.

But in both the USA and western Europe the degree of government regulation has fluctuated considerably. Prominent European democratic socialists Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany and President Francois Mitterrand of France led their countries from from 1969 to 1974 and 1981 to 1995, respectively. Conversely, in the 1980s Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in Britain cut back the government regulation of capitalism. While progressivism, the New Deal, and welfare-state policies inched liberals closer to democratic socialism, the Reagan-Thatcher opposition to “creeping socialism” and “big government” encouraged conservatives to place more trust in capitalism or “the free market.”

Today, not only are there very different types of capitalism in different countries–Brooks, for example, distinguishes “between a version of democratic capitalism, found in the U.S., Canada and Denmark, and forms of authoritarian capitalism, found in China and Russia”–but U. S. capitalism today is not the same as it was before the Progressive Era. Nor is democratic socialism in Europe the same as it was in 1912, when the German Social Democratic Party demonstrated its popularity.

A fair and unbiased review, “Democratic Socialist Countries 2019,” concludes that most prominent European countries contain a mix of capitalist and democratic-socialist elements. For example, it states, “Norway, like other Scandinavian countries, is . . . [not] fully socialist nor fully capitalist.”

Thus, Brooks is too simplistic when he writes “capitalism won.” If one equates socialism with communism, as Brooks comes close to doing, then saying capitalism won over socialism is closer to the truth. For Soviet-style communism did collapse by 1991 with the disintegration of the USSR. Still, that’s not completely accurate because western economic-political systems are more mixed than purely democratic capitalist.

Brooks’ narrow view of socialism and triumphant take on capitalism require a historical corrective because of three significant problems.

The first is the political use of simplistic capitalism-vs.-socialism propaganda. Socialism and socialist have long been scare words conservatives hurl at opponents. Social Security? Socialist! Medicare? Socialist! In the 1960s when Congress debated Medicare, the American Medical Association (AMA) hired Ronald Reagan to speak out against it on a record entitled “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.”

More recently, Donald Trump stated that socialism “promises unity, but it delivers hatred and it delivers division. Socialism promises a better future, but it always returns to the darkest chapters of the past. That never fails. It always happens. Socialism is a sad and discredited ideology rooted in the total ignorance of history and human nature.” His campaign has claimed that “Bernie Sanders has already won the debate in the Democrat primary, because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism.”

The second problem is that our political-economic development has made us more of a mixed system than a capitalistic one thanks to such developments as Progressivism, the New Deal, Lyndon’s Johnson’s “Great Society,” and Medicare.

The third main problem is that capitalism’s main aim of profit-seeking still needs (in Bell’s words) a higher “moral or transcendental ethic.” Seeking the common good is one such ethic that has often been suggested, from the Progressive era to, more recently, Pope Francis and Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

In previous articles such as “BP, Corporations, Capitalism, Progressivism, and Government” and “The Opioid Crisis and the Need for Progressivism,” I dealt with the profit-at-all-cost operations of corporations such as British Petroleum (BP), and Purdue Pharma. I also addressed why governments need to regulate companies responsible for oils spills and opioid deaths to ensure they serve the common good.

In the last two years, two more notable cases of insufficient corporate concern for anything but profits emerged, again demonstrating the need for government oversight.

The first involves Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). In early December, 2019 it agreed to pay $13.5 billion for causing Northern California wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes and businesses and killed more than 100 people in just two of the fires. The LA Times noted that critics believe the company put “short-term profits before necessary safety measures.”A Marxist publication’s headline read “Profits before people: Why PG&E turned off the lights in California.”

The second case involves aircraft manufacturer and defense contractor Boeing. In late 2018-early 2019, two Boeing 737 Max 8 Jets crashed killing 346 people. Again, profits were placed before safety. One Daily Beast article declared that “top managers in the company’s Chicago headquarters, more alert to Wall Street than airline safety, gave priority to stock buybacks and shareholder returns.”

Again, government regulation of Boeing was insufficient. Pilot Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, depicted by Tom Hanks in the movie “Sully: Miracle on the Hudson,” criticized the USA for not providing sufficient funds to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), leaving it ill equipped to oversee aircraft safety. Instead, Sully charged, the FAA allowed Boeing itself to certify that it was meeting safety standards. “To make matters worse, there is too cozy a relationship between the industry and the regulators. And in too many cases, FAA employees who rightly called for stricter compliance with safety standards and more rigorous design choices have been overruled by FAA management, often under corporate or political pressure.”

Thus, history demonstrates that the assertion that capitalism “won” is inaccurate. The irresponsibility of corporations like BP, Purdue Pharma, PG&E, and Boeing indicate the ongoing cost of unregulated capitalism. Today, President Trump continues to assail the type of enlightened regulation produced by the Progressive Era and FDR. The main task of voters in 2020 and thereafter will not be to choose whether we want capitalism or democratic socialism. Rather, it will be to decide the best pragmatic mix of the two (and best presidential candidate) to further the common good.

aha, lessen power of one small aspect of democracy in cap'lism, structural incentive MAX profit [// Worster Dust Bowl maxims, extraction]

1219, CoC lobby

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/reuters-america-update-1-u-s-sec-proposes-rules-that-could-limit-shareholder-voices.html

Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street’s top regulator on Tuesday proposed a pair of long-awaited rules that would set new limits on shareholders ability to call for corporate changes on thorny issues like climate change disclosures and executive compensation In one of the biggest wins for the corporate lobby under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-2 along partisan lines to raise the re-submission thresholds for motions that shareholders file on company ballots and to put new requirements on firms guiding investors how to vote in corporate elections.

Both shareholder proposals and proxy advisory firms are cornerstones of corporate governance and how investors hold management accountable.

Both changes will be subject to public comment.

Democrats Rob Jackson and Allison Herren Lee voted against the rules, saying they tilted the playing field toward corporate management.

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https://inthesetimes.com/article/21592/capitalism-witches-women-witch-hunting-sylvia-federici-caliban

Italian socialist feminist Silvia Federici is mandatory reading to understand gender politics in 2019. The opening sentences of her 1975 pamphlet “Wages Against Housework”—“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”—will stick in your head and change your whole concept of family.Caliban and the Witch, her titanic 1998 work on witch trials as a tool of early capitalism, will take your head apart and put it back together.

Federici is not just relevant but getting more so every second. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work; she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies; the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt; entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it; half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.

Federici’s latest,Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism—unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women—and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.

For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.

Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like theMalleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.

“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers,” Federici writes in Caliban, “the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.” ...

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-december-12-2019/

enclosure was peasant land grab

Caliban and the Witch - Libcom.org

https://libcom.org › files › Caliban and the Witch

Caliban andthe . . Witch. Autonornedia. ,. Silvia. Federici ..... There are other ways in which Caliban mId tire Witch speaks to "women's history" and feminist ...

Silvia Federici - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Silvia_Federici

Silvia Federici is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist ... Federici's best known work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati ...

Background · ‎Scholarly contributions · ‎Books · ‎Books edited by her

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/when-capitalism-kills-culture/

no lnx

When capitalism kills culture

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, center, tours Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, March 3, 2016. DoD photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Tim D. Godbee

Written by The Conversation November 15, 2019

Julien Lefort-Favreau, Queen’s University, Ontario

The story is all too familiar – yet it should command more attention from Canadians.

Recently, the Globe and Mail reported the Ben McNally bookstore, located on Bay Street a stone’s throw from Union Station, would close in 2020. Two days later, Rupert McNally, the founder’s son, confirmed the news on the store’s website. It had been open since 2007.

The reason for the closure is simple: the store will be replaced by an alleyway linking Bay Street to the alley behind it. This redevelopment is part of a project that the owner calls (ironically?) “The Bay Street Village.”

It is therefore a stupid example of gentrification that pits a modest shopkeeper against a greedy landowner.

The increase in the value of Toronto’s real estate is not exactly new. But we can see here an example of a paradigm that is not reassuring for the future of large cities: the profitability of businesses devoted to cultural property is hardly compatible with the overbidding in real estate.

Montréal is facing the same problem, and it affects all independent businesses. In August, the City gave the Commission on Economic and Urban Development and Housing the mandate to conduct public consultations on vacant space on commercial arteries. Several of these areas have rates ranging from 10 to 15 per cent.

A “hygienization” of urban centres

It has already been demonstrated that gentrification is largely based on a city’s ability to offer an interesting and diversified cultural life. Some, such as Richard Florida, have linked this phenomenon to the emergence of a “creative class.”

Geographer Oli Mould, in his excellent book, Against Creativity, published in 2018, attacks the very notion of creativity. He criticizes Richard Florida with virulence by brilliantly showing how “creative” gentrification can also act as a form of hygienization in urban centres that, ironically, hinders spontaneous citizen initiatives. To put it bluntly, once gentrification is completed, culture is more or less eliminated from the central districts.

We are interested in the case of the closure of the Ben McNally bookstore because it shows the consequences of real estate speculation on the vitality of a city and, ultimately, on culture on a national scale. Very quickly, after the announcement by the owners of the bookstore, many players in the Canadian publishing ecosystem expressed serious concerns.

That is because independent bookshops, Ben McNally in particular, do not belong to a large group or chain and aren’t limited to the sole function of selling books. They are truly a place of cultural mediation.

The purpose of booksellers is to introduce readers to more complex works that have received less media attention. In Kingston, Ont., the city where I live, the Novel Idea bookstore is part of the community life. It organizes meetings with local authors and federates a community of readers. In Montréal, bookstores such as Le port de tête, L’Écume des jours and Gallimard also have a clearly established cultural function.

Independent bookstores are places where demanding literature or radical essays can find readers. In short, the exact opposite of a virtual library where algorithms – certainly effective – guide readers’ tastes. There is no doubt that these algorithms favour books that are already selling well, regardless of the careful work of smaller publishers.

For a “bibliodiversity”

Why defend the independence of Canadian literature? Out of pure nationalism? Not exactly.

Rather, it is a question of how the bookstore can, in an era of advanced globalization, be a place of defence for the diversity of cultures, what some have referred to as bibliodiversity: a diversity of languages (in the case of Canada, English, French and Aboriginal literatures), but also socially equitable modes of production and dissemination. In this case, it ensures that cultural property produced with our public funds finds takers.

To put it simply, a book in Canada will sometimes be subsidized at the time of writing through creation grants, in its production through operating grants to publishers, and then sold by Amazon or, in the worst case, unsold due to a lack of suitable distribution locations. The Canadian book system provides a relatively good framework for its authors and publishers to deal with the horrors of the free market, in a spirit of cultural and economic protectionism. But in the current configuration, booksellers seem to be abandoned.

Make the less visible visible

But it is not simply a matter of defending a blurred Canadian identity. It is also a matter of making a diversity of identities visible. Think of the Racines bookstore in Montréal North, which highlights the culture and history of racialized authors. Or, the bookstore L’Euguélionne, which, by settling in the gay village in Montréal and adopting a cooperative structure, has made it its mission to offer a wide selection of literature on women and LGBPT2QIA groups.

An independent bookstore is therefore a meeting place for people from the neighbourhood but also, possibly, for affinity groups. Bookstores can be, in some contexts, sources of resistance. André Schiffrin states in L’argent et les mots – the third volume of a trilogy essential to understanding the effects of cultural globalization – that the number of New York bookstores has been divided by 10 since the post-war period.

Capitalism has its own rhythm, but also its own specific geography. Urban space is profoundly transformed by financial capitalism. Urban spaces are becoming expensive, and the closure of cultural spaces is, metaphorically and by extension, a reduction in the space for ideas and expression.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]The Conversation

Julien Lefort-Favreau, Assistant Professor, French Studies, Queen’s University, Ontario

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/dont-count-on-capitalism-to-save-the-earth/

no lnx

Don’t count on capitalism to save the Earth

Written by Ted Morgan / Salon October 19, 2019

The bad news just keeps coming. Again and again, science-based studies uncover increasing evidence that the planet is headed toward unfathomable disaster.

In the last year alone, we have seen publication of the US National Climate Assessment’s Fourth National Climate report, the UN Global Sustainable Development report (“The Future is Now”), the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report, the World Meteorological Association report on Accelerating Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on Climate Change and Land and Ocean and Cryosphere, the Science Advisory Group to the UN Climate Action Summit’s report “United in Science,” to say nothing of countless articles in science journals warning that catastrophe lies ahead.

As “United in Science” put it, current efforts need to be “roughly tripled to be aligned with the 2o C goal and increased fivefold to align with the 1.5o C goal” adopted by the 2016 Paris Agreement (emphasis added).”

Hence we are confronted by the damage already resulting from climate change: more intense and frequent extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, droughts, forest fires, and heat waves; rising sea levels that threaten the homes, lives and livelihoods of millions of people; and melting ice caps and permafrost, among others.

The consensus among science-based reports is that the path ahead is far worse: widespread food and water scarcity, increased exposure to diseases and allergic illnesses, economic decline, and damage to the “infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.”

As Noam Chomsky put it, “To describe these challenges as ‘extremely severe’ would be an error. The phrase does not capture the enormity of the kinds of challenges that lie ahead.”

We can observe three kinds of responses to the crisis of climate change. First, activism on a global scale is clearly on the rise, commonly led by young people who will bear the greatest burden of climate change.

Millions participated the global Climate Strike on September 20. 530 groups from around the world signed on to the Lofoten Declaration calling for rapid phasing out of fossil fuels.

One of the signers, the Extinction Rebellion, has mobilized two weeks of dramatic direct action and civil disobedience in cities from New York and Philadelphia to London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Amsterdam, Toronto and Sydney: from traffic blockades to rallies, marches, and street theatre to throwing red paint on Wall Street’s bull statue. Some 200 young mothers marched from Westminster to 10 Downing Street where they engaged in a Nurse-In, nursing the babies they seek to protect from climate disaster.

Second, most nations of the world, many states and localities within the United States, even some corporations and the US military, now recognize that the world faces a profound challenge. Several governments have taken preliminary steps toward altering their emissions, and even more have pledged to do so.

In contrast to the energy of the Climate Strike and the warnings of the UN Science Advisory Group warning, the UN Climate Action Summit produced only modest pledges from a minority of nations.

These steps remain woefully inadequate if the world is to avoid a cataclysmic outcome.

Why this relative inaction in the face of global catastrophe? The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the world’s developed capitalist economies, with China and the US leading the way. By contrast, people in nations that have the least impact on climate change are most vulnerable to the worst of its effects.

This climate injustice is only one manifestation of the inequalities and injustices built into the capitalist powers’ imperial exploitation of the “under-developed” world. In the late Immanuel Wallerstein’s framework, the core capitalist powers compete with each other for dominance in exploiting the resources of the underdeveloped periphery nations.

Consequently, each of the capitalist powers is loathe to weaken its competitive position vis à vis the other capitalist economies. In a capitalist world, each economic unit must act to protect what it deems its own interests. The only counterweight comes from the public sector.

Yet in a capitalist world, each public authority — local, state or national government — is constrained by the fear that pushing public interests too far will cause capital flight, thereby undermining its viability. And, of course, corporations and the wealthy dominate the shaping of public policy — nowhere more than in the US.

This is the way capitalism works, which suggests how profound and systemic the changes will have to be if the world is to avoid catastrophe.

Lastly, however, the Trump administration and its fossil fuel allies have thumbed their noses at the world by brazenly accelerating the race to destruction.

Among his flagrant attempts to flout the international scientific consensus, Trump has pledged to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement; he promoted fossil fuel interests at the 2017 climate talks, he campaigned to end the “war on coal,” and subsequently his administration has moved to relax environmental coal plant emissions while weakening the federal government’s ability to set national standards. The administration removed restrictions on the leakage of methane from the nation’s oil and gas wells; it has taken steps to encourage coastal and Arctic oil drilling and exploration; and Trump announced he was revoking California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to enforce automobile emissions standard tougher than those of the federal government.

But itself, climate change has caused 150,000 deaths each year, a number that is likely to double in a decade, and it has contributed to 5 million human illnesses every year. Left unchecked, climate change casualties could climb into the millions. Those political actors and fossil fuel producers who resist the fundamental changes that are necessary become guilty of producing these deaths — in short, guilty of crimes against humanity.

The world cannot wait for the capitalist states to enact adequate constraints on greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, the Climate Strike and Extinction Rebellion are the beginning of a global uprising of increasing numbers of an increasingly well informed public. The confrontation with the powerful polluters will only grow; it will not diminish. Ultimately, the test will be the global uprising becomes coordinated force for systemic change that can no longer be dismissed by the powers that be.

see story / reductionism

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-sacrificial-rites-of-capitalism-we-dont-talk-about/

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The sacrificial rites of capitalism we don’t talk about

Written by Lynn Parramore, Institutefor NewEconomicThinking September 5, 2019

Every society has at least one dominant story. Think of it as the official line: Here’s who we are, what we’re doing and why. But if you pay attention, you may notice other stories, too. Stories that circulate below the radar — and sometimes right out in the open — contradicting the official narrative. Most people don’t openly acknowledge them, but the signs are everywhere.

Think of Catholic saints beaming their polytheistic, atavistic messages on brightly colored church windows. See the majestic Mary, whose exaltation helps to hold at bay the tensions of a monotheistic, father-centered religion officially in denial of the divine feminine. The Queen of Heaven papers over gaps in the main story, making it more appealing, more workable.

The Church needs Mary. Without her, the dominant story might fall apart.

So deployed, counter-narratives are not necessarily a threat, but can serve to constrain a system’s instabilities, balance its tensions. Supritha Rajan, an English professor at the University of Rochester, sees the dominant story of capitalism working in this way. Part of a wave of humanities scholars taking a closer look at the meaning and history of capitalism, her book, A Tale of Two Capitalisms, reveals how the fields of anthropology and economics, along with the literary form of the novel, which developed together in the late 18th and 19th centuries, cross-pollinated each other and worked in tandem to investigate and offer new theories about human nature and culture. Together, they helped create a new story for the citizens of an emerging world.

Rajan was born in India and emigrated with her family to Massachusetts at the age of seven. She is attuned to how the dominant narrative of capitalism appeared at the height of Britain’s colonial power, a time when major thinkers often looked to far-flung countries like India as sites of static, superstition-ridden, “primitive” cultures that the capitalist system would render obsolete.

Capitalism’s official story, Rajan explains, charts a linear progression from magical-thinking hunter-gatherers doing their “trucking and bartering,” as Adam Smith would have it, to today’s rational global capitalists engaged in free competition. This story insists — and here we come to a tricky part — that when individuals act in their own interest, the best results occur for everybody. Millions of self-centered actions add up to create an equilibrium that gives birth to a society that is fairer and more stable, creative, and abundant than ever before.

Quite a tale! But far from the whole story, says Rajan. She warns that accepting it at face value blinds us to the ways it damages our lives.

Rational Agents, Ritual Actions

Rajan charts the development of anthropology as a distinct field of study at a time when practitioners tended to separate things like ritual and magic — often performed communally — from the main flow of modern life. By then this stuff belonged on the periphery, contained, perhaps, within a few hours at church on Sunday or in entertainment halls. Anthropologists held that the relegation of the “irrational” to the margins was what distinguished advanced societies from the backward places where such activities remained central to life.

Rajan started with a hunch that magical rites, sacrificial rituals, and sacred values were not just relics of a pre-modern past, but actually woven right into the story of capitalism from the beginning. They exist everywhere under our noses, popping up in everyday economic activities and permeating even the high-tech exchanges of the global marketplace. What we are taught to think of as irrational and rational are actually mobile, flexible categories that continuously overlap.

To test her hunch, Rajan revisits the time when capitalist speculation and credit was replacing Britain’s traditional land-based economy. Technologies like the telegraph were collapsing time and space, and social life was morphing from extended kinship models to the nuclear family we know today. At this time, anthropologists were shaping a story that human society developed from a focus on primitive religion to the embrace of scientific rationalism. Any pre-modern ideas that might appear in the new forms were supposed to be merely fading ghosts.

Political economists, she notes, went even further: They insisted that the capitalist economy had exorcised these ghosts altogether. The new human being was hailed as “homo economicus” — a rational person who pursues wealth for self-interested motives. He, for such a being was imagined to be male, belonged strictly to the realm of the profane.

The great Victorian novelists, who were very much engaged with these developments, sensed that something was not quite right in the story. They noticed that capitalism was producing not just abundance and stability, but inequality, alienation and misery. Yet in criticizing the new system, they tended to accept and even buttress the separation of categories of experience insisted upon by social scientists. Thomas Carlyle’s famous condemnation of the “cash-payment” as “the sole nexus” of capitalism, for example, posited an economic realm as one in which ethical and religious values hold no sway.

But was it really so?

Rajan takes up the case of Charles Dickens, often viewed as the great anti-capitalist of Victorian literature, who observed that a society of self-interested economic actors could produce tremendous horror. Ideologically opposed to various aspects of capitalism, he turned to sacred ideas like sacrifice and ritual to imagine a community invested in values like disinterestedness, reciprocity, and communality — the very values endangered by the capitalist model of self-interest.

In A Tale of Two Cities, whose plot begins in year 1775, Dickens depicts Paris as a city stuck in backward economic and social modes in contrast to the more productive, modern city of London. But in order for capitalism to work harmoniously in London, something of the religious sphere had to be added to the sauce. Dickens casts a woman, Lucie, as the person who takes the stink away from all the selfish business conducted by the men — a Victorian “angel in the house,” an emblem of all the non-utilitarian values that homo economicus supposedly had no use for. Lucie, like many other female characters in Victorian novels, is supremely compassionate and sacrifices for the greater good: she is homo communis....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/we-are-clearly-living-in-a-bizarro-capitalism-era-and-its-time-to-change-it/

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We are clearly living in a bizarro capitalism era — and it’s time to change it

Written by Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute August 27, 2019

Remember “Bizarro Superman,” the character who represented the polar opposite of Superman and all that he stood for? Today we have an economic equivalent in the form of Bizarro Capitalism. In the good old days, borrowers paid interest on the money that was loaned to them, and bankers paid depositors a savings rate to entice them to store their money at the bank. Now it’s increasingly the other way around.

Judging from the speeches given at the recent annual Jackson Hole gathering of the various bigwigs in the global central banking scene, the mutation of our economy hasn’t fully dawned on them. For the most part, we heard the same old shibboleths. Indeed, the very notion of having a high-profile forum in a glamorous setting to highlight the views of central bankers symbolizes how far we have come in terms of prioritizing monetary policy over fiscal activism, despite the fact that this has led to a policy “black hole,” according to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

The hesitation in embracing fiscal policy further (despite the anomalous presence of negative rates that could be arbitraged away by fiscally generated economic growth) is largely the product of a number of myths that have governed policy-making during the 40-year period of neoliberal ascendancy. Among them: the misconception that excessive government spending “crowds out” private sector investment; the belief that “responsible” fiscal policy and reduced budget deficits in and of themselves create the conditions for sustained economic growth; the questionable notion that “quantitative easing” actually does anything to benefit the real economy (as opposed to merely inciting financial speculation); and, lastly, the very idea that independent central bank technocrats are better suited than democratically elected officials to solve our current problems when the record shows the opposite. Far from being disinterested umpires, the monetary authorities have consistently prioritized financial interests and, in so doing, have acted more like arsonists adding to a major fire. The irony today is that central banks have historically been the traditional agent of deliverance for the financial sector. But in the current environment of negative rates, they are becoming its angel of death.

The huge rally that has characterized this summer’s trading in the global bond markets has culminated with a new phenomenon hitherto unseen: the presence of negative-yielding bonds, a growing and increasingly widespread feature of the economic landscape. We now have over $16 trillion worth of negative-yielding bonds (out of a total global bond market size of around $100 trillion). Adding to this topsy-turvy financial landscape, UBS in Switzerland has introduced a charge of 0.6 percent on deposits larger than 500,000 euros. Similarly, Denmark’s Jyske Bank has just announced plans to charge negative rates on deposits. To be sure, it’s only wealthy clients who will incur this charge for now (a nice socialist touch, for this Scandinavian social democracy), but it’s an ominous precedent for any saver nonetheless if the banks ultimately decide to extend these charges to the less affluent. Functionally, a charge on deposit represents a penalty on savings that acts like a tax increase. It represents the perverse apotheosis of a “too big to fail” banking system in which depositors are now starting to pay to store their money at banks that survive in their current form because our monetary and fiscal policy officials backstop them.

Think about the implications: Banks are charging depositors to store their money at their institution, and $16 trillion worth of borrowers are now being paid by the world’s creditors for the “privilege” of holding their bonds. Imagine what that is doing to your pension fund (how does a trustee calculate his/her firm’s pension liabilities with a negative interest rate?), or your insurance annuities, let alone the money you deposit in your bank account. Or consider buying a home in Denmark now that Jyske Bank, the country’s third-largest bank, has launched the world’s first negative interest mortgage: 10 years at -0.5 percent. What this means is that borrowers still make monthly payments, as is usual on all mortgages, but the outstanding loan is reduced each month by more than the borrower has paid, by virtue of the negative rate. We are truly in uncharted waters.

We started down this road decades ago in Japan, and it is to the Land of the Rising Sun that we should look for a glimpse of the future. The Bank of Japan owns almost half the stock of the country’s outstanding public debt, so effectively it is the Japanese Government Bond market; secondary trading activity is virtually nonexistent. Not that we should shed any tears for Japanese bond traders (who are gradually becoming extinct—no bond vigilantes here), but perhaps we should ponder the fate of Japanese savers, whose savings income has dwindled as a consequence of decades of virtually zero interest rates. This makes the economy particularly vulnerable to external shocks (such as the planned consumption tax increase, which twice before has created economic relapse in this aging country of savers) because there is minimal income flow to cushion the sharp change.

Outside Japan, the broad global rally in bond prices (which has led to a corresponding decline in bond yields) represents a collective panic attack that, notwithstanding all of the monetary gymnastics of the world’s central bankers, the global economy is rapidly slowing down. The signs are out there: In China, the escalating Sino-U.S. trade war is adversely impacting overall growth; in Germany, a degenerating banking sector and rapidly slowing exports are grinding down the economy; and in the rest of Europe, especially the UK, the imminence of Brexit is engendering a crisis of confidence, as fears of No Deal chaos are rising as we approach the October 31 deadline.

For some decades since Bretton Woods, the tools available to central banks did the trick. Most recently, the markets have increasingly taken to heart European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” pledge to save the euro. Draghi has repeatedly used the ECB’s balance sheet to backstop sovereign euro-denominated paper, leading investors to pile into government bonds in countries once thought to be on the threshold of insolvency. Overall credit spreads between southern periphery and the more “fiscally sound” north have accordingly diminished considerably to the point where 100-year bonds are becoming a thing: Ireland and Austria have both issued 100-year paper (likewise non-Eurozone Argentina, which historically has been a serial defaulter, but still was able to capitalize on this mania). Markets today discount totally the risk of national bankruptcy in the mad grasp for yield and additional income. This is moral hazard run amok.

All the norms of a market economy are being subverted by the very agents—central banks—that embody the market fundamentalism that has taken deep root in the global economy. Borrowers get paid, savers get charged. The solvency of pension funds is also coming under risk in countries like Germany where institutions by law have to buy negative-yielding government bonds. The entire German Bund yield curve trades at negative yields, so Berlin is in danger of being hoisted on its historic fiscal austerity petard. The “cure” of negative rates is proving to be as bad as the disease for many, which yet again illustrates why excessive reliance on interest rate manipulation is a terrible way to conduct economic policy.

All of this is to say that governments, not central banks, have the optimal tools for our challenges: money distributed to the public for the general welfare through a range of projects and programs as opposed to central bank-engineered bailouts to a potpourri of financial institutions (many of which should have been shut down in 2009 and beyond). As much as it might frustrate the designs of financiers and billionaires and their fear of government money going to the public, that’s the only thing that’s going to move the needle. Certainly, there is no way out, absent a robust government fiscal response that borrows at these historically unprecedented rates and generates sufficient economic growth to arbitrage away the negative yields.

Far from “crowding out” private investment (the usual argument deployed against “excessive” government spending), public investment via properly targeted fiscal policy could provide a new source of growth that “crowds in” additional business investment. As I’ve written before, “the basis of the ‘crowding out’ claim is that… [excessive] government spending causes interest rates to rise, and investment to fall. In other words, too much government borrowing ‘crowds out’ private investment.” That’s totally wrong, as J.M. Keynes came to realize almost a century ago: “For the proposition that supply creates its own demand, I shall substitute the proposition that expenditure creates its own income.”

For all of his multifold flaws, perhaps Donald Trump’s one singular virtue is that he is not a deficit hawk. In spite of what many have criticized as the president’s fiscal profligacy (in reality, because of it), the U.S. economy remains a conspicuous oasis of growth. As economist Paul Krugman has wryly noted, “[that] isn’t really a surprise given the GOP’s willingness to run huge budget deficits as long as Democrats don’t hold the White House.” Trump’s lack of attachment to prevailing economic orthodoxy, and the political imperatives of the 2020 election, likely mean he will pull out all the stops to try to prevent a recession next year in the U.S. The recent funding agreement secured with Congress on the debt ceiling will likely ensure another fiscal jolt to sustain some growth going forward into the first quarter of 2020, as the government budget deficit as a percentage of GDP is now running at around 4.5 percent.

Which is not to say that all is well in the U.S. It remains a major problem that the bulk of the fiscal policy benefits continue to flow to the top tier, which has the highest savings propensities, and historically unprecedented sums are going to the military. Consequently, the U.S. economy fails to get maximum bang for its fiscal buck (at least as far as the civilian economy goes). It doesn’t grow as efficiently as it could because more and more of the economy’s gains are being funneled to increasingly fewer people.

Moreover, the employment gains that the president has continued to hype have been overstated, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and companies are now cutting back on hours worked. Normally when the workweek is being cut like this, it signals a slowdown or, at the very least, diminishing confidence in future growth prospects on the part of the private sector. So Trump’s instinct to spend now might not be mistaken, but if past policy is any indication, the president is likely to misallocate in favor of his fellow oligarchs and generals. Only properly targeted fiscal policy that takes aim at raising living standards and delivering the public investments in education, technology and infrastructure will deliver real long-term prosperity for all of us, not just the privileged few.

To reiterate, this is a job for elected officials, not central banking technocrats. At this stage, in fact, ineffective monetary policy is making things worse. Central bankers are perpetuating a perverse risk-reward asymmetry as a consequence of this very low interest rate policy, which is also death for financial institutions. This is a profound irony, considering the degree to which central bankers have consistently prioritized the interests of finance over other parts of the economy. And while a shrinkage of finance relative to the rest of GDP may be good for the rest of us, absent a fundamental philosophical change in overall policy (especially on the fiscal front), we will still be facing an environment characterized by wage stagnation, nonexistent job security, rising inequality, and subpar growth potential, all the while continuing to reward irresponsible economic behavior.

The policy world needs to change course and do it quickly. However, the presence of negative yields (and all the implications that flow from that) suggests that we’re still a long way off from that happening.

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Neoliberalism: Political success, economic failure

Inauguration parade (January 20, 1981). As Reagan read his inauguration address, 52 U.S. hostages (held by Iran for 444 days) were set free. Wikipedia image

Written by Robert Kuttner / The American Prospect August 3, 2019

Since the late 1970s, we’ve had a grand experiment to test the claim that free markets really do work best. This resurrection occurred despite the practical failure of laissez-faire in the 1930s, the resulting humiliation of free-market theory, and the contrasting success of managed capitalism during the three-decade postwar boom.

Yet when growth faltered in the 1970s, libertarian economic theory got another turn at bat. This revival proved extremely convenient for the conservatives who came to power in the 1980s. The neoliberal counterrevolution, in theory and policy, has reversed or undermined nearly every aspect of managed capitalism—from progressive taxation, welfare transfers, and antitrust, to the empowerment of workers and the regulation of banks and other major industries.

Neoliberalism’s premise is that free markets can regulate themselves; that government is inherently incompetent, captive to special interests, and an intrusion on the efficiency of the market; that in distributive terms, market outcomes are basically deserved; and that redistribution creates perverse incentives by punishing the economy’s winners and rewarding its losers. So government should get out of the market’s way.

By the 1990s, even moderate liberals had been converted to the belief that social objectives can be achieved by harnessing the power of markets. Intermittent periods of governance by Democratic presidents slowed but did not reverse the slide to neoliberal policy and doctrine. The corporate wing of the Democratic Party approved.

Now, after nearly half a century, the verdict is in. Virtually every one of these policies has failed, even on their own terms. Enterprise has been richly rewarded, taxes have been cut, and regulation reduced or privatized. The economy is vastly more unequal, yet economic growth is slower and more chaotic than during the era of managed capitalism. Deregulation has produced not salutary competition, but market concentration. Economic power has resulted in feedback loops of political power, in which elites make rules that bolster further concentration.

The culprit isn’t just “markets”—some impersonal force that somehow got loose again. This is a story of power using theory. The mixed economy was undone by economic elites, who revised rules for their own benefit. They invested heavily in friendly theorists to bless this shift as sound and necessary economics, and friendly politicians to put those theories into practice.

Recent years have seen two spectacular cases of market mispricing with devastating consequences: the near-depression of 2008 and irreversible climate change. The economic collapse of 2008 was the result of the deregulation of finance. It cost the real U.S. economy upwards of $15 trillion (and vastly more globally), depending on how you count, far more than any conceivable efficiency gain that might be credited to financial innovation. Free-market theory presumes that innovation is necessarily benign. But much of the financial engineering of the deregulatory era was self-serving, opaque, and corrupt—the opposite of an efficient and transparent market.

The existential threat of global climate change reflects the incompetence of markets to accurately price carbon and the escalating costs of pollution. The British economist Nicholas Stern has aptly termed the worsening climate catastrophe history’s greatest case of market failure. Here again, this is not just the result of failed theory. The entrenched political power of extractive industries and their political allies influences the rules and the market price of carbon. This is less an invisible hand than a thumb on the scale. The premise of efficient markets provides useful cover.

The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to society’s most powerful people—as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab. The British political economist Colin Crouch captured this anomaly in a book nicely titled The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Why did neoliberalism not die? As Crouch observed, neoliberalism failed both as theory and as policy, but succeeded superbly as power politics for economic elites.

The neoliberal ascendance has had another calamitous cost—to democratic legitimacy. As government ceased to buffer market forces, daily life has become more of a struggle for ordinary people. The elements of a decent middle-class life are elusive—reliable jobs and careers, adequate pensions, secure medical care, affordable housing, and college that doesn’t require a lifetime of debt. Meanwhile, life has become ever sweeter for economic elites, whose income and wealth have pulled away and whose loyalty to place, neighbor, and nation has become more contingent and less reliable.

Large numbers of people, in turn, have given up on the promise of affirmative government, and on democracy itself. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ours was widely billed as an era when triumphant liberal capitalism would march hand in hand with liberal democracy. But in a few brief decades, the ostensibly secure regime of liberal democracy has collapsed in nation after nation, with echoes of the 1930s.

As the great political historian Karl Polanyi warned, when markets overwhelm society, ordinary people often turn to tyrants. In regimes that border on neofascist, klepto-capitalists get along just fine with dictators, undermining the neoliberal premise of capitalism and democracy as complements. Several authoritarian thugs, playing on tribal nationalism as the antidote to capitalist cosmopolitanism, are surprisingly popular.

It’s also important to appreciate that neoliberalism is not laissez-faire. Classically, the premise of a “free market” is that government simply gets out of the way. This is nonsensical, since all markets are creatures of rules, most fundamentally rules defining property, but also rules defining credit, debt, and bankruptcy; rules defining patents, trademarks, and copyrights; rules defining terms of labor; and so on. Even deregulation requires rules. In Polanyi’s words, “laissez-faire was planned.”

The political question is who gets to make the rules, and for whose benefit. The neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman invoked free markets, but in practice the neoliberal regime has promoted rules created by and for private owners of capital, to keep democratic government from asserting rules of fair competition or countervailing social interests. The regime has rules protecting pharmaceutical giants from the right of consumers to import prescription drugs or to benefit from generics. The rules of competition and intellectual property generally have been tilted to protect incumbents. Rules of bankruptcy have been tilted in favor of creditors. Deceptive mortgages require elaborate rules, written by the financial sector and then enforced by government. Patent rules have allowed agribusiness and giant chemical companies like Monsanto to take over much of agriculture—the opposite of open markets. Industry has invented rules requiring employees and consumers to submit to binding arbitration and to relinquish a range of statutory and common-law rights.

Neoliberalism as Theory, Policy, and Power

It’s worth taking a moment to unpack the term “neoliberalism.” The coinage can be confusing to American ears because the “liberal” part refers not to the word’s ordinary American usage, meaning moderately left-of-center, but to classical economic liberalism otherwise known as free-market economics. The “neo” part refers to the reassertion of the claim that the laissez-faire model of the economy was basically correct after all.

Few proponents of these views embraced the term neoliberal. Mostly, they called themselves free-market conservatives. “Neoliberal” was a coinage used mainly by their critics, sometimes as a neutral descriptive term, sometimes as an epithet. The use became widespread in the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

To add to the confusion, a different and partly overlapping usage was advanced in the 1970s by the group around the Washington Monthly magazine. They used “neoliberal” to mean a new, less statist form of American liberalism. Around the same time, the term neoconservative was used as a self-description by former liberals who embraced conservatism, on cultural, racial, economic, and foreign-policy grounds. Neoconservatives were neoliberals in economics.

Beginning in the 1970s, resurrected free-market theory was interwoven with both conservative politics and significant investments in the production of theorists and policy intellectuals. This occurred not just in well-known conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, Cato, and the Manhattan Institute, but through more insidious investments in academia. Lavishly funded centers and tenured chairs were underwritten by the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and other far-right foundations to promote such variants of free-market theory as law and economics, public choice, rational choice, cost-benefit analysis, maximize-shareholder-value, and kindred schools of thought. These theories colonized several academic disciplines. All were variations on the claim that markets worked and that government should get out of the way.

Each of these bodies of sub-theory relied upon its own variant of neoliberal ideology. An intensified version of the theory of comparative advantage was used not just to cut tariffs but to use globalization as all-purpose deregulation. The theory of maximizing shareholder value was deployed to undermine the entire range of financial regulation and workers’ rights. Cost-benefit analysis, emphasizing costs and discounting benefits, was used to discredit a good deal of health, safety, and environmental regulation. Public choice theory, associated with the economist James Buchanan and an entire ensuing school of economics and political science, was used to impeach democracy itself, on the premise that policies were hopelessly afflicted by “rent-seekers” and “free-riders.”

Click here to read how Robert Kuttner has been unmasking the fallacies of neoliberalism for decades

Market failure was dismissed as a rare special case; government failure was said to be ubiquitous. Theorists worked hand in glove with lobbyists and with public officials. But in every major case where neoliberal theory generated policy, the result was political success and economic failure.

For example, supply-side economics became the justification for tax cuts, on the premise that taxes punished enterprise. Supposedly, if taxes were cut, especially taxes on capital and on income from capital, the resulting spur to economic activity would be so potent that deficits would be far less than predicted by “static” economic projections, and perhaps even pay for themselves. There have been six rounds of this experiment, from the tax cuts sponsored by Jimmy Carter in 1978 to the immense 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by Donald Trump. In every case some economic stimulus did result, mainly from the Keynesian jolt to demand, but in every case deficits increased significantly. Conservatives simply stopped caring about deficits. The tax cuts were often inefficient as well as inequitable, since the loopholes steered investment to tax-favored uses rather than the most economically logical ones. Dozens of America’s most profitable corporations paid no taxes.

Robert Bork’s “antitrust paradox,” holding that antitrust enforcement actually weakened competition, was used as the doctrine to sideline the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Supposedly, if government just got out of the way, market forces would remain more competitive because monopoly pricing would invite innovation and new entrants to the market. In practice, industry after industry became more heavily concentrated. Incumbents got in the habit of buying out innovators or using their market power to crush them. This pattern is especially insidious in the tech economy of platform monopolies, where giants that provide platforms, such as Google and Amazon, use their market power and superior access to customer data to out-compete rivals who use their platforms. Markets, once again, require rules beyond the benign competence of the market actors themselves. Only democratic government can set equitable rules. And when democracy falters, undemocratic governments in cahoots with corrupt private plutocrats will make the rules.

Human capital theory, another variant of neoliberal application of markets to partly social questions, justified deregulating labor markets and crushing labor unions. Unions supposedly used their power to get workers paid more than their market worth. Likewise minimum wage laws. But the era of depressed wages has actually seen a decline in rates of productivity growth. Conversely, does any serious person think that the inflated pay of the financial moguls who crashed the economy accurately reflects their contribution to economic activity? In the case of hedge funds and private equity, the high incomes of fund sponsors are the result of transfers of wealth and income from employees, other stakeholders, and operating companies to the fund managers, not the fruits of more efficient management.

There is a broad literature discrediting this body of pseudo-scholarly work in great detail. Much of neoliberalism represents the ever-reliable victory of assumption over evidence. Yet neoliberal theory lived on because it was so convenient for elites, and because of the inertial power of the intellectual capital that had been created. The well-funded neoliberal habitat has provided comfortable careers for two generations of scholars and pseudo-scholars who migrate between academia, think tanks, K Street, op-ed pages, government, Wall Street, and back again. So even if the theory has been demolished both by scholarly rebuttal and by events, it thrives in powerful institutions and among their political allies.

The Practical Failure of Neoliberal Policies

Financial deregulation is neoliberalism’s most palpable deregulatory failure, but far from the only one. Electricity deregulation on balance has increased monopoly power and raised costs to consumers, but has failed to offer meaningful “shopping around” opportunities to bring down prices. We have gone from regulated monopolies with predictable earnings, costs, wages, and consumer protections to deregulated monopolies or oligopolies with substantial pricing power. Since the Bell breakup, the telephone system tells a similar story of re-concentration, dwindling competition, price-gouging, and union-bashing.

Air travel has been a poster child for advocates of deregulation, but the actual record is mixed at best. Airline deregulation produced serial bankruptcies of every major U.S. airline, often at the cost of worker pay and pension funds. Ticket prices have declined on average over the past two decades, but the traveling public suffers from a crazy quilt of fares, declining service, shrinking seats and legroom, and exorbitant penalties for the perfectly normal sin of having to change plans. Studies have shown that fares actually declined at a faster rate in the 20 years before deregulation in 1978 than in the 20 years afterward, because the prime source of greater efficiency in airline travel is the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes. The roller-coaster experience of airline profits and losses has reduced the capacity of airlines to purchase more fuel-efficient aircraft, and the average age of the fleet keeps increasing. The use of “fortress hubs” to defend market pricing power has reduced the percentage of nonstop flights, the most efficient way to fly from one point to another.

Robert Bork’s spurious arguments that antitrust enforcement hurt competition became the basis for dismantling antitrust. Massive concentration resulted.

In addition to deregulation, three prime areas of practical neoliberal policies are the use of vouchers as “market-like” means to social goals, the privatization of public services, and the use of tax subsides rather than direct outlays. In every case, government revenues are involved, so this is far from a free market to begin with. But the premise is that market disciplines can achieve public purposes more efficiently than direct public provision.

The evidence provides small comfort for these claims. One core problem is that the programs invariably give too much to the for-profit middlemen at the expense of the intended beneficiaries. A related problem is that the process of using vouchers and contracts invites corruption. It is a different form of “rent-seeking”—pursuit of monopoly profits—than that attributed to government by public choice theorists, but corruption nonetheless. Often, direct public provision is far more transparent and accountable than a web of contractors.

A further problem is that in practice there is often far less competition than imagined, because of oligopoly power, vendor lock-in, and vendor political influence. These experiments in marketization to serve social goals do not operate in some Platonic policy laboratory, where the only objective is true market efficiency yoked to the public good. They operate in the grubby world of practical politics, where the vendors are closely allied with conservative politicians whose purposes may be to discredit social transfers entirely, or to reward corporate allies, or to benefit from kickbacks either directly or as campaign contributions.

Privatized prisons are a case in point. A few large, scandal-ridden companies have gotten most of the contracts, often through political influence. Far from bringing better quality and management efficiency, they have profited by diverting operating funds and worsening conditions that were already deplorable, and finding new ways to charge inmates higher fees for necessary services such as phone calls. To the extent that money was actually saved, most of the savings came from reducing the pay and professionalism of guards, increasing overcrowding, and decreasing already inadequate budgets for food and medical care.

A similar example is the privatization of transportation services such as highways and even parking meters. In several Midwestern states, toll roads have been sold to private vendors. The governor who makes the deal gains a temporary fiscal windfall, while drivers end up paying higher tolls often for decades. Investment bankers who broker the deal also take their cut. Some of the money does go into highway improvements, but that could have been done more efficiently in the traditional way via direct public ownership and competitive bidding.

Housing vouchers substantially reward landlords who use the vouchers to fill empty houses with poor people until the neighborhood gentrifies, at which point the owner is free to quit the program and charge market rentals. Thus public funds are used to underwrite a privately owned, quasi-social housing sector—whose social character is only temporary. No permanent social housing is produced despite the extensive public outlay. The companion use of tax incentives to attract passive investment in affordable housing promotes economically inefficient tax shelters, and shunts public funds into the pockets of the investors—money that might otherwise have gone directly to the housing.

The Affordable Care Act is a form of voucher. But the regulated private insurance markets in the ACA have not fully lived up to their promise, in part because of the extensive market power retained by private insurers and in part because the right has relentlessly sought to sabotage the program—another political feedback loop. The sponsors assumed that competition would lower costs and increase consumer choice. But in too many counties, there are three or fewer competing plans, and in some cases just one.

As more insurance plans and hospital systems become for-profit, massive investment goes into such wasteful activities as manipulation of billing, “risk selection,” and other gaming of the rules. Our mixed-market system of health care requires massive regulation to work with tolerable efficiency. In practice, this degenerates into an infinite regress of regulator versus commercial profit-maximizer, reminiscent of Mad magazine’s “Spy versus Spy,” with the industry doing end runs to Congress to further rig the rules. Straight-ahead public insurance such as Medicare is generally far more efficient.

An extensive literature has demonstrated that for-profit voucher schools do no better and often do worse than comparable public schools, and are vulnerable to multiple forms of gaming and corruption. Proprietors of voucher schools are superb at finding ways of excluding costly special-needs students, so that those costs are imposed on what remains of public schools; they excel at gaming test results. While some voucher and charter schools, especially nonprofit ones, sometimes improve on average school performance, so do many public schools. The record is also muddied by the fact that many ostensibly nonprofit schools contract out management to for-profit companies.

Tax preferences have long been used ostensibly to serve social goals. The Earned Income Tax Credit is considered one of the more successful cases of using market-like measures—in this case a refundable tax credit—to achieve the social goal of increasing worker take-home pay. It has also been touted as the rare case of bipartisan collaboration. Liberals get more money for workers. Conservatives get to reward the deserving poor, since the EITC is conditioned on employment. Conservatives get a further ideological win, since the EITC is effectively a wage subsidy from the government, but is experienced as a tax refund rather than a benefit of government.

Recent research, however, shows that the EITC is primarily a subsidy of low-wage employers, who are able to pay their workers a lot less than a market-clearing wage. In industries such as nursing homes or warehouses, where many workers qualified for the EITC work side by side with ones not eligible, the non-EITC workers get substandard wages. The existence of the EITC depresses the level of the wages that have to come out of the employer’s pocket.

Neoliberalism’s Influence on Liberals

As free-market theory resurged, many moderate liberals embraced these policies. In the inflationary 1970s, regulation became a scapegoat that supposedly deterred salutary price competition. Some, such as economist Alfred Kahn, President Carter’s adviser on deregulation, supported deregulation on what he saw as the merits. Other moderates supported neoliberal policies opportunistically, to curry favor with powerful industries and donors. Market-like policies were also embraced by liberals as a tactical way to find common ground with conservatives.

Several forms of deregulation—of airlines, trucking, and electric power—began not under Reagan but under Carter. Financial deregulation took off under Bill Clinton. Democratic presidents, as much as Republicans, promoted trade deals that undermined social standards. Cost-benefit analysis by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was more of a choke point under Barack Obama than under George W. Bush.

“Command and control” became an all-purpose pejorative for disparaging perfectly sensible and efficient regulation. “Market-like” became a fashionable concept, not just on the free-market right but on the moderate left. Cass Sunstein, who served as Obama’s anti-regulation czar,uses the example of “nudges” as a more market-like and hence superior alternative to direct regulation, though with rare exceptions their impact is trivial. Moreover, nudges only work in tandem with regulation.

There are indeed some interventionist policies that use market incentives to serve social goals. But contrary to free-market theory, the market-like incentives first require substantial regulation and are not a substitute for it. A good example is the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which used tradable emission rights to cut the output of sulfur dioxide, the cause of acid rain. This was supported by both the George H.W. Bush administration and by leading Democrats. But before the trading regime could work, Congress first had to establish permissible ceilings on sulfur dioxide output—pure command and control.

There are many other instances, such as nutrition labeling, truth-in-lending, and disclosure of EPA gas mileage results, where the market-like premise of a better-informed consumer complements command regulation but is no substitute for it. Nearly all of the increase in fuel efficiency, for example, is the result of command regulations that require auto fleets to hit a gas mileage target. The fact that EPA gas mileage figures are prominently disclosed on new car stickers may have modest influence, but motor fuels are so underpriced that car companies have success selling gas-guzzlers despite the consumer labeling.

Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, were big promoters of financial deregulation.

Politically, whatever rationale there was for liberals to make common ground with libertarians is now largely gone. The authors of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made no attempt to meet Democrats partway; they excluded the opposition from the legislative process entirely. This was opportunistic tax cutting for elites, pure and simple. The right today also abandoned the quest for a middle ground on environmental policy, on anti-poverty policy, on health policy—on virtually everything. Neoliberal ideology did its historic job of weakening intellectual and popular support for the proposition that affirmative government can better the lives of citizens and that the Democratic Party is a reliable steward of that social compact. Since Reagan, the right’s embrace of the free market has evolved from partly principled idealism into pure opportunism and obstruction.

Neoliberalism and Hyper-Globalism

The post-1990 rules of globalization, supported by conservatives and moderate liberals alike, are the quintessence of neoliberalism. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the use of fixed exchange rates and controls on speculative private capital, plus the creation of the IMFand World Bank, were intended to allow member countries to practice national forms of managed capitalism, insulated from the destructive and deflationary influences of short-term speculative private capital flows. As doctrine and power shifted in the 1970s, the IMF, the World Bank, and later the WTO, which replaced the old GATT, mutated into their ideological opposite. Rather than instruments of support for mixed national economies, they became enforcers of neoliberal policies.

The standard package of the “Washington Consensus” of approved policies for developing nations included demands that they open their capital markets to speculative private finance, as well as cutting taxes on capital, weakening social transfers, and gutting labor regulation and public ownership. But private capital investment in poor countries proved to be fickle. The result was often excessive inflows during the boom part of the cycle and punitive withdrawals during the bust—the opposite of the patient, long-term development capital that these countries needed and that was provided by the World Bank of an earlier era. During the bust phase, the IMFtypically imposes even more stringent neoliberal demands as the price of financial bailouts, including perverse budgetary austerity, supposedly to restore the confidence of the very speculative capital markets responsible for the boom-bust cycle.

Dozens of nations, from Latin America to East Asia, went through this cycle of boom, bust, and then IMF pile-on. Greece is still suffering the impact. After 1990, hyper-globalism also included trade treaties whose terms favored multinational corporations. Traditionally, trade agreements had been mainly about reciprocal reductions of tariffs. Nations were free to have whatever brand of regulation, public investment, or social policies they chose. With the advent of the WTO, many policies other than tariffs were branded as trade distorting, even as takings without compensation. Trade deals were used to give foreign capital free access and to dismantle national regulation and public ownership. Special courts were created in which foreign corporations and investors could do end runs around national authorities to challenge regulation for impeding commerce.

At first, the sponsors of the new trade regime tried to claim the successful economies of East Asia as evidence of the success of the neoliberal recipe. Supposedly, these nations had succeeded by pursuing “export-led growth,” exposing their domestic economies to salutary competition. But these claims were soon exposed as the opposite of what had actually occurred. In fact, Japan, South Korea, smaller Asian nations, and above all China had thrived by rejecting every major tenet of neoliberalism. Their capital markets were tightly regulated and insulated from foreign speculative capital. They developed world-class industries as state-led cartels that favored domestic production and supply. East Asia got into trouble only when it followed IMFdictates to throw open capital markets, and in the aftermath they recovered by closing those markets and assembling war chests of hard currency so that they’d never again have to go begging to the IMF. Enthusiasts of hyper-globalization also claimed that it benefited poor countries by increasing export opportunities, but as the success of East Asia shows, there is more than one way to boost exports—and many poorer countries suffered under the terms of the global neoliberal regime.

Nor was the damage confined to the developing world. As the work of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has demonstrated, democracy requires a polity. For better or for worse, the polity and democratic citizenship are national. By enhancing the global market at the expense of the democratic state, the current brand of hyper-globalization deliberately weakens the capacity of states to regulate markets, and weakens democracy itself.

When Do Markets Work?

The failure of neoliberalism as economic and social policy does not mean that markets never work. A command economy is even more utopian and perverse than a neoliberal one. The practical quest is for an efficient and equitable middle ground.

The neoliberal story of how the economy operates assumes a largely frictionless marketplace, where prices are set by supply and demand, and the price mechanism allocates resources to their optimal use in the economy as a whole. For this discipline to work as advertised, however, there can be no market power, competition must be plentiful, sellers and buyers must have roughly equal information, and there can be no significant externalities. Much of the 20th century was practical proof that these conditions did not describe a good part of the actual economy. And if markets priced things wrong, the market system did not aggregate to an efficient equilibrium, and depressions could become self-deepening. As Keynes demonstrated, only a massive jolt of government spending could restart the engines, even if market pricing was partly violated in the process.

Nonetheless, in many sectors of the economy, the process of buying and selling is close enough to the textbook conditions of perfect competition that the price system works tolerably well. Supermarkets, for instance, deliver roughly accurate prices because of the consumer’s freedom and knowledge to shop around. Likewise much of retailing. However, when we get into major realms of the economy with positive or negative externalities, such as education and health, markets are not sufficient. And in other major realms, such as pharmaceuticals, where corporations use their political power to rig the terms of patents, the market doesn’t produce a cure.

The basic argument of neoliberalism can fit on a bumper sticker. Markets work; governments don’t. If you want to embellish that story, there are two corollaries: Markets embody human freedom. And with markets, people basically get what they deserve; to alter market outcomes is to spoil the poor and punish the productive. That conclusion logically flows from the premise that markets are efficient. Milton Friedman became rich, famous, and influential by teasing out the several implications of these simple premises.

It is much harder to articulate the case for a mixed economy than the case for free markets, precisely because the mixed economy is mixed. The rebuttal takes several paragraphs. The more complex story holds that markets are substantially efficient in some realms but far from efficient in others, because of positive and negative externalities, the tendency of financial markets to create cycles of boom and bust, the intersection of self-interest and corruption, the asymmetry of information between company and consumer, the asymmetry of power between corporation and employee, the power of the powerful to rig the rules, and the fact that there are realms of human life (the right to vote, human liberty, security of one’s person) that should not be marketized.

And if markets are not perfectly efficient, then distributive questions are partly political choices. Some societies pay pre-K teachers the minimum wage as glorified babysitters. Others educate and compensate them as professionals. There is no “correct” market-derived wage, because pre-kindergarten is a social good and the issue of how to train and compensate teachers is a social choice, not a market choice. The same is true of the other human services, including medicine. Nor is there a theoretically correct set of rules for patents, trademarks, and copyrights. These are politically derived, either balancing the interests of innovation with those of diffusion—or being politically captured by incumbent industries.

Governments can in principle improve on market outcomes via regulation, but that fact is complicated by the risk of regulatory capture. So another issue that arises is market failure versus polity failure, which brings us back to the urgency of strong democracy and effective government.

After Neoliberalism

The political reversal of neoliberalism can only come through practical politics and policies that demonstrate how government often can serve citizens more equitably and efficiently than markets. Revision of theory will take care of itself. There is no shortage of dissenting theorists and empirical policy researchers whose scholarly work has been vindicated by events. What they need is not more theory but more influence, both in the academy and in the corridors of power. They are available to advise a new progressive administration, ifthat administration can get elected and if it refrains from hiring neoliberal advisers.

There are also some relatively new areas that invite policy innovation. These include regulation of privacy rights versus entrepreneurial liberties in the digital realm; how to think of the internet as a common carrier; how to update competition and antitrust policy as platform monopolies exert new forms of market power; how to modernize labor-market policy in the era of the gig economy; and the role of deeper income supplements as machines replace human workers.

The failed neoliberal experiment also makes the case not just for better-regulated capitalism but for direct public alternatives as well. Banking, done properly, especially the provision of mortgage finance, is close to a public utility. Much of it could be public. A great deal of research is done more honestly and more cost-effectively in public, peer-reviewed institutions such as the NIHthan by a substantially corrupt private pharmaceutical industry. Social housing often is more cost-effective than so-called public-private partnerships. Public power is more efficient to generate, less prone to monopolistic price-gouging, and friendlier to the needed green transition than private power. The public option in health care is far more efficient than the current crazy quilt in which each layer of complexity adds opacity and cost. Public provision does require public oversight, but that is more straightforward and transparent than the byzantine dance of regulation and counter-regulation.

The two other benefits of direct public provision are that the public gets direct evidence of government delivering something of value, and that the countervailing power of democracy to harness markets is enhanced. A mixed economy depends above all on a strong democracy—one even stronger than the democracy that succumbed to the corrupting influence of economic elites and their neoliberal intellectual allies beginning half a century ago. The antidote to the resurrected neoliberal fable is the resurrection of democracy—strong enough to tame the market in a way that tames it for keeps.

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-june-24-2019/

distortion of adam smith

predistribution vs re-

free mkt pretend that mkt/invis hand only rational/objective sys, but author says myth, only exists in law of jungle, strong wins;

apple tech created by govt, stolen/used by apple, $ stashed in ireland no/3 ppl (citizens of no cty?) to hide 9b$ from tax 2012.

Can American Capitalism Survive?: Why Greed Is Not Good ...

https://www.amazon.com/Can-American-Capitalism-Survive.../dp/125018598X

As a result, Americans are losing faith that a free market economy is the best system. In Can American Capitalism Survive?, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steven Pearlstein chronicles our descent and challenges the theories being taught in business schools and exercised in boardrooms around the country.

Can American Capitalism Survive? | Steven Pearlstein | Macmillan

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250185983

"If anyone can save capitalism from the capitalists, it's Steven Pearlstein. This lucid, brilliant book refuses to abandon capitalism to those who believe ...

Book review: Steven Pearlstein's 'Can American Capitalism Survive?'

https://www.brookings.edu/.../book-review-steven-pearlsteins-can-american-capitalism...

Jan 16, 2019 - Isabel Sawhill reviews Steven Pearlstein, which looks at whether capitalism can survivethe current moment.

Book review of Can American Capitalism Survive?: Why Greed Is Not ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/...can-capitalism.../30f50182-aad5-11e8-b1da-ff7faa6...

Oct 11, 2018 - Steven Pearlstein surveys our economic landscape and ponders the survival of capitalism.

Steven Pearlstein: Can American Capitalism Survive ...

https://www.commonwealthclub.org/.../steven-pearlstein-can-american-capitalism-surv...

As seen with his latest book, Can American Capitalism Survive?, Steven Pearlstein's critique of capitalism falls in line with this trend. A Pulitzer Prize-winning ...

Can American capitalism survive? Steven Pearlstein on the perils of ...

https://www.vox.com/2019/1/2/.../american-capitalism-neoliberalism-steven-pearlstein

Jan 2, 2019 - A new book explores whether capitalism can be saved from itself.

CAN AMERICAN CAPITALISM SURVIVE? by Steven Pearlstein ...

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/.../steven-pearlstein/can-american-capitalism-survive/

Jun 27, 2018 - Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post economics journalist Pearlstein examines our dominant economic system and finds it sorely wanting.

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519 mma

Fox Business had an entire week of capitalism vs. socialism programming, and it was absurd. Large parts of it were just billionaires lecturing about how bad it would be to take on income inequality. At one point, actor Dean Cain absurdly claimed that "being politically connected ... doesn't work well in capitalism."

ref

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/05/22/ever-heard-ussr-review-fox-business-capitalism-vs-socialism-week/223772

From May 13-17, several shows on Fox Business joined in a week-long theme of “Capitalism vs. Socialism,” purporting to debate the merits and pitfalls of each economic system, which included a town hall on Thursday afternoon. Commentary during the themed segments was dominated by wealthy people arguing against strawman representations of socialism, condescendingly giving advice to the young socialists, defending income inequality as a good thing, tokenizing the suffering of Venezuela, and downplaying the economic struggles of poor Americans.

The week-long coverage came at a time when the American public is confused about what “socialism” is, in part because of decades of demonization of the term. And Fox Business didn’t do much to set the record straight.

[vid]

Misunderstanding socialism

Fox Business’ themed week was predominantly devoted to attacking socialism, despite a constantly changing definition of what commentators meant by “socialism.” Throughout the week, Fox figures and guests misleadingly characterized socialism as “participation trophies,” worker-run grifts, and a demand for identical salaries regardless of job or position.

Actor Dean Cain described socialism as asking someone, “‘What do you want to do for a living?’ and if they give you an answer, tell them, ‘No, you’re going to be this instead.’ That’s what socialism is.”
Cain also bragged that his son “is a true, true capitalist” who “didn’t want to get a participation trophy, he wanted to get a championship,” which is “what you get with capitalism.” Cain added that “capitalism breeds hard work,” whereas “socialism, you get what you demand and how much can I take, how much can I fleece the system.” Cain commented at the end of his appearance that "being politically connected ... doesn't work well in capitalism."
Fox host Dagen McDowell cited “problems in public housing with children getting asthma here in New York or the Flint water crisis” as “problems created by government,” asking, “So how does more government fix those?” Progressive activist and author Nomiki Konst responded that “what you saw [in those two instances] was a conservative government create austerity,” which left residents with substandard public services in order to make wealthy people wealthier.
Host Stuart Varney claimed, “You give power to the workers … and you starve investment capital because it will not go to investment; it will always go to the workers. And that way, you run down the subway system.” Varney offered no basis for arguing that laborers would hoard profits instead of investing in their work. In fact, an ongoing analysis from the National Center for Employee Ownership shows that stocks from companies at least partially owned by employees are consistently outperforming the S&P 500: “In its first year, the [Employee Ownership Index] had a 30.3 percent return as compared to the S&P’s 15.5 percent return. As of mid-January 2019, the relative return is 28 percent to 12 percent.”
Varney bizarrely claimed, “Socialists always deprive companies of any kind of capital. All the money has to go to the workers, not to reinvestment in capital equipment. … So they don’t innovate; they don’t move forward. I think that’s the way it is.” Fox’s Jackie DeAngelis concurred, saying that “I think we answered the question” of whether or not the U.S. can “afford socialism.”
DeAngelis suggested that socialism was to blame for Brexit, because the Eurozone debt crisis had “the weaker countries in the system … pulling down the stronger countries.” She did not explain the comment further, although on-screen graphics compared the national debts of France and Italy.
Host Maria Bartiromo said to her guest Konst, “You just said a minute ago that it’s 1/10th of a percent at the top making all the money. So you must agree that everybody should make the same salary then.” Bartiromo also incorrectly insisted that Konst was “confusing capitalism and socialism” because she believes that every person should be “able to start their own business.”
Retired billionaire Foster Friess used a $100 bill as a prop to explain how socialism in health care would mean that his money goes to the government and “I lose complete control of my medical care. So, that medical care is probably the most important thing to people.”The $100 bill served no actual purpose other than to give Friess something to hold while he made his comment.
Bartiromo and Friess spent three minutes berating a socialist guest for supposedly believing that everyone should be paid the same regardless of their job, even though he repeatedly said that is not what he believes.
DeAngelis suggested that the Affordable Care Act was proof that socialism doesn’t work.DeAngelis claimed that the conservative-rooted ACA was “the closest that we’ve even come to having the conversation, implementing the reforms” of socialism, but after the ACA passed, “people actually didn’t get what they wanted. They ended up paying more.”
Bartiromo accused Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) of “taking advantage of people who really don’t understand” socialism.
Mattie Duppler of the National Taxpayers Union bizarrely claimed, “Socialism at its core ... enriches politicians, which is why we hear politicians talk a lot about socialism.” For comparison, in 2015, more than 50% of all members of Congress in the capitalist United States were millionaires. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “It would take the combined wealth of more than 18 American households to equal the value of a single federal lawmaker’s household.”
Former Clinton adviser Mark Penn claimed that 18-29 year olds are “falling prey to socialist rhetoric” because of their “different lifestyle where they go from college to roommates, and they don’t have full responsibility for 10 or 12 years.”
Fox’s Lisa Kennedy Montgomery presented a false binary choice between capitalism and “people in extreme poverty” to make the case “that things have gotten better” under capitalism. When New York City Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Bianca Cunningham replied that strong markets are “not translating to people’s actual material conditions,” Kennedy mocked her for using the term “living wage” and supporting a $15 minimum wage.
Failed Federal Reserve Board nominee Herman Cain incorrectly claimed the USSR stood for “United Soviet Socialist Republic.” USSR actually stood for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Claiming record income inequality is normal, even good

Fox Business hosts and guests readily argued that massive income inequality, rather than being an indictment of our economic system, is actually proof that capitalism works because the income gap is driven by the success of talented people. However, the income gap is driven by skyrocketing executive salaries regardless of ability, while workers’ real wages have essentially flatlined since 1978.

Economist Alan Greenspan: “The basic problem of inequality is the fact that people are born that way. We’re all born differently.” While Greenspan acknowledged that income inequality is “unfortunate for the stability of the system,” he also said, “It’s very difficult to do all that much [to remedy it] because you’re fighting a fundamental issue, which is human nature. We are doing the best we can.”
Friess: “We say we have a problem because of income inequality. If that’s the problem, then the American dream is a problem.”
Friess: “We talk about these ‘cronies on top.’ Yeah, friends of ours, Barbara and Craig Barrett, have given millions of dollars” to schools. Friess insisted that critics needed to “look at the $413 billion of philanthropy from these ‘bad guys.’”
PwC partner Mitch Roschelle claimed, “If we make the marginal tax rate 90%, we’re going to create more income inequality and not less.”
Fox’s Charles Payne called what his guest termed “the pitfalls of capitalism” an example of “rich people problems to a degree, right, because … even the poorest Americans live so much better” than people in other countries.

Wealthy people lecturing the less fortunate

From downplaying homelessness to suggesting that popular support for socialism is a false flag, multiple wealthy commentators on Fox Business’ “Capitalism vs. Socialism” week inadvertently revealed their own ignorance and cognitive dissonance regarding the magnitude of the problems poor and working-class Americans face.

American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks discussed the “moral case for the capitalist system” and initially said that capitalism has “a moral obligation” to end global poverty, but changed it mid-sentence to an “opportunity.”
Cain said that he disagreed with the argument that there are people who “don’t have food to eat and they don’t have shelter,” because “some homeless people choose not to go to” shelters and food banks. When challenged on his premise, Cain angrily replied, “I grew up taking biscuits to school for lunch with no meat. So don’t talk to me about people coming to school who don’t have food and this and that. It’s available if they go out and work for it like everybody else works for it.”
Billionaire John Catsimatidis suggested that the popular support for socialism is a false flag.Catsimatidis claimed, “Somebody is stirring the pot in our country and making these things happen. And we have to depend on the FBI or whoever to find out who is stirring this pot.” He also asked “who really funded” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and “how did they get into a position where they could be such large spokespeople for people that, who know if they really exist or don't exist.”
Varney admitted that he “was a socialist” at one point, until “I started to make a lot of money” and realized “I really do work for this.” Varney explained: “I was a socialist, and I was always jealous about those people who made a lot of money. And then I started to make a lot of money, and I realized, you know, I really do work for this. And my brains, drive, talent, and ability should be rewarded. And they were rewarded. And I’m damned if I’m going to take half of it and give it to socialists.”
Varney lectured an audience member that “my wealth, that I made by myself” benefitted his grandchildren, “and I’m not looking for anything off you.” When the audience member laughed at Varney’s commentary, he replied, “I don’t know what you’re laughing at young man, but you could learn something.”
Payne introduced Thomas Peterffy, “the richest man in Florida, one of the richest people on the planet,” who said he is “very, very much afraid of socialism” because of “regulation.” Peterffy said: “My fear is that economic success is getting out of the reach of people … because there is more and more federal, state, and local regulation and it is becoming very, very difficult for somebody to start a business and to grow a business. So for that reason, people I think believe that they are doomed to not being successful in their lives and therefore they turn around and look at socialism.”
The president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, told Varney that under socialism, “the people who’d be hurt the most are lower-income earners” because wealthy people will simply leave the country.

Socialism stifles innovation

Fox Business figures focused heavily on capitalism driving innovation but managed to almost completely miss the human point that these big tech companies’ innovation are often powered by workers facing ruthless, even lethal exploitation.

McDowell claimed that the reason Americans “pay much higher drug prices than the rest of the world” is because “Americans are the ones footing the bill for all the innovation.” The word “profit” was not mentioned in McDowell’s comment, even though in the third quarter of 2018, 14 top pharmaceutical companies recorded over $29 billion in profits. However, McDowell did say that the exorbitant drug prices Americans pay are “basically helping cure the rest of the world of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.”
DeAngelis: Socialism has “this problem with stifling innovation that doesn’t allow the ball to more forward. And that it what this is all about, right? It’s growing America.” DeAngelis did not mention who exactly does the “growing” in “growing America.”
Varney countered DeAngelis mentioning big technology companies as an example of pitfalls of capitalism by claiming the practices of such companies were actually “innovative [and] dynamic.” In response, DeAngelis walked back her claim. DeAngelis highlighted “anti-competitive practices” at Google and allegations that Amazon doesn’t pay its “fair share” of taxes as an example of capitalism’s excess. Varney replied that it was actually “a fine example of capitalism being innovative, dynamic, and a remarkable employer and creator of wealth,” and DeAngelis agreed, responding, “I think saying ‘capitalism gone wrong’ may be a little bit too strong.”
DeAngelis claimed that by “stifling competition [and] stifling innovation,” socialism prevents people “from innovating in the proper ways.” She then asked Varney to "imagine a world where there’s no Microsoft” and other companies like it that "create billions and billions of dollars in revenue [and] hundreds of thousands of jobs.” DeAngelis also raised the spectre of “state-run oil companies” and said that “pharmaceutical breakthroughs” only happen in the U.S., and not anywhere else, because of capitalism.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman: “Inequality is part of what makes capitalism work. If there’s not a reward for doing more, … you don’t get those inventions.” Bartiromo concurred and questioned “how many great innovations have we seen coming out of Europe” -- the birthplace of Spotify, ASOS, Skype, and many other successful tech companies.

Venezuela

Despite American conservatives’ as the latest example of socialism run amok, the extreme human tragedy there is an exception to socialist policies, not the rule: Elsewhere in South America, socialists have held power in both stable and unstable countries with both large and small economies, and ruin did not follow -- in fact, several of them have thrived, including Bolivia, which, like Venezuela, also nationalized the country’s top industry under an authoritarian president.

DeAngelis claimed that millennials support socialism only because they haven’t “seen it play out over time” and referenced Venezuela as one of the “extreme examples.”
DeAngelis: “Why do we need to speculate what socialism would look like when we can actually just look around the world at examples. … Let’s start with Venezuela.”
Catsimatidis: “We are fighting for the soul of America. … And to people that love socialism, you know what I said? ‘I’d buy you a one-way ticket to Venezuela. Enjoy it!’”
Duppler: “Venezuela’s a perfect example” of “how socialism generally plays o...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/us-billionaires-know-capitalism-is-broken-and-now-theyre-fearing-a-revolution/

The spate of far-left and far-right politicians being elected to office in the United States arguably speaks to a deep public distrust in how the political and economic system has failed average people, and focused all of its energy on the priorities and whims of a small class of billionaires.

A new deep dive by the Washington Post suggests that U.S. billionaires themselves are acutely aware of this divide — and are fearful that it could bring about the end, or at least the radical transformation, of American capitalism itself.

Tech billionaire Greg Larsen, for example, is reportedly worried that hot spots of business and investment like Silicon Valley are soaking up all the wealth. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” he said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger” — and he and Rep. Ro Khama (D-CA) fear this is politically unsustainable.

This sort of concentration makes American communities less livable — both communities that are being “left behind” with no jobs, and the communities like Silicon Valley that are gaining all the jobs only for the cost of living to skyrocket and become unaffordable for working people.

Nor is that the only potential issue. As technological capital increases and automation threatens huge segments of the economy, some entrepreneurs like OpenAI chairman Greg Brockman worry we may reach a point where human labor becomes unnecessary for the economy, and we may have to switch to a system where the government distributed profits directly to nonworkers through universal basic income for their survival.

Brockman compared it to the consumption of meat: “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,” he explained. Similarly, perhaps one day “we’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive.’”

All of this, however, is making billionaires like investor Seth Klarman uneasy. “I think we’re in the middle of a revolution — not a guns revolution — but a revolution where people on both extremes want to blow it up,” he suggested of politicians proposing huge transformations of the capitalist system like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), “and good things don’t happen to the vast majority of the population in a revolution.”

chris pod with we were told forever that cap'l and democ were wed, but now messy divorce

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/fk-capitalism-report-shows-democratic-socialists-of-america-are-on-the-rise-in-iowa/

Although President Donald Trump has been using the word “socialist” to tar and feather the Democratic Party and rally his base, “socialist” is a label that most Democrats reject. Nonetheless, there has been a lot of discussion of “socialism” and what it does or doesn’t mean—and an article written by Elaine Godfrey and published in the Atlantic on Friday takes a close look at the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in, of all places, Iowa.

Iowa is much more of a swing state than its deeply Republican neighbor to the west, Nebraska. President Barack Obama won Iowa in both 2008 and 2012, while Trump carried the midwestern state in 2016. Iowa, Godfrey acknowledges, seems an unlikely place for the DSA to be making inroads, yet she notes that Iowa native Caroline Schoonover heads a DSA chapter that “has about 160 members” and “didn’t exist before” 2016. In fact, Godfrey writes, “none of Iowa’s DSA groups did.”

For her article, Godfrey interviewed Schoonover and other DSA activists in Iowa and found that they were motivated by issues like “climbing rents and high student-loan debt” and have concluded that “the cause of their financial woes is capitalism.” Their “solution,” Godfrey writes, is to “replace” capitalism “with something else.”

There are some caveats in Godfrey’s article, however. DSA members in Iowa, she writes, don’t necessarily have an across-the-board view of exactly what “socialism” means—and “under the DSA umbrella,” she says, “one can expect to find all types of political philosophies, including Marxists, Leninists, communists and even libertarian socialists.”

But if all of these DSA members have something in common, according to Godfrey, it is that “socialism, to them, means a fairer world—one where every person is born with a guaranteed right to things like health care and education.”

A few members of the Democratic Party who were elected in the 2018 midterms openly identify with the term “socialist,” including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who has been a member of the DSA. And her ally, Sen. Bernie Sanders, describes himself as a “democratic socialist.” But as Godfrey points out in her article, most Democrats don’t identify as socialists—even liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren has described herself as “capitalist to my bones.” And the DSA members that Godfrey spoke to in Iowa consider themselves to be quite separate from the Democratic Party.

Schoonover, for example, told Godfrey, “We don’t talk about Bernie. He’s not a factor in our organizing at all…. We’re not a Bernie Sanders fan club just waiting for our chance to finally knock doors for him.”

Godfrey shows a contrast between Warren’s liberalism and DSA members. Warren is vehemently critical of crony capitalism and abuses in the banking sector but doesn’t consider capitalism itself to be the problem. And in contrast to Warren’s “capitalist to my bones” comment, Godfrey quotes Iowa-based DSA activist Rob Shaw as saying, without hesitation, “Fuck capitalism.”

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https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-april-5-2019/

fossil fuel driven? late stage capitalism?

privatize benefits, socialize costs eg tech co's use public funded tech

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-april-5-2019/

Updates on LA strippers strike, Trump fails to end US trade deficit, UN reports on protests against capitalist inequality and gov’t repression of those protests, GM closes Lordstown, Ohio factory with tragic social effects, Trump and FED reduce bank regulation after 10 years of massive bank misdeeds. Interview with journalist Bob Hennellyon underpaid EMTs and right-wing hostility to Green New Deal’s proposal for a universal right to a job.

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319 raw story

Capitalism has lost its appeal all of a sudden among younger Americans, and even some of the staunchest free market evangelists understand why.

Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, looks at recent books for Project Syndicate by a pair of prominent economists that critique capitalism and prescribe new solutions to reduce wealth inequality.’

Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India who teaches at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argues that communities no longer are capable of holding the state or market in check.

Rajan traces that unraveling to around 1970, after the global recovery from World War II began to wind down and governments had little to offer but vague promises that resulted in additional borrowing.

That left governments in Europe and North America too weak to deal with the information and communication revolutions, and they were unable to help workers manage the disruption, Rajan argued, and corporations exploited that employee vulnerability to enrich shareholders and managers.

Oxford University economist Paul Collier traces a similar pattern in Britain by focusing on Imperial Chemical Industries, which altered its mission in the 1990s from being “the finest chemical company in the world” to extracting shareholder value.

Collier finds that Britain’s talent and income became increasingly concentrated in London, which leaves behind angry and gutted communities, and Rajan also argued that the elite minority had wrecked communities by gobbling up the market and the state to enrich themselves.

“Behind today’s populist upheavals is a widespread recognition that the economy no longer serves the public good or even the interests of most of its participants,” Deaton concluded. “To understand why, one must identify what has been lost amid so much material technological gain.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-a-failing-capitalist-system-is-allowing-amazon-to-cripple-america/

Capitalism is failing in America, and Amazon is both the cause and beneficiary of much of the breakdown.

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Jeff Bezos said, “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” He might have added three capitalist practices familiar to his company: (1) Pay no taxes; (2) Drive competitors out of business; and (3) Exploit workers.

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Anarcho-Capitalism: The Sordid Details of Amazon’s Tax Avoidance

In 2018, according to its own SEC filings, Amazon claimed a refund on its $11 billion in U.S. profits. It did the same on nearly $6 billion in profits in 2017. The company has reportedly positioned itself to avoid even more future taxes with unspecified tax credits.

In the most extreme form of capitalism taxes do not exist. This is called “anarcho-capitalism.” Among all corporations, Amazon may be the leading advocate of this philosophy. They haven’t paid federal income tax for the past two years. They set up headquarters in Luxembourg for tax breaks that are now being challenged. They claim minimal profits on hundreds of billions in revenue, resulting in one of the lowest profit margins among major corporations, and thus much less tax. Of course, Amazon claims to be using tax credits from past losses that stemmed from investment in research and development (R&D). But the company appears to overstate and obfuscate the R&D numbers. Its only ‘explanation’ of R&D in its annual report comes in an ambiguously all-encompassing section called “Technology and Content.” Plus, that’s no excuse to dodge taxes. Walmart and Google each spent nearly $12 billion on technology in 2018, almost as much as Amazon, but Walmart paid 28 percent in federal taxes, and Google 14 percent.

We learn much more at the state level. Amazon has played one state against another for tax breaks over the years, most recently negotiating an estimated $3 billion tax credit from the state of New York before residents rebelled — as well they should have. The Economic Policy Institute found that employment levels don’t significantly change in communities with new Amazon warehouses, and a recent study by The Economist concluded that the opening of a fulfillment center in a given community actually depresses warehouse wages. Furthermore, as an indication of the folly of wooing corporations with state subsidies, Upjohn research found that in the great majority of cases incentives are not even a part of a company’s decision to locate in a given area.

Most insidiously, Amazon’s seemingly fair-minded acceptance of state sales taxes likely has a dark side. For years the company fought the state tax as it built a competitive advantage over smaller firms. Now that it’s firmly established, online variety and convenience have replaced price as the primary incentives for most consumers, and so Amazon now supports a sales tax, very likely to discourage competition. Evidence comes from one study that found Walmart 34 percent cheaper than Amazon in four of five product categories.

Monopoly: Amazon and the Killing of Competition

Kiplinger compiled a remarkable list of 49 companies, many of them familiar to almost all Americans, that are in danger of being driven out of business by Amazon. One of them, Toys ‘r’ Us, has already succumbed. Sears is nearly gone. Others include Barnes & Noble, Kroger, Rite Aid, Best Buy, Etsy, Yelp, Pandora, and even stalwarts like Target and Trader Joe’s and UPS and Fedex and Office Depot and Staples. Investopedia agrees, adding Macy’s and even Walgreen’s and CVS and Costco.

In a summary of “The Myth of Capitalism,” by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, it is argued that “an increase in market concentration across the United States has resulted in a system that is not true capitalism, since freedom is being restricted…Amazon is crushing retailers…It can determine what products can and cannot sell on its platform, and it competes with any customer that encounters success.” Columbia University and UN economist Howard Steven Friedman adds, “Monopolies are one example of capitalism failing. Monopolies have virtually no competition and can dictate prices to their customers unless they are restricted by regulators.”

Of course, along the way Amazon has destroyed or dismantled or discouraged many smaller businesses. Like the jewelry store in New Mexico owned by Candelora Versace, who said her customers have started buying gems online, in part to avoid state taxes, and then visiting her store just for the settings. She considers the far-reaching effects of Amazon’s tax avoidance: “The roads don’t pay themselves. The schools don’t fund themselves…When they don’t want to pay the tax, it cheats us.”

Labor in Decline: The Economic and Physical Abuse of Amazon’s Workers

Amazon warehouse workers make about $13 per hour. That’s not a living wage for a U.S. family of four, and not even for a single person in many areas of the country. So the employees of this super-rich company turn to food stamps, letting U.S. taxpayers take care of them. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, one in ten Amazon workers were recently on SNAP. In Arizona, one in three. Along with the low pay comes intolerable working conditions, with overheated warehouses and employees using water bottles to avoid bathroom breaks in order to meet their schedules. And worse, employees have suffered workplace injuries that leave them homeless, disabled, or unable to earn an income. Employees are also forced to deal with constant surveillance, anti-union pressure, and the threat of losing their jobs. Much of Amazon’s over-hyped R&D spending is focused on the development of robots to replace human workers.

Capitalism has failed workers, and it has caused a surge in inequality that gets worse with each passing year. In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty showed that for 40 years, from 1970 to 2010, labor’s share of national income (wages and salaries) has declined. Stanford research reveals that “the declining labor share at the economy level is driven by the growth of large firms.” Like Amazon.

A Good Reason for Democratic Socialism

There may be no better argument for democratic socialism in America than the way individual state leaders have been falling over each other trying to lure corporations to their states with tax subsidies. We Americans have never been able to cooperate in ending this pointless waste of tax money that should be going to education and jobs and infrastructure.

Does Jeff Bezos have any sense of social responsibility for all the societal benefits heaped upon his company? Amazon has arguably benefited more than any other company from what The Economist calls the “game-changing breakthroughs” of the Internet, which was built with our tax money through the National Science Foundation since the 1980s, and before that by the taxpayer-funded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Fortune refers to Amazon’s actions as “extracting public money for its own enrichment.”

But perhaps the Amazon boss doesn’t care. According to The Atlantic, “Bezos has argued that there is not enough philanthropic need on earth for him to spend his billions on.” If that truly reflects the man’s attitude, it shows an incomprehensible ignorance or disdain on his part. Bezos himself said, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel…I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.”

Good work, Jeff. Benefit from seventy years of public inventiveness and productivity and funding, and then fly off to the skies before you have to pay for it.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/heres-why-capitalism-vs-socialism-is-a-false-choice/

Economic power is—and always has been—the foundation of political power. Those who control the peoples’ means of living rule.

In a democracy, however, each person must have a voice in the control and management of the means of their living. That requires more than a vote expressing a preference for which establishment-vetted candidate will be in power for the next few years.

My previous column, “Confronting the Great American Myth,” distinguished true democracy from government by the wealthy, a plutocracy. Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Constitution was written by representatives of the new nation’s wealthy class to keep people like themselves in power.

On Jan. 4, the newly elected Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced HR1, the For the People Act of 2019. Its aim is to make voting easier, reduce the influence of big money, and curtail gerrymandering. Even before it was introduced, the champions of having rich people rule were falsely characterizing it as an attack on the freedom of speech of ordinary Americans.

The provisions of HR1 represent an important step in a transition from the plutocracy we have to the democracy most Americans want. Unfortunately, political gridlock assures that HR1 has no chance of becoming law until at least after the 2020 election. Yet the popular yearning for democracy reflected in that bill makes this a propitious moment for a serious conversation about what a true democracy might look like and why it would be a good idea.

We stand at an epic choice point for our nation and for humanity. The plutocracy now in place has put us on a path to self-extinction—a future with no winners, rich or poor. We must now seek a path that restores the health of Earth’s regenerative systems while securing equity, material sufficiency, peace, and spiritual abundance for all—exactly the opposite of the plutocrats’ drive to secure the power, privilege, and material excess for themselves. This makes democracy far more than just a good idea; it is now an imperative.

The power of plutocracy depends on keeping the people divided against each other along gender, racial, religious, or other fault lines. The goal is to divert our attention from themselves so that they can maintain their power and continue to amass wealth.

Champions of plutocracy would also have us believe that we must choose between two options: capitalism (private ownership and management) or socialism (government ownership and management). They prefer we not notice that in their most familiar forms, both capitalism and socialism feature an undemocratic concentration of control over the means of living in the hands of the few. Democracy is essential for either to work effectively for the benefit of all.

Plutocrats generally favor capitalism, because in the extreme form we now experience, it supports virtually unlimited concentrations of wealth and power.Its practitioners are also drawn by capitalism’s ideological claim that unregulated markets will assure that the presumed benefits of a growing economy will be shared by everyone, and so the rich need not bear any personal responsibility beyond maximizing their personal financial gain.

The critical economic and political question for humanity is not whether our means of living will be controlled by corporations or government, but whether control will be concentrated for the benefit of the few or dispersed, with benefits shared by everyone.

Support for the needed economic transition can come from many places. Just as people are not necessarily racist because they are White or misogynistic because they are male, people do not necessarily become plutocrats just because they are rich. Many wealthy people work actively for economic and political democracy and support radical wealth redistribution, including through support of progressive taxation and significant taxing of inherited wealth.

The political and economic democracy we seek cannot be easily characterized as either capitalist or socialist. It is a system of substantially self-reliant local economies composed of locally owned enterprises and community-secured safety nets with responsibilities shared by families, charities, and governments. Such a system facilitates self-organizing to create healthy, happy, and productive communities.

In our complex and interconnected world, this system will require national and global institutions responsive to the people’s will and well-being to support cooperation and sharing among communities, but the real power will be dispersed locally. There would be ample room for competition among local communities to be the most beautiful, healthy, democratic, creative, and generous. There is no place for colonizing the resources of others or for predatory corporations.

These communities will most likely feature cooperative and family ownership of businesses. They will also recognize the rights of nature and their shared responsibility to care for the commons and to share its gifts.

The rules of plutocracy evolved over thousands of years. We have far less time to come up with suitable rules for democratic alternatives. That search must quickly become a centerpiece of public discussion.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/a-glossary-of-exploitive-economics-lean-in-and-8-other-bad-business-buzzwords-that-should-be-phased-out/

...Moral Hazard:  The cynical belief that you will automatically behave irresponsibly if not held accountable for your actions, especially in terms of financial responsibility; a moral pretext for demolishing the public sphere; the belief that everyone is a feckless opportunist.

The concept of moral hazard originated in insurance economics. It argues that once people are protected by insurance (say home and contents) they’ll automatically engage in riskier behavior than normal (leaving their homes unlocked, for example). The theory assumes that people are not only stupid but have no sense of civic responsibility. The rationale has been deployed by neocons to lay ruin to the welfare state. Unemployment insurance incentivizes work avoidance. Public health care encourages unhealthy lifestyle choices, etc. We could follow the rationale reductio ad absurdum: public fire brigades shouldn’t be funded because they inadvertently encourage people to be careless in the kitchen, and might result in them burning down their homes.

Office Email: An electronic communication system that has become ubiquitous among the modern workforce; an instrument for spreading wage-theft and unpaid overtime; something 50 percent of the workforce now “check” outside of office hours.

What is colloquially called the “tyranny of email,” started life as a cool invention by Ray Tomlinson in 1971

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/how-unchecked-capitalism-and-massive-inequality-made-america-bully-nation/

labor history

guide to the systemic origins of America's bully culture.

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The following is an excerpt from the new book Bully Nation by Charles Derber & Yale R. Magrass (University Press of Kansas, 2016):

On October 1, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that a Burger King franchise in Ferndale, Michigan, near Detroit, had bullied a part-time worker, Claudette Wilson, by sending her home two hours early for not positioning pickles correctly on her burgers. As Judge Arthur J. Anchan put it, the company illegally sent Wilson home for failing to “put pickles on her sandwiches in perfect squares.”

Such absurd but intimidating and humiliating bullying of a very low-paid worker was retaliation aimed at intimidating Wilson from continuing her efforts to organize low-wage Burger King workers. A few days earlier, she had stopped at the store to ask workers coming off their shifts to fill out a questionnaire about their wages. A manager had written her up for violating the store’s “loitering and solicitation” policy, something that Judge Anchan also said was “protected activity” and thus illegal. Wilson said she had not done the pickles quite perfectly because of her anger about the earlier unfair treatment.

The story gets bigger because Wilson was one of several workers, including Romell Frazier, who were members of a group called D15, part of the Fast Food Forward Network trying to unionize Michigan Burger Kings. Wilson’s “pickle problem” was really part of a larger and more serious pickle faced by the workers. The Michigan Burger King franchisee was systematically going after workers who were part of D15 and threatening them with sanctions, including firing.

Frazier, for example, had talked up a union and had spoken about striking to his fellow workers. A manager told him that “if he was talking about striking again, he’d soon be picking up his paycheck,” a clear threat intended to bully any workers who were engaged in organizing others. The company claimed that it had the right to prohibit workers from talking about unionizing on the job, but such activity is actually “protected, concerted activity” under the law. It’s against the law to punish any workers for discussing unionizing or other forms of organizing. And as Judge Anchan underscored in his decision, the workplace is the “particularly appropriate place” for such talk and distribution of material because it’s “the one place where employees clearly share common interests”; further, he said, “this is particularly true in the instant case where some of the workers are lower paid individuals who commute to work via bus.”

The pickle gets even bigger because the incident took place during a nationwide organizing campaign for fast-food workers. D15 and the Fast Food Organizing Network were partly funded by the nation’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The union was a leading supporter of the grassroots organizing spreading like a prairie fire among workers not only at Burger King but also at McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other fast-food chains. As the workers organized for unions and a higher minimum wage, the big companies were striking back. The threats and retaliation aimed at workers such as Wilson and Frazier might be called “capital bullying”—a type of bullying that is built into the DNA of corporate capitalism and that occurs at workplaces everyday, much like the pervasive bullying happening daily in schoolyards.

Capital Bullying: Capitalism, Competition, and Winners versus Losers—How the Rich Bully the Poor

Though the bullying of vulnerable kids in schools gets a lot of attention, the bullying of vulnerable workers usually is ignored. If the mass media mention it at all, they typically parrot the corporate view that the agitating workers are troublemakers who deserve punishment. The failure of scholars in the “bullying field” to see even illegal (not to mention legal) corporate threats, intimidation, and retaliation as bullying is another profound failure of the psychological paradigm that views bullying only as a “kid thing” in schools. Such scholars are blind to the adult and institutionalized bullying that is endemic to our economic system.

We refer to the bullying against workers such as Wilson and Frazier, whether pertaining to something as small as Wilson’s pickle bullying or as big as being fired en masse, as capital bullying, meaning bullying inherent to Western and especially American capitalism. We must move from the micropsychological to the macrosocietal paradigm to discuss capitalism as a bullying system. Only a macroanalysis can analyze capital bullying and help create structural changes to reduce it, a deeply destructive type of bullying carried out mainly by corporations. The bullying problem at Burger King and all the big fast-food firms is not a result of the personal psychological problems of the managers; rather, it is something that is systemically dictated and enacted no matter what the psychology of management.

Any economic or social system based on power inequality creates potential or latent bullying that often translates into active bullying, by institutions and individuals. So this is not a problem exclusive to capitalism; bullying was brutally manifest in systems claiming to be socialist or communist, such as the Soviet Union, and it is also obviously a major problem in China today. But capitalism is the dominant system currently and has its own, less recognized, institutionalized bullying propensities. They are not discussed in the academic bullying literature, but they are directly or indirectly responsible for much of the bullying we see in American schoolyards and among both kids and adults.

In many cases, corporate institutional bullying should not be viewed as personal bullying because the managers involved, though they are threatening and harming workers, are being required to act as agents of the company. As individuals, they may not deliberately be seeking to humiliate or harm their workers. Such “decent” or “nice” managers may cut wages or fire workers, but in doing so, they are carrying out institutional imperatives and orders rather than fulfilling personal motives to dominate, intimidate, and humiliate.

The greatest early critic of capitalism, Karl Marx, firmly believed that unequal power is inherent in capitalist systems—and that this creates power hierarchies and market structures that require institutional bullying.

Capitalism puts ownership of capital into the hands of one small group—the “capitalist class,” often dubbed“ the 1%” today. Most of the rest of the population is part of a huge underpaid working class or a growing poverty-stricken and jobless group, with no or very little capital or power. Marx argued that this unequal class power is the essential capitalist ingredient for profit, enabling capitalists—and specifically their corporations—to bully workers into accepting the wages and working conditions dictated by the owners. Put another way, workers have to accept their inferior position, a hallmark of bullying on which the entire system depends.

Thomas Piketty, in his blockbuster best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has spread public awareness of capitalism as an inequality machine. In his book, Piketty presents data about the distribution of capital ownership in more than twenty countries over the last three centuries. He finds that capitalism, with only one exception in the last 300 years, has created wide, sustained, and often extreme inequalities of both income and wealth. Piketty argues that this does not reflect markets gone wrong; rather, it is the way capitalist markets are designed to work.

Piketty is very explicit about this: “Specifically, it is important to note that [inequality] has nothing to do with any market imperfection. Quite the contrary: the more perfect the capital market (in the economist’s sense), the more likely” that inequality will be created and grow. There are no self-correcting market mechanisms to limit inequality, he argues, but only political interventions that are difficult to achieve. “It is possible,” he says,“to imagine public institutions and policies that would counter the effects of this implacable logic: for instance, a progressive global tax on capital. . . . It is unfortunately likely that actual responses to the problem—including various nationalist responses—will in practice be far more modest and less effective.”

Put simply, inequality in wealth and power is baked into capitalist systems, and it is fundamental to structural and institutional bullying. But why does this inequality lead capitalists to bully workers and the poor—and also other groups, such as consumers, and even other capitalists? The answer has less to do with the psychology of executives than with the structure of the capitalist marketplace.

Capitalism is a ruthlessly competitive system in which all capitalists— whether corporations or individual entrepreneurs—have no choice but to compete furiously. Karl Marx argued that capitalists who do not compete with the ferocity of sharks, going for the kill, will be destroyed by rivals who are committed to the economic battlefield and to winning at all costs. This is an economic version of militarism, and it also mirrors the ethic of the schoolyard bully—dominate or die.

This systemic competition incentivizes even so-called nice or “socially responsible” capitalists to bully workers, consumers, and fellow capitalists. Corporations that do not bully workers—by paying low wages, breaking unions, and constantly harassing those who seek to challenge the power of the companies—will typically be at a competitive disadvantage compared to those that do; this is because the bullying leads to high corporate profits, as in McDonald’s and other fast-food giants, and thus attracts more capital from the financial markets. Investors follow the money, just as sharks follow blood in the water. Corporations that do not bleed their workers by cutting wages and benefits—and intimidating those who challenge their degradation—will tend to see reduced profits and lose out to their competitors in the capital markets. A failure to bully workers into accepting low wages and the loss of other benefits also reduces profits, since increases in wages and benefits are drains on profit. This is a structural reality faced by all capitalists, whatever their personality, and it demonstrates the need to move from a psychological paradigm to one focusing on structural imperatives.

The same logic leads capitalists to compete intensely even with giant rivals in the 1%. The system will not be kind to competitors who are unwilling to threaten, undermine, and destroy their rivals; they are vulnerable to being put out of business. This results in bullying within the capitalist class; it is, we show, both similar to and different from the cross-class bullying of workers that is class warfare. In both cases, the strong must defeat competitive rivals, and they can win only by devouring the weak.

Structural competition in the marketplace encourages other types of capitalist bullying, including bullying of the unemployed, of consumers, and of politicians. These bullying relations, too, are structurally dictated by the marketplace. As on the bully schoolyard, nice guys finish last.

Before moving forward, we must illustrate the generic way in which competition in most capitalist societies leads to the rich (the winners) bullying the poor (the losers). This is particularly true in the United States, where the competition is harsh and the ideology of winners and losers conveyed in a particularly bullying discourse. At least since the nineteenth century, American capitalists have seen the competitive process as a form of social Darwinism, in which the strong overcome the weak and the best triumph. Thus, the rich deserve all their wealth and blessings, whereas the poor deserve their low station and misery. Since the market is seen as a Darwinian selection process, it is only natural and good that the rich—those who have proved their worth—assume control over the society as a whole. The system will not function unless the poor learn that they deserve their fate; workers must be bullied until they embrace this Darwinian view that they are inferior and deserve their fate.

This view emerged in early American Puritanism, where competitive success was seen as a sign of God’s grace. The winners proved themselves a higher order of being, entitled to deference and special power and status. Competitive failure in the markets was, to the Puritans, a sign of being damned, in this life and the next. The degree of loss was a measure of the degree of worthlessness; it justified the winners treating the losers as drags on the social order who had to be controlled and kept in their place. Workers who didn’t accept their inferiority as losers would be bullied until they did so. This sense of inferiority is a “hidden injury of class, the enduring trauma of capital bullying.” This ancient Puritan view has survived in various forms to the present day, with the wealthy winners seeing their success as a sign of virtue—and seeing the poor as losers whose nature is inferior and parasitic. In the 2012 presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney made his famous comment about makers and takers, expressing perfectly his view that the poor were parasites leeching off the wealth created by capitalists like himself. He claimed that 47 percent of Americans were takers, thus condemning much of the population to the status of dependent moochers on the body politic. The implication was not hard to fathom: people in Romney’s class would have to take charge of society and take control of the takers, through political and sometimes coercive means, in order to maintain a prosperous and virtuous social order. They had to bully the takers to embrace the view that the makers deserved to be in power and legitimately claimed their wealth.

This is, of course, a bullying view of society, in which the winners of capitalist competition must assume control over the losers to preserve social well-being. To offer help to the losers—through welfare or other social benefits—is to divert resources to the undeserving and encourage their dependency and parasitism. Politically, this leads to austerity policies that are designed to be punitive to the poor and maintain the “natural” and “fair” unequal order that the competitive selective process has established. All people deserve their positions in the hierarchy, and those who question this primal assumption must be bullied into accepting their inferiority. Austerity has become the contemporary policy most clearly symbolizing capitalist bullying, in which the worthy rich threaten and withhold benefits from the unworthy masses, who in turn recognize their own inferiority.

This bullying perspective was articulated lucidly by the writer Ayn Rand, who turned it into a broad philosophy about the morality of capitalism. Rand divided the population into the strong and the weak, the worthy and the unworthy, the productive or “creative” and the moochers. The virtue of capitalism was that the free, competitive market provided a sure way of distinguishing these two orders of people, and it ensured that the worthy would triumph over the unworthy, the makers over the takers. To intervene and seek to reverse that order by helping the losers was immoral and would lead to social decline. Society thrived only when it allowed—indeed forced—the strong to dominate the weak in the Darwinian world, structured and managed through the market.

Rand is useful because she so clearly described the bullying philosophy and practices that govern US capitalism and its basic social Darwinism. The idea that the strong must dominate the weak is central to the schoolyard bully. The bully is strong and a winner and therefore entitled to control the weak, who are seen as sissies, cowards, and losers. The weak must accept the definition of themselves as inferior. The bullies in school essentially enforce their own austerity on the out-crowd—the loser kids deserve the humiliation, injury, and ostracism administered by the winner kids in the in-crowd.

Bullying for Profit: Robber Barons Show How to Bully Workers and Make a Mint

In 1892, one of the most famous American strikes took place at a Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Andrew Carnegie had been known as one of the less ruthless tycoons of the era, but when the union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, organized a strike at the Homestead plant to increase wages, Carnegie decided to break their will and destroy the union for good. Before things were over, workers were threatened and attacked, and some were even killed; proud workers who asserted their right to earn a living wage and enjoy basic American rights were ruthlessly bullied into submission and defeat. The Homestead tragedy is an iconic symbol of capitalist bullying, whereby, in the name of property rights, profits, and prosperity, employers threaten and harm workers who seek a degree of workplace power and decent wages.

As early as 1889, the union had effectively taken over the plant and established work rules to limit management’s absolute power to control every detail of the work. A series of negotiations ensued, and Carnegie, who had nominally accepted unions, decided enough was enough. He instructed his man on the scene, Henry Clay Frick, to lock out the workers. Frick sealed the plant, built a high barbed wire fence, installed cannons capable of spraying boiling liquid, and turned the site into an armed camp.

On July 20, 1892, the Strike Committee resisted the intense bullying pressure that Carnegie and Frick imposed, issuing this defiant proclamation:

“It is against public policy and subversive of the fundamental principles of American liberty that a whole community of workers should be denied employment or suffer any other social detriment on account of membership in a church, a political party or a trade union; that it is our duty as American citizens to resist by every legal and ordinary means the unconstitutional, anarchic and revolutionary policy of the Carnegie Company, which seems to evince a contempt [for] public and private interests and a disdain [for] the public conscience (commemorated on a plaque at the pumphouse of the plant).”

Such open resistance by the bullied was unacceptable. Frick responded by calling in the Pinkerton guards, an armed private security service that would attack the striking workers while helping bring in new, nonunion employees. Fighting broke out when workers refused to leave, and several of them were shot dead. As the fighting continued over the next few days, the union tried to defuse the situation, but Carnegie and Frick were not ready to concede anything. They turned to Pennsylvania’s governor, Robert E. Pattison, a politician who had been elected as part of the Carnegie political machine and was in no mood to tolerate workers confronting his corporate patron. The governor immediately ordered 4,000 soldiers to surround the plant—and within a day, the strikers were dispersed. Some of them were bayoneted to death by state militiamen.

The strike ended, and the plant reopened with nonunion workers. The union collapsed. The consequences were disastrous for workers across America. In the next several years, Carnegie and his fellow robber barons destroyed unions at steel and other plants across the country. By 1900, there was no unionized steel plant left in Pennsylvania, and the labor movement was effectively destroyed.

Homestead is a symbol of the capital bullying that has kept workers weak and intimidated up to the present day. Carnegie called himself a pacifist and had been seen, as noted earlier, as the most compassionate of the robber barons. He had given hundreds of millions of dollars (billions in today’s money) to build public schools and libraries, and he so opposed the expansion of the American militaristic empire that he offered to pay $20 million to “free” the Philippines. But the crisis at Homestead proved that wages and profits require a bullying system that keeps workers disorganized and submissive, with military force being used when necessary. This is true whatever the personality of the managers, with Carnegie exemplifying a “benign” capitalist pulled by the imperatives of market competition into bullying. The regime change of the New Deal led to a peak of about 36 percent of US workers being organized in unions, yet the Reagan revolution decades later resurrected the work Carnegie and the other robber barons began; as of 2014, some 94 percent of private sector workers had no union.

The minimum wage workers at Burger King and other fast-food companies, as well as at huge businesses such as Walmart, are struggling to create a new labor movement to help prevent the return of Gilded Age conditions. They are beginning to see that without the countervailing power of unions, corporate bullying—keeping wages low and workers submissive— will never end and that American workers will be like the bullied weak kids in the schoolyard. Corporate employment in capitalist societies creates latent or active bullying against all employees, including unionized ones. To work in America is to inevitably experience substantial structural bullying, and those on the lower end of the totem pole suffer the most and yet somehow must learn to view it as a fair situation—much like the kids who are far down on the totem pole of power and “coolness” in school.

Reproduced with permission of the University Press of Kansas, Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society by Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass.

https://www.alternet.org/economy/economy-built-around-stock-market-certain-end-looking-mess-we-call-america

It’s part of the American experience to find yourself in an elevator, in an airplane terminal, or at home, looking at a screen with stock numbers whizzing by, and people yammering about how America is somewhere on the spectrum between wonderful or about to disintegrate because of a 5 percent swing in Boeing or Microsoft stock. How did we get to a national economic conversation that is dominated by chatter on the rise and fall of stocks, when it’s just a small part of economic life for most of the 300 million people who live in this country?

American-style shareholder capitalism, with its incessant focus on maximizing stock value, started gaining primacy over European/Japanese-style stakeholder capitalism in the 1980s. It was premised on a notion best epitomized by Milton Friedman that the only social responsibility of a corporation is to increase its profits, laying the groundwork for the idea that shareholders, being the owners and the main risk-bearing participants, ought therefore to receive the biggest rewards. Profits therefore should be generated first and foremost with a view toward maximizing the interests of shareholders, not the executives or managers who (according to the theory) were spending too much of their time, and the shareholders’ money, worrying about employees, customers, and the community at large. The economists who built on Friedman’s work, along with increasingly aggressive institutional investors, devised solutions to ensure the primacy of enhancing shareholder value, via the advocacy of hostile takeovers, the promotion of massive stock buybacks or repurchases (which increased the stock value), higher dividend payouts and, most importantly, the introduction of stock-based pay for top executives in order to align their interests to those of the shareholders. These ideas were influenced by the idea that corporate efficiency and profitability were impinged upon by archaic regulation and unionization, which, according to the theory, precluded the ability to compete globally.

While tying corporate decision-making and its performance to stock price to incentivize efficient resource allocation and productive transformations sounds superficially attractive, the champions of this theory never bothered to show how these outcomes could be achieved if shareholder capitalism was fully implemented. In fact, the historical experience has been abysmal. GM and GE, to cite two prominent examples, were once poster boys for the success of American capitalism. More recently, they are presumed to be speculative candidates for bankruptcy. They are but a symptom of the bigger problem. And there is a growing skepticism in the ability of American capitalism to deliver on its economic promise of prosperity.

In the 1980s, we were still at the embryonic stages of shareholder capitalism, and American institutional investors aggressively proselytized both domestically and abroad. During that time, when I was working as a fund manager in Japan, Toyota became a particularly prominent target, on the grounds that the company wasn’t using its substantial cash pile “productively.” The argument was made that the company’s management was maximizing their self-regarding interests over shareholder value. Holding onto the cash reserves was thought to be a mistake, lest managers be tempted to make unproductive investments. This despite that fact that by any traditional metric—profitability, market share, sales, return on investments—Toyota remained a remarkably successful company.

Backed by domestic institutions (particularly from their associated companies), Toyota’s management resisted the push of the foreign investors like myself, many of whom were leading the charge to distribute the company cash pile to shareholders. Toyota management made the seemingly anachronistic decision that the cash was best retained to invest in future lines and cope with changing market conditions, as well as retaining valuable and skilled employees, who were key to the company’s growing productivity and global sales success (even at a cost of some short-term harm to profitability). They also argued that elevating dividend payouts would derogate from needed research and development, which was required to retain the company’s edge over global competitors.

Given that Toyota has retained the ranking of most valuable car brand in the world six years running (in fact, number one in 11 of the 13 years in which the survey has been conducted), senior management’s strategy appears to have been vindicated. There is stable ownership and decision-making structure. Focus is on enterprise-specific skill development and cultivating capabilities in-house. Toyota consolidates product and its production process planning and ensures that sufficient training and equipment (pertaining to processes required for new products) are provided or developed in-house. It largely finances operations using its internal cash flow. Neither stock buybacks nor high-dividend payouts are the norm. In short, the company has developed a long-term development strategy that fuses innovation with high-quality, sustainable management practices that operate durably at scale for many millions of customers around the world.

By contrast, Professor William Lazonick’s seminal study, “Profits without Prosperity,” underscores the notion that top-level U.S. executives, whose incentives have been increasingly based on stock-based financial targets, have lost the ability to develop the innovative capabilities of an enterprise. Instead, spurred by the prospect of stock gains, the executives have channeled their focus toward “short-termist” achievement of targets (such as by giving out excessive loans to finance customers’ purchases to boost quarterly sales targets, as Detroit’s “Big Three” have done repeatedly), increasing share valuations and increasing the variable component of their compensation (by share repurchases). As a result, their enterprises have become financialized, and their balance sheets severely weakened. The shortcomings of the companies that have fallen victim to this trend have been masked by the performance of the company stock, in itself a mirage brought about by financial engineering to boost share prices, as Rana Foroohar has documented in her book, Makers and Takers.

The focus on short-termism has ultimately degraded the financial health of the corporations concerned, as well as cannibalizing future investment opportunities. As Lazonick pointed out, in many instances where U.S. executives have resorted to stock repurchases, payouts were well above the net income, and in many cases occurred even when the company wasn’t profitable; certainly, there was little correlation to company performance per se. Cash that could be deployed toward creating a better product line has instead been spent on stock buybacks, while the strategy of expanding loans to customers to purchase the underlying product effectively steals from future sales, as well as expanding corporate leverage. Another way companies catered to shareholder capitalism was by selling off capital-intensive, but cash flow-generative businesses, as Jack Welch did when he became CEO of GE and shifted the company focus away from sales of jet engines, nuclear reactors and mining equipment, instead building up GE Capital, which ultimately became another “too big to fail” financial behemoth (and has done much to contribute to GE’s deterioration).

Additionally, a deregulated labor market that allows for “costless” hiring or firing (“costless” only from the perspective of management, obviously, not labor) in reality has reinforced this short-termism and further degraded long-term corporate performance. Executives abuse the “benefits” of a largely deregulated labor market to sack workers with impunity, thereby generating the “free” cash flow that can be used instead for share repurchases, even as the company loses valuable labor expertise, which can generate future production bottlenecks.

One must also question the notion that the stock market is an efficient gauge of corporate performance, especially when management is prone to what Professor Bill Black calls “control fraud.” There is an asymmetry of information between corporate insiders and institutional shareholders, which means that putting a “price” on managerialism so as to discipline them if the management engages in unproductive investments is a fantasy. Exposed to the harsh light of reality, this is an especially absurd idea that only an economist could love, given the divergent time frames between institutional investors monitored on the basis of quarterly performance versus executives who must make investment decisions, the results of which may not be established for years. This is exacerbated by the ludicrous notion that dilettante fund managers, relatively unschooled in anything (other than MBA degrees that propagate concepts like maximizing shareholder value), could possibly be superior judges of corporate performance and allocators of capital against those who have literally learned the business from the factory floor up.

In the “downsize and distribute” regime of American shareholder capitalism, the labor force is downsized, certain operations are discontinued, and the cash retrieved from these processes is distributed rather than retaining and reinvesting in developing the productive capabilities. American executives have proven all too willing to disgorge cash annually on buybacks at the expense of identifying the investments in organization and technology that were needed to remain competitive in the industry in which they operated.In contrast to Germany or Japan, real engineering has been replaced by financial engineering.This is what the doctrine of “shareholder value” has actually delivered: unproductive share buybacks, which manipulate short-term share price performance, even as it derogates from long-term research and development, engenders persistent short-termism in corporate decision-making, and induces value extraction, rather than value creation. All of this financial vandalism has created multiple economic crises, long recessions, growing inequality and decades of stagnant incomes for the average American worker. Shareholder value in truth has created no real value at all.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/capitalisms-final-solution-nothing-less-complete-ecological-collapse

no lnx

Capitalism’s Final Solution Is Nothing Less than Complete Ecological Collapse

This is the nightmare logic of scarcity capitalism.

By Ed Simon / History News Network October 12, 2018, 1:58 AM GMT

Four centuries ago, somebody starving in the drought afflicted Elbe region in what is today the Czech Republic, anonymously chiseled onto the stone of the receding river bank a warning. Here, along the river where one day American and Soviet troops would meet on their duel approach to Berlin, a graffito made by unknown hand marks 1616 as the oldest year recorded on one particular “Hunger Stone”, and on that surface there is a memento mori which reads “Wenn du mich sicht, dann weine.” This summer, among the hottest recorded, and the Elbe once again receded to the point where observers could read that ominous missive: “If you see me, weep.”

Something to tattoo on the brain with the Monday release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change. Authored by 91 scientists, representing 40 countries and based on over 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies, the conclusions of the commission are horrifying. According to Coral Davenport at the New York Times the climatologists discovered that if “greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit” by 2040, radically earlier than had been thought, meaning that most readers of this article will bear witness to “inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty.”

A child born today will have just turned the drinking age in a world where close to all of the coral reefs will be extinct and where massive storms like Hurricane Florence or Hurricane Maria, which has nearly destroyed a Puerto Rico abandoned by the government of the United States, will be common. Where the social, cultural, and economic affects of climate change will be recorded not on revealed hunger stones, but in pandemics, wars, famines, and genocides exacerbated by the effects of higher temperatures. Brandon Miller and Jay Croft at CNN write that we’ll see in starker detail the horrific results of industrial man-made global warming earlier than in two decades, with the report concluding that humanity has “only till 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change.”

Alterations to human behavior which might hasten the worst effects of climate change are technically possible, though the study’s authors doubt such change is politically feasible, as it would require direct action on the part of the industrial economies of the world, something with “no documented historic precedent.” Myles Allen of Oxford University explained that “we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime” if we’re to stave off an ecological apocalypse which we now understand isn’t centuries in the future, but rather mere decades, if not years.

We already see the effects in the increasing ferocity of storms, the droughts that mark not just the developing world, but increasingly North America and Europe, and in the wildfires, which have burnt their way across the west. As the world’s temperature rises we see an equivalent political slow burn, nations increasingly moving toward the delusional reactionary nationalisms as a means of punishing refugee populations often affected either directly by climate change or by the civil strife made possible by it, for as Mark Fishcetti describes the Syrian civil war in Scientific American, “Human-induced drying in many societies can push tensions over a threshold that provokes violent conflict” – a reality that if the Trump administration pretends to deny, has long been acknowledged by the Pentagon.

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Climate change has resulted in civilizational catastrophe before. Historian John Kelly notes in The Great Mortality, his book on the Black Death of fourteenth-century Europe, that pestilence was furthered by “climactic and ecological instability,” the bubonic plague encouraged by weakened immune systems brought on by drought and famine. Polymathic anthropologist Jared Diamond has considered how climate change brought collapse in cultures as varied as the Anasazi and Maya or the medieval Norse settlements of Greenland, writing that the “collapse of industrial civilization… could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources.” Arguably the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley were felled by climate change, and one wonders if the peasants of Sumer were as despondent as that German speaker on the Elbe who asked future generations to weep, or if they were rather as myopic as we are, saying of such changes that “This too shall pass” while what expires is civilization itself?

Humans are unable to imagine the actual passing of their way of life. A sense that history changes has been novel for most cultures, even apocalyptic minded ones, as medieval paintings which depict Christ as a Flemish peasant or ancient Judeans as Florentine nobleman can attest. The idea that the past was radically different from the present and that tomorrow will be distant from today is an innovation of Renaissance humanism and then modernity. Rather, it’s always been easier to imagine that your world will literally pass into oblivion than that the values your civilization holds dear might disappear (or need to disappear). During those lean times on the Indus River, on the Euphrates, or the Elbe, women and men may have dreamt of the end of days, but they couldn’t have quite dreamt of us. The myths that structured their world precluded it.

Lest we be too arrogant, ours is not so different a perspective, for as the literary theorist Frederic Jameson famously noted, it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Similar for the hungry penitent in the temple to all the gods of Sumer, or to the starving medieval pilgrim who could envision the return of Christ, but not that he might look different from those who populated his world. Limited perspective is the wage of any totalizing ideology, and all eras are structured by such paradigms. As a priest in Moloch’s temple or a monk in a medieval monastery had their religions, so have we ours, but the cracked gods of our world differ in one important respect – only capitalism’s Mammon has the capability of bringing about the apocalypse.

Only capitalism was able to inaugurate a new geological epoch in the Anthropocene; unique is our dominant ideology’s status in being able to obliterate all of humanity. IPCC Co-Chair Debra Roberts said that the report is a “line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” but what should disturb us most is the authors’ accurate alarm at the lack of political will to avert catastrophe. In the United States the coal, oil, and gas industries’ obfuscate, high percentages of Americans believe the lie that climate change is a hoax (while record heat affects the Midwest this October), and the Trump administration trashes the Paris Accords.

Noam Chomsky has said that the Republican “party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand,” with modern fascism directly correlated to the increasing chaos of climate change itself.Roy Scranton in We’re Doomed. Now What? writes that as the “gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear…. [Y]ou can see it in the pull to nationalism, sectarianism, war, and racial hatred. We see it in the election of Donald Trump.”

What must be reckoned with is how this situation was directly engendered by industrial capitalism, and in particular by the partisans of its most extreme ideological manifestations of libertarianism and neoliberalism who have provided cover for policies that have enflamed the crisis.Past centuries were circumscribed by their worldviews, be it medieval Catholicism, or classical Roman Augustan paganism, or the varied gods of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia. Even the most visionary of individual perspectives must be limited by a culture’s dominant way of thinking, but while our adherence to the market is as all-encompassing as a Babylonian’s loyalty to Marduk, it is only our dark religion which actually threatens Armageddon.

Unfettered, unregulated, capricious, vampiric capitalism has brought us to the brink, and the mass inability to comprehend this fact evidences how ingrained said ideology is. Our blinders are such that human tragedy that is attributable directly to our economic system is often naturalized as simply being “The way that things are,” thus precluding even the possibility of different ways of arranging our world.Death due to differing ideologies is always interpreted as conscious and preventable, but capitalist tragedy is simply understood as how life operates.

Consideration of those who have died because of capitalism (and those who will, which may yet include us all) doesn’t require a cover-up. So inured are we to seeing capitalism as its own imposed ideology that we fail to understand its death toll. Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorovwrote that “remembrance of our own woes prevents us from seeing the suffering of others,” and while true, the converse is also accurate. While admitting that capitalism provided for unprecedented class mobility and technological innovation, an honest consideration of its death toll in any hypothetical Black Book of Capitalism would have to include not just the obvious fatalities of those who died in industrial accidents or whose lives were shortened by their labor, but indeed the victims of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and of fascismo corporativo, which is simply capitalism driven to its horrifying end

Invisibility of such atrocities through normalization is a species of what the philosopher Louis Althusser termed “interpellation,” that is to say that we’re all molded subjects of the ideology that governs our world so that we mostly hold uncritical assumptions about capitalism’s normativity. Writer William T. Vollmann addresses future generations in his new tome on climate change Carbon Ideologies, explaining that “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.” As 2040 approaches our ignorance is a form of collective suicide.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post writes that future “Historians will look in absolute astonishment” that not only did our governments and corporate elite fail to halt climate change, but that our policy makers “actually pushed in the wrong direction.” That’s assuming that there will even be any historians left after the climate change horseman of pestilence, famine, war, and death gallop across the scorched and burning world, their riders named “Deregulation,” “Bottom Line,” “Market,” and “Profit.”

An August environmental impact statement prepared by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concedes that far from being a “Chinese hoax” as Trump has alleged, the average temperature will rise seven degrees by century’s end. Quite a wide gulf between what the Trump administration knows to be true and what his deluded believers will swallow. Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and Chris Mooney at the Washington Post write that the Trump “administration did not offer this dire forecast … as part of an effort to combat climate change,” for their “analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.” Why prevent collapse when Trump concludes that there is still so much money to be made in not averting disaster?

This is the nightmare logic of scarcity capitalism, the macabre calculus which is content to let millions of people starve in the third world and that will ultimately exterminate refugees who dare to escape a parched landscape, all so that the economic status quo can be maintained before the process kills us all. The puritanism of corporate eco-individualism which configures environmental protection as simply a matter of driving a Prius or taking short showers is moral contrition or personal branding rather than policy, a quasi-theological sacrifice before the altar of the dying Earth. What’s actually required is a massive, international, eco-socialist mobilization of governments and industries that are responsible for this calamity. Because right now capitalism’s final solution is nothing less than complete ecological collapse. In his 1888 autobiographical Ecce Homo, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche eerily predicted that the 20th century would witness “wars as have never happened on earth.” With chaos brought about by the scarcity resulting from climate change, we may reevaluate how prescient Nietzsche was about the last century, realizing that he was perhaps actually off by a hundred years.

Ed Simon is the editor-at-large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. A frequent contributor at several sites, his collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post Religion will be released by Zero Books in November 2018.

Ralph talks to professor Charles Derber about how corporate capitalism has turned America into a “bully nation.”

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https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/charles-derber-nicholas-mokhiber/

Imagining Life After Capitalism

What can Star Trek tell us about life after capitalism? Peter Frase discusses four possible futures in a world where workers are increasingly being replaced by machines — ranging from communist and socialist societies to ones in which workers are literally disposable. (Encore presentation.) Resources: Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism Verso, 2014

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-august-27-2018/

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https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-august-21-2018/

Capitalism depends on various inexpensive things to stay robust, including labor — both paid and unpaid — energy, food, and nature. What happens when they all stop being cheap at the same time? Jason Moore discusses whether capitalism can survive the rising costs of business as usual. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Raj Patel & Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet UC Press, 2017

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CAPITALISM

Uber and Lyft price-gouge customers trying to flee Seattle shooting120 anNicole Karlis / Salon

Misunderstanding socialism

Claiming record income inequality is normal, even good

Wealthy people lecturing the less fortunate

Socialism stifles innovation

Venezuela

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guide to the systemic origins of America's bully culture.

Uber and Lyft price-gouge customers trying to flee Seattle shooting120 an Nicole Karlis / Salon