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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 13 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters 

Zoë Schlanger, October 5, 2024 [The Atlantic]

…This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense. Over time, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on disasters in an ad hoc way, outside its main disaster budget, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School….

The U.S. is facing a growing number of billion-dollar disasters, fueled both by climate change and by increased development in high-risk places. This one could cost up to $34 billion, Moody’s Analytics estimated. Plus, the country is simply declaring more disasters over time in part because of “shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution….

…A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that every dollar of disaster preparedness saves communities $13 in damages, cleanup costs, and economic impacts. But since 2018, the government has set aside just 6 percent of the total of its post-disaster grant spending to go toward pre-disaster mitigation….

Meanwhile, costs of these disasters are likely to balloon further because of gaps in insurance. In places such as California, Louisiana, and Florida, insurers are pulling out or raising premiums so high that people can’t afford them, because their business model cannot support the current risks posed by more frequent or intense disasters. So states and the federal government are already taking on greater risks as insurers of last resort. The National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, writes more than 95 percent of the residential flood policies in the United States, according to an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania. But the people who hold those policies are almost all along the coasts, in specially designated flood zones. Inland flooding such as Helene brought doesn’t necessarily conform to those hazard maps; less than 1 percent of the homeowners in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the city of Asheville was badly hit, had flood insurance….

But some of these measures, such as adopting stronger building codes, tend to be unpopular with the states that hold the authority to change them. “There is a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government in terms of how to do this,” Schlegelmilch said. The way things work right now, states and local governments would likely end up shouldering more of the cost of preparing for disasters. But they know the federal government will help fund recovery.
Plus, spending money on disaster recovery helps win elected officials votes in the next election. “The amount of funding you bring in has a very strong correlation to votes—how many you get, how many you lose,” Schlegelmilch said. But the same cannot be said for preparedness, which has virtually no correlation with votes.

…All of that is a way of saying that hurricanes are really dangerous, and involve massive sums of money and important questions of market power and shortages. And that’s especially true today, with our monopolized and thus fragile supply chains. For instance, when North Carolina got hit with immense rain from Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago, it killed hundreds of people, and also knocked out a mine making 90% of the key pure quartz on which the semiconductor industry depends. To take another example, the American Hospital Association has already asked the President to declare a national emergency due to a shortage of IV fluids as a result of the disaster….

((One factory about 35 miles east of Ashville supplied 60% of the nation’s IV fluids…))

….So what’s the right approach to addressing the resulting crisis?

The response will require more state capacity. Clearly there’s search and rescue and immediate crisis response, which requires a lot more funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We’re going to need a permanently larger FEMA, since climate change has dramatically increased the pace of natural disasters. The government should probably just rebuild and then make all cell phone service free in the area for the next two months, and find a way of extending Medicaid to everyone so no one has to deal with billing. Or they could just temporarily nationalize hospitals.

What we can learn from the Covid crisis and the CARES Act is that we should immediately be sending resources to individuals and small businesses in the area. A quick disbursal of cash to everyone in the region, as well as a revival of the Paycheck Protection Program for small business loan/grants, would help people afford basic necessities, and keep businesses alive. Bank regulators should also freeze credit reporting and student debt payments for people in affected counties.

Given the potential crisis of Florida property values and all the financing attached to those, we need to think about bank solvencies. To address the possibility of a financial crisis, Congress should stop working through the Federal Reserve, which is too focused on helping private equity and large banks and far too opaque. Instead, the government should structure a new public bank called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It should be run by the FDIC, and be allowed to use the Fed balance sheet for loans, which would all be publicly posted.

We can also learn some lessons from the post-Katrina moment, as well as what happened during Covid, and the CARES Act. What we can learn from Katrina is that it’s important to do as much within the government as possible, instead of through contractors….

… we are entering a world beset by climate change, which will require a different political order. Last July, I wrote a piece on how we are forgetting the lessons from Covid. We are still highly dependent on China, and the fragility of our supply chains hasn’t improved. And that’s because, while there are some good policymakers in positions of authority like Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra, the bulk of our leadership class is still in thrall to a finance-friendly model of industrial fragility. And this dynamic is as much an ideological problem as anything else….

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• National Economic Council….

• National Security Council….

• White House Counsel….

• Domestic Policy Council….

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

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

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

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret Plot To Buy American Democracy (podcast)

[The Lever, September 20, 2024]

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

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

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

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

Corporations Are People, My Friend (YouTube video)

[The Lever, September 10, 2024]

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

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

[The Lever, September 17, 2024]

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

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

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

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

What is the deep state? (YouTube video)

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

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

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

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global power shift

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

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

ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker 

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

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by Tony Wikrent

Russia / Ukraine

Russia will be ‘at war’ with NATO if Ukraine long-range missile restrictions lifted, Putin warns

Avery Schmitz and Michael Conte, September 13, 2024 [CNN]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned NATO alliance leaders that a move to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of longer-range Western missiles to strike deep inside his country would be considered an act of war.

“This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us,” Putin told reporters on Thursday.

 

Putin says NATO will be “in the war” if U.S. or allies let Ukraine fire long-range missiles at Russia

Haley Ott,  September 13, 2024 [CBS News]

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Thursday that a decision by the U.S. or its NATO allies to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia would be viewed as NATO’s direct participation in the war, which he said would significantly change “the very nature of the conflict.”

“Flight assignments for these missile systems can, in fact, only be entered by military personnel from NATO countries. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. And therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is a question of making a decision whether NATO countries directly participate in the military conflict or not,” Putin said in response to a question on Thursday.

“If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries, in the war in Ukraine,” the Russian leader added.

Strategic Political Economy

Master Plan, Ep 5: How Corporations Became People

David Sirota and The Lever staff, September 10, 2024 [The Lever]

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

The master planners were just getting started. While Buckley v. Valeo blew the lid off limits to certain kinds of campaign expenditures, Big Business also wanted to ensure that corporations could spend as freely as their human counterparts. This is where the master planners’ sleeper agent on the Court, Justice Lewis Powell, would work behind the scenes to deliver an expansive ruling that created the foundation for Citizens United.

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Justice Alito reports German princess gave him $900 concert tickets

Associated Press, September 06, 2024 [via DailyKos]

Justice Samuel Alito reported Friday that he accepted $900 worth of concert tickets from a German princess, but disclosed no trips paid for by other people, according to a new financial disclosure form.

The required annual filing, for which Alito has often sought an extension, doesn’t include details of the event tickets gifted by socialite Gloria von Thurn und Taxis of Germany….

[TW: I begin with seemingly innocuous news item because it bears directly on today’s condition of  political culture in USA. The rest of the Associated Press story lists a number of other gifts and courtesies Justice Alito has accepted, and sees nothing else peculiar in the gift by Gloria von Thurn und Taxis.

[Now, Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

[I am not going to write anything more on this Section other than to note its obvious importance as part of the Constitution of a republic in a world dominated and mostly ruled by monarchies and oligarchies. What I want to draw attention to are some of the comments in the DailyKos story:

Sep 06, 2024 at 06:36:03 PM  — WTF is a German Princess?

Sep 06, 2024 at 06:40:10 PM —Germany hasn’t been a monarchy for more than 100 years….

Sep 06, 2024 at 06:46:09 PM — Germany still has princesses?

[Ganesh Sitaraman makes the very astute observation in his 2017 book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic that Americans’ historic dislike of monarchies began to disappear after World War Two, when nazism, fascism, and communism came to be perceived as greater threats than oligarchy, and USA elites embraced a “special relationship” with the United Kingdom. To this day, the largest embassy by far in Washington DC is the British.

[But the threats of oligarchy and monarchy did not actually recede; they merely disappeared in the shadows cast by the Cold War. Very few people wondered what had become of the vast fortunes controlled by the former oligarchs of Europe. Perhaps people did not want to ask such potentially embarrassing questions of our new-found anti-communist allies.

[Thurn und Taxis is one of the oldest and nastiest of the European “black nobility.” In the 15th through 18th centuries, the family became one of the richest in the world by operating the postal service used by Europe’s royal families to communicate with each other. In 2017, the family’s net worth was estimated at around $ 2.5 billion,  “including the largest privately owned forests in Europe.” Gloria married into the family by wedding Johannes. Their son, Albert, was, at age eight, one of the youngest people ever recorded as a billionaire when Johannes died, leaving Albert sole designated heir of a $3 billion fortune.

[The nephew of Johannes was Max Thurn. He was a major power in the Mont Pelerin Society, serving as secretary from 1976 to 1988. This is the period in which the Mont Pelerin Society’s economic “neoliberalism” became entrenched in power under Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in USA. The past half century of economic “neoliberalism” has pauperized the working class, destroyed the middle class, and enriched only elites, creating the social conditions in which right wing reactionaries thrive.

[It is a tragedy that the USA public and media are largely ignorant of the bloody history of European oligarchs, and fail to make the connection between inherited wealth, the continued existence of oligarchs like Thurn und Taxis, and the collapse of representative democracies around the world. The corruption of US Supreme Court Justice Alito is just a recent case in point.

[The social milieu Justice Alito is apparently comfortable in should certainly be of great public interest, and even, I strongly suggest, of concern to any intelligence agency that seriously understands the importance of maintaining the United States as a republic.  Another comment from the DailyKos story:

Sep 07, 2024 at 01:09:34 PM — Back in the 1980’s I spent the afternoon with the “Kiser Apparent” of Germany while working as an archaeologist for the “very rich”. The “Prince” owned catfish farm in Texas. The rich kissed his ass.

[Theorists of civic republicanism warned about the corrupting influence of wealth and luxury. That’s one reason why Section 9 was written. Now consider Donald Trump and who is mentor was:

Aside From The Ones Living In Miami, Brooklyn and WeHo, Will Russians Get To See “The Apprentice?”

Howie Klein, September 07, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

Before Trump barged his way into the national consciousness, Roy Cohn was one of the worst villains of any American in our lifetimes— right up there with J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Joseph McCarthy… and on a par with historical miscreants like Jefferson Davis, Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest… A real master of corruption, Cohn built his hideous career by exploiting power, weaponizing fear and perverting the law. From his role as McCarthy’s right-hand man during the Red Scare— ruining countless lives through baseless accusations of communism— to his later years as a ruthless Mafia lawyer, Cohn epitomized everything vile about American greed and runaway ambition. With the exception of a small handful of delusional Republicans, his career is universally seen as a showcase of sociopathic disregard for ethics, and he is seen as a man who thrived on manipulation, blackmail… destruction. Most damning of all, Cohn mentored The Donald, passing along his amoral playbook to a demon who went on to wreak even more havoc on the country. So Cohn’s poisonous influence didn’t end with his death; it metastasized into the very heart of modern American politics.

And now there’s a film! Nick Schager’s preview for the Daily Beast noted that it’s the movie Señor T doesn’t want you to see— and for good reason… a damning film about the making of a monster… “a bona fide supervillain origin story.”

As you probably know by now, it’s “an incisive primer on the relationship with Roy Cohn that made the 45th President of the United States who he is today. Which is to say, it lays out the gory details regarding the source of his egomania, greed, ambition, vanity, sociopathy, and heartless rapey-ness, the last of which comes to the fore in a brutal assault of his first wife Ivana.”

When they first met, Cohn recognizes him “as a dreamer determined to do whatever it takes to be Rockefeller-grade rich, as well as something of an empty vessel into which he can pour all his evil. Pour he does, gradually taking Trump under his wing and indoctrinating him in the ways of unabashed cutthroat nastiness. To succeed, Cohn instructs, Trump must follow three surefire rules: attack, attack, attack; deny everything and admit nothing; and never acknowledge defeat and always claim victory….

‘The Apprentice’ Review: Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong Are Superb in Chilling Account of the Unholy Alliance That Birthed Donald Trump

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This Briahna Joy Gray interview of David Sirota discusses the fundamental problem of money in USA politics. Near the beginning, they discuss the likely danger that Harris will lay out positions that are progressive, but eventually abandon them and capitulate to the donor class, as she did on Medicare for All in 2019.

Beginning around 39:23, Sirota summarizes The Lever’s new work on Lewis Powell and the Powell Memo, and how Powell enabled corporations to corrupt the political system. There is some important  information that was not publicly known before The Lever staff combed through nearly forgotten archives the past two years, including Powell’s friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the group of secret task forces established by the Chamber of Commerce to implement the Powel Memo.

They discuss what  the Democratic Party might do when Trump is no longer on the scene. The Party just can’t be held together if it’s only progressives and big money donors in the Big Tent. Sirota talks about what he saw at the Demcoratic National Convention: the tensions under the surface between clean energy groups and corporate sponsors involved in fossil fuels. “You had anti-billionaire Senator Bernie Sanders…  sharing the same stage with Illinois ultra-rich Democratic governor JB Pritzker.”

The last 20 minutes I found very tedious and a bit maddening. Gray asked whether or not Biden was a break from the right-ward drift of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. When Sirota said he thought that was the case, Gray refused to accept the answer and kept pressing for example of how Biden was “better.” Sirota would explain some policy change or program achievement, and Gray would just ignore it.

What a waste of the last 20 minutes! Why can’t Gray and other people on “the left” accept that, as Sirota said, “something changed” that made Biden much better on economics than Clinton and Obama? It would be so much more useful to try to identify what changed, what caused that change, and figure out if that cause and effect can be replicated again to continue driving the Democratic Party toward better economic policies.

And, glaring by its absence, was any discussion of how two of the most progressive member of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman, were defeated in primaries earlier this year. They were buried by an avalanche of money from the Israeli front group, AIPAC. There was no mention of this at all.

Finally, also missing was any discussion of what people can do, either inside or outside the Democratic Party. Gray now believes that the two Sanders presidential campaigns, and the freezing out of AOC, Katie Porter, and The Squad, all show that the Democratic Party is useless as an instrument for achieving progress.

Ok, that’s understandable, but what are the alternatives? Remember, Gray and Sirota have both been “on the inside.” From 1999 to 2001, Sirota worked as press aide and spokesperson for then U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, then served as a speechwriter and senior adviser for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. And Gray was National Press Secretary for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.

I should also note that in 2008, Sirota published The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, giving ample warning of the populist surges we have seen under Sanders and Trump. So, an important topic for discussion should be: Why did reactionaries  manage to take control of the (anti)Republican Party, but the progressives fails to take control of  the Democratic Party?

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

John Kiriakou: The Slide Into Authoritarianism

John Kiriakou [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2024]

The Social Recession Is Accelerating 

Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]

A reader asked about the term social recession which he’d noted in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Here is the paragraph:
“Stagnation in opportunities to work and earn (i.e. a financial recession) leads to social recession, a loss of opportunities for adulthood: a rewarding career, family, and a home of one’s own. In a social recession, unemployed young people may be mired in adolescent narcissism, eschewing ambitions not just in work but in romance and marriage.”….

In the purely financial / economic terms of growth of GDP, household income, corporate profits and the value of assets, the US has only been in an economic recession for a few months in 2008-09 and at the start of the pandemic lockdown. But when measured by the ability of just about anyone willing to work hard and practice basic frugality to buy a house and start a family, the US has been in a social recession since 2009. Demographics / economics analyst Chris H., who tweets as

CH @economica, recently posted charts which reflect this social recession, most strikingly in the collapse of the US birthrate that started in 2009. He asked: “The largest childbearing population in US history has gone on strike…maybe we should know why?”….

The social recession began as a direct result of policy responses to the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09, policies that favored capital and those who already owned assets, at the expense of everyone who did not inherit wealth/assets or was too young to buy assets such as houses when they were still affordable to average workers….

As I often note, average wages have stagnated for the past 45 years. This stagnation was tolerable as long as the cost of a house, childcare and healthcare insurance remained somewhat affordable to average workers, but once the engines of financialization transformed the US economy into a Bubble Economy of soaring real estate / stock valuations that then inevitably crash, triggering an even larger bailout / stimulus response that inflates an even greater bubble, the costs of home ownership, childcare and healthcare soared out of reach of all but the top 20%….

GRAPH Wage earners’ share of gross domestic income (GDI) declined from 1970’s 51% to 43% in 2022. $149 trillion in GDI was shifted from labor to capital.

Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No. That is social recession in a nutshell. When this fact is raised in conversation, those in the top 10% protest, but their protest rings hollow, for what they’re really saying is: since I’m doing great and all my friends are doing great, everyone’s doing great. There’s a word for this: denial. Denial cannot solve problems, it can only make them worse.

Global power shift

Patrick Lawrence: “The End of Days” 

[Scheerpost , via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]

…Three-quarters of the French stood with Chirac, whose refusal to enlist France in Operation Iraqi Freedom strained Franco–American relations for several years. Remember “freedom fries” and the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” This was the level to which Bush II brought American discourse as he manipulated public opinion prior to the invasion. Good guys, bad guys. Black hats, white hats.

There is one detail of the U.S.–French confrontation over Iraq that remains very little known. Just before the 20 March 2003 invasion, Bush II called Chirac in a late-hour attempt to persuade him to change his mind. The exchange was very heated. Bush II made a vigorous argument that with the events of 11 September the prophesied war of Gog and Magog had at last begun. I can only imagine what went through the worldly Chirac’s mind, or indeed the look on his face, as Bush II discoursed in this manner.

I know of only one account of this conversation. It is in The Irony of American Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Walker & Co., 2010), a book William Pfaff published late in his life. The book sits at the end of Pfaff’s long and principled career as a sort of summation. It is rightly read as his causes-and-consequences critique of American exceptionalism. And it includes, inter alia, a description of the Bush–Chirac exchange. He got it, if I recall correctly what he told me later, from a high source in the French Foreign Ministry.

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